Sick of These Fucking Dungeons
Oh Boy He's Doing Theory
A Preface
This article details every brain worm that squirms when I think about dungeons. It’s written from my perspective along with the historical concepts that brought me there. My intent with this article is not accuse but to prompt. I do not believe the way you engage in play pretend reflects on your character1. Consider this your heads up that the following words are getting into some shit.
“Decolonization” haunts this decade of TTRPG design. The word has become a shibboleth of cozycore marketing, woke signalling, and ideologically driven design2. While I question how much material progress is possible in the make-believe elf game art form, there is no doubt these culural revolutions matter. How do we make art the drags us forward, art that reflects our own highly advanced beliefs?
We sure as hell don’t keep making dungeons3
What the Heck is a Dungeon?
The dungeon has wandered quite far from its etymological origins. (game) Dungeons are sometimes prisons, oubliettes, or torture chambers. But mostly they are tombs and temples. The reason for that is that “Dungeon,” the gamic space, is an ideological product of its colonialist origins.
So what is a dungeon according to colonialism?
A dungeon is a territory designated the target of colonialism. Its location is typically foreign, often exotic4, and contains things to steal and things to kill. The steal-coded things are distinct from the kill-coded things (though this was not always the case, see historic adventures like Keep of the Borderlands that did not rule out the potential to enslave the inhabitants).
I am not bringing up the distinction for the sake of wordplay; the ideological power of colonialism is categorization. The system is created and perpetuated by organizing society into the metropole and the targets. The metropole has citizens, it has law, it has culture, and it has homes. The targets do not. They are unpeopled, they are lawless, they are barbaric, and they are dislocated. The colonial dungeon framework is the use of language to target a place for exploitation, its people for extermination, and its resources for extraction.
Pulling Out the Bricks
Alright, so the dungeon is an unplace. It is categorized as a zone where it’s not only ok to enact violence and loot the spoils, it’s expected. TTRPGs love dungeons because TTRPGs are also about categorization. They are systems that construct facsimiles for us to play in. So let’s talk categories.
The Categorization of Bodies
TTRPGs love stats. Stats are nice and direct. If you look at two different things and you want to determine which is more, you consult the numbers. Stats are the physics of the game - the atoms and molecules that describe what a thing is and how it behaves. Stats in TTRPGs create something from nothing.
Colonialism also loves stats. Stats are nice and direct. Stats flatten and simplify a complicated reality. They apply the mask of logic and reason over bigotry. If you want to categorize people, to create a benchmark that lets you unpeople those below it; you use stats. Something like say, race. Or when people catch onto the grift you rhetorically retreat to something subtler like, say, intelligence.
Stats are used both ways in TTRPGs, especially in dungeons. We are quite familiar with the history of these games tying race to morality (sorry, alignment). We’re probably also familiar with the bell curvification of racial modifiers (all orcs are stupid, all elves are graceful). But of course it’s deeper than that. The bedrock of these games; strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom, charisma root the game in violence itself.
These six descriptors were not drawn from the aether. They exist to contextualize the violence you do in the dungeon. They are numbers you can compare against the things in the dungeon, to test your violence against theirs. This is true even if you never roll the dice. Gravity is still there even if you never jump.
So What Do We Do About it?
You could abandon stats. The big six I mean. Dread asks the players questions about their character and uses those answers to determine proficiency or talent. Because that’s really all stats do. They tell the player what’s relevant about the reality of the game world.
You could also use stats to decenter violence. Golden Sky Stories constructs characters not out of HP, strength, and skills, but connections, dreams, and feelings. You’d probably find it a lot harder to unperson a critter when the only way you can describe it is their relationship with other critters and how it’s feeling.
The Categorization of Violence
Violence is not intrinsically immoral. Violence is a form of communication. Dungeon violence is more than the individual combats; it is the traversal through the dungeon itself. Dungeon violence is discretized. Conquering a dungeon is a summation of violent interactions5 tallied by means of resource expenditure. Despite the specific measurements of violence - HP, damage, weapons, spells, morale, spacing, etc. - these numbers depersonalize conflict between individuals. There is no ideological clash observed between the warrior and 2d6 goblins. The ideology is so large it is invisible.
You know what depersonalized violence looks like within colonialism. You know it every time a poster fantasizes that people in some other place are dying from the bad policies they supported. You know it when your government posts death tolls from genocide, pandemics, and wars. Violence is emotional; it can be cruel or furious or heroic. Numbers are unemotional. Numbers let us hold tragedy in our palm and put it away without a second thought.
So What Do We Do About it?
Games don’t need to include violence. This isn’t just about abstracting combat into a single roll, or removing it completely. Violence is a system, it is a way of coercing others into doing things they do not want to do. It is as simple as making games about things that do not (locally) involve violence. Gardening, fashion, writing, archeology. Violence may find your characters in their pursuits of these things. Violence may be politically woven into the pursuit of these things. But they are not inherently about characters inflicting violence.
Even if we do not abandon violence, we can abandon dungeon violence. Combat and struggle rooted in emotions and desires. Violent gameplay resolved by verbal negotiation. Violence expressed through art. Even violence resolved by pure randomness.
The Categorization of Culture
We come back to the tombs and the temples. Dungeons are intrinsically linked to culture, specifically the ways in which it can be stolen or destroyed. A tomb is, after all, a grave; dungeon delving is grave robbing. A temple is a place of worship - aesthetically and ideologically demonified to make it acceptable for conquer. Their objects do not have cultural value. They are commodified in monetary worth6 or their potential to advance your capability of violence. There is no difference between the Icthion Blade and the +1 greatsword from the perspective of the mechanics. It may have value to your grave robber as a memento of conquest, but not as a ritual object.
This categorization is perhaps the least similar to real world colonialism. Even when repurposed as historical objects, the theft of cultural items is an assimilation of culture into the metropole. Products of the barbaric outlands removed and imprisoned to “keep them safe”. From burial urn to temple decor, extracting these objects from their home and encasing them in glass is functionally equivalent to destroying them. The observer gains no more value from the museum piece than they would from a reproduction. But through theft, power is denied to the owners and enriches the hegemon.
This cultural categorization does overlap between games and real life in other ways; syncretism. Religious syncretism (the most common form in this context) is the absorption of outside beliefs into the dominant culture. This serves to empower the hegemonic culture by reinforcing its ontology; your gods are actually our gods from an alternate (wrong) interpretation. This cultural devouring overlaps with science and philosophy as well; alternate modes of thought and technology supported by historical success can be dismissed as correct conclusions gained from incorrect reasoning. You are intimately aware of this process. How many times have you harvested their medicinal flora that conveniently functions as your potions?
So What Do We Do About it?
This requires a radical reconsideration of how characters are intended to interact with the world. A world in which objects serve a purpose beyond violence, and for this purpose to feed back into the characters’ actions. Art that is inherently valuable because the characters can make and understand art. Magic, medicine, and technology that functions according to the rules of its creators and not absorbed by philosophy of conquerors.
The Categorization of Spaces
What do you think of when you picture a dungeon? A tomb7? A temple8? A collection of rooms? A grid?
The dungeon is categorized as a place to be traversed. It has locations that house things to kill and/or things to steal. It has distances that tax your supplies. It has traps and hazards to impede your traversal. Much ink has been spilled trying to make dungeons make sense. Ecologies, economies, housing, etc. But they do not undungeon the space. Ecologies exist to be disrupted. Economies exist to be exploited. Housing exists to hold things to kill. If these things described the dungeon as a place, like a city, well then it wouldn’t be a dungeon.
You know what a dungeon is according to colonialism. Like in reality. A prison is your state’s dungeon9. Bill Gates considers India his dungeon10. Elon Musk considers Bolivia his dungeon11.
A concentration camp is an industrialized dungeon.
So What Do We Do About it?
Putting the place in context is a start. You’re already 90% there when you go to The Temple of This Other Culture. Might be harder to burn the churches if you understood what purpose they served for the community. Same for the tombs12. But that stuff is deeply rooted in genre tropes. It’s harder to systematically kill and loot everything in a town, a city, a library. You’re familiar with lots of places that aren’t dungeons - take the language you’d use to describe your grocery store and apply it to your imagined spaces.
The challenge of this is it forces you to actually learn how things work. How all the food gets transported to the grocer, how it gets stored without spoiling, how it gets put on the shelves, and how that store maintains inventory so they know when to order more food. It makes it a place. Not a pit with resources to be extracted but a node in the web that makes up society.
You could also ditch the maps completely. What is a map but a categorization of geography? It may sound ridiculous but you’re familiar with theater of the mind - just keep expanding that abstraction.
Conclusion
I like dungeon crawler video games where I click on the screen and my multicolored freak makes all the monsters pop. I like RPGs where I click the attack option and deal 9999 damage. I don’t love sitting at the real life table while the graph paper and dice turn 2d6 goblins into meat before I play pretend chop them into play pretend dead meat. There is too much abstraction lost in the tabletop part of the TTRPG for me that I cannot ignore.
I don’t think I’m going to take down the dungeon crawler industry and I’m not trying to. I only hope that I can prompt a similar introspection from you, dear reader, that I go through when I’m reading or designing a game and run into those unchallenged assumptions about what a game is supposed to be. I only hope it urges you to pull up some bricks.
I believe it a little.
Those of us in the scene just refer to it as “design”
Dragons are still up for debate
308 results when searching “oriental” on DrivethruRPG. It should be noted that this includes products that do not specifically have the word in their title - the descriptor is so historic to this artform that it serves as a genre tag
The reaction roll is part of this system. It is a negotiation of present or future violence. Just because you have the opportunity to de-escalate encounters do not mean this behavior is the intended game state at a macro level.
Appraised based on their composite materials, IE not as art objects but the value that can be extracted by destroying and recycling them
Three-thousand, nine-hundred and thirty seven hits on DrivethruRPG
Six-thousand, three-hundred and fourteen hits on DrivethruRPG
I realize we just tangled the etymology into one big mess of xmas lights here
https://www.timesnownews.com/world/us/us-news/india-is-a-laboratory-to-try-bill-gates-draws-backlash-amid-controversial-vaccine-trial-article-115927218
https://english.elpais.com/economy-and-business/2022-02-14/how-nations-sitting-on-lithium-reserves-are-handling-the-new-white-gold-rush.html
There’s enough discussion regarding Egyptology and real life Adventurers here to fill an entire article but we do not have time for that right now