I CAN DELVE FOR MILES: WHAT DRAWS YOU TO DUNGEON CRAWLS?

There's one kind of dungeon crawl I like and that's the one where I fill out a map. I run around exploring everything and when I press a button to look at my map it is filled out a little more.

Especially in simplre, procedurally generated games it's sometimes exciting to get through some kind of wall/door into an open chasm and you have no idea what lies beyond. (and usually I just back out and close the door behind me. Hoping that whatever lived there in the darkness didn't notice me.

Or I might just be talking about Minecraft, where I guess you crawl through dungeons.

But yeah the "minecraft feel" of certain kinds of dungeon crawls. The exploration. The finding of places with an implied story.

And often the utter lack of any friendlies anywhere. Basically it's just you vs the world. (preferably vs zombies)

Some kind of interesting mechanic mixed with fun gameplay. If we're talking roguelike here, there has to be something drawing you into each dungeon. Usually they're just hard enough so that sometimes I die, but as I play more I have more confidence in my success rate.

The Binding of Isaac managed to suck me in for 25 hours, and the dungeon itself is only ~45 minutes long (if you survive the whole thing). Everything is randomly generated, from enemies and levels to the power-ups and character progression, but it's so well-balanced you rarely rage about how screwed you got (and you will get screwed), you just attempt another dungeon dive.

Also, if you're gonna be in dungeons a lot you better have some fucking good music.

One thing dungeon crawls are really bad at is keeping the game feeling fresh. I can only climb down to the next floor of the 100 floor dungeon so many times before they all start feeling the same. It becomes indistinguishable from grinding the same enemies over and over, which is something I think we all probably hate. It's not that it doesn't start out fun - it's just that it gets boring and stagnant after a while. The game can be fun while I am finding out new stuff and figuring out the system and unlocking lots of cool junk, but eventually in any dungeon crawl you basically get to a point where you're fighting enemies with a slightly different attack pattern than you've seen before, and you're using skills that are 20% stronger than they were a few floors ago. It gets old.

The thing is that any possible solution to this problem is basically equivalent to making the game into not a dungeon crawl. Like after every few floors of dungeon you could give the player a break - you could give them some cut scenes to distract them, add a boss, add some normal battles in events that aren't part of the dungeon, sometimes toss in maybe a minigame, or just give them a chance to walk around in a non-combat setting. You can give them access to a whole new tier of skills or equipment at once, or forcibly change up their party members so that they don't get too comfortable. And then once they've had their breather, you can put them in a section of dungeon that looks and feels quite different than the previous section.

But at this point you no longer have a dungeon crawl. You have a fuckin' JRPG. And, honestly, that's kind of the idea of JRPGs, in a way. Break up the dungeon crawl however possible. I'm not sure that's a conscious decision by many JRPG designers, but it's definitely the end result.

Another thing that helps is short-term goals, but only if they're all unique. If you keep getting upgraded versions of the same short-term goal - kill all enemies on floor 37, now kill all enemies on floor 38, now kill all enemies on floor 39 - it won't feel like you're making any progress. The player has to feel like, "Hooray, I beat that part of the game, it's behind me, let's move on to the next new thing the game has to offer." There's an immense satisfaction that comes from just feeling like you're making accomplishments and progress.

Smut of the female characters. Obviously. NicoB has this down pat.

More seriously: Games are more fun when they don't drag me down with dumb shit. Especially dungeon crawls. Is your dungeon filled with pits or dark tunnels that are there for the sole purpose of making me miserable and padding gameplay time? Are your cutscenes longer than a full-length Pixar movie? Do you like to set your walk and text speed really slow so that the 'player becomes immersed in the story and world'? Then you are doing it wrong and I hope you step on a rusty nail.

Screw you Craze you got me addicted to Kingdom Rush, damn I love tower defense games... Anyway on topic I love the random loot in dungeon crawls, I dislike complex puzzles but thats just me I'm not good at solving puzzles unless its Resident Evil styled.

Another good dungeon diver was Summon Night: Swordcraft Story. A good story kept me going back to the dungeon to delve deeper. Etrian Odyssey and Swordcraft Story also reminded me of an important feature for dungeon crawlers:

The ability to jump between floors like from floor 1 to floor 5, etc. Both games employed this and thank god they did or else I'd have never gone further than floor 2 or 3.

If a dungeon crawler doesn't have this mechanic in some form or fashion (either a jump point or a Holy-Crap-Get-Me-Out-Of-Here Item) then the game becomes less enjoyable and more of a test of keeping from slamming things into the wall when you die because you couldn't make it another 20 paces to the exit after traversing 8 floors.

author=Max McGee
Restricting myself to tabletop gaming, and then further to GMing, what I like best about dungeon crawls is designing and then awarding treasure (and secondarily the challenges guarding it).

I've just realized an odd phenomenon about RPGs related to this. In non-RPG games, the player faces challenges and the reward is that they can continue to play the game. A simple example is Mario, where you beat a level so that you can get to the next level and beat that one too. It's completely recursive. Yea, there is the end goal of beating the game and saving the princess, but for the most part, you're there to play more levels - and if the gameplay is fun, well then this makes complete sense.

In an RPG, there's two reward paths going on simultaneously. Like above, when you beat a boss and emerge from a dungeon, you are rewarded with the ability to continue the game, but you're also rewarded with tangible personal rewards, like XP, money, and equipment. Often this is tied in with the first reward, as you wouldn't be strong enough to continue without it, but it also allows for constantly changing player states, and *possibly* more solid, material proof of progress.

This is getting really theoretical and I'll shut up now, but I think this is part of why Zelda games are so great. Not only are you rewarded with story and more areas to explore, but you're also rewarded with more strength, capabilities, and a clear and obvious sense of achievement that you can see any time you open up your inventory.

To tie this into the topic, if you're making dungeon-crawl-esque game, and there's a lessened importance on story or continuance, you should highly emphasize the player's growth and progress in another way, be it tangible rewards or something unique.