Dungeon crawl

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Dungeon (games). (Discuss)

This article is about the general style of adventure. For the computer game named after it, see Linley's Dungeon Crawl

A dungeon crawl (often referred to as a dungeon crawler or dungeon bash) is a type of role-playing adventure in which the characters fight their way through an extensive dungeon (or other labyrinthine environment, such as a castle or cave), killing various monsters there, often creatures such as Dragons and Orcs, and looting any treasure they find may find. The term can be used in a pejorative sense, since dungeon crawls often lack any meaningful plot or logical consistency.^{[citation needed]} Because of this, however, they can be very undemanding for a gamemaster to run, and the "hack and slash" style of play common in dungeon crawls is appreciated by many players.

Visual aids such as maps, models, or miniature figures are often used to represent the landscape of a dungeon in a dungeon crawl.

Due to their potential for simplicity and the limited expectations most players have for plot and logical consistency in dungeon crawls, they are fairly popular in computer role-playing games. The roguelike genre is a common and typical example, with endless randomly generated dungeon terrain and randomly placed monsters and treasures scattered throughout.

The dungeon crawl has also been a major influence on action-based first-person perspective computer games, notably Doom and Quake.^{[citation needed]}

The first dungeon crawl computer game was pedit5 written in 1974 by Rusty Rutherford.^{[citation needed]}