Labyrinth of Refrain: Dead Ends and Exploration

I’ve been playing Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk on my Switch these past few weeks.  It’s a first person dungeon crawler, of which I have played a few others, mostly within the Shin Megami Tensei series.  Got one more boss and maybe I’ll take on the last optional boss and then I am done with it.  I’ve been enjoying it so far but what I want to talk about is the maps.  As someone who is running a West Marches game with a dungeon crawling focus, any takeaways I can apply to designing my own dugeon maps I’ll find pretty valuable.

As a first person dungeon crawler, Labyrinth of Refrain places a pretty strong emphasis on exploring the maps it presents you with, although ultimately each merely requires you find a sequence of objectives (and defeat the bosses), with no requirements to explore every single square of the map, most of my maps are very close to being completely filled out as visited.

There are a few reasons for this.  Firstly, I like my maps in these games to look nice and complete.  This helps me in figuring out where to go next, if I see a square with no wall next to it, that generally means it is a path I have not explored, because even if I can see the current path leads to a dead end, I will generally walk to the edge of the dead end anyway, just so, if I come back to the area a few days later I can see it is a dead end on my map.  This helps with the next point which is that I often got lost, the game is not called Labyrinth for nothing, and many of the areas had large sub-sections that basically were completely unconnected to the main path to the objectives, or objectives that were off the path to the main objective, but required to unlock a door

But the game also rewarded exploration, by going down dead-ends and the long way around loops one could fine treasure and items that were otherwise miss-able.  Out of the way places would have points that resorted your stamina and rewarded you with magic resources.  Given the relatively minor penalty for being defeated, one could even argue that the additional enemy encounters were, in a sense, a reward for exploring given that they gave experience and resources upon defeat.  The game DOES start throwing high powered enemies at you if you linger in the dungeon too long, but also gives you the tools to easily resume where you left off, so even the time limit isn’t too harsh.

Of course, sometimes the dead ends are just that, dead ends, there’s no treasure, no rewards, and even the enemies fought could also have been fought just running along the main path.  Other times there are even traps or damage tiles, which serve no purpose if you trigger them but to make exploration harder.  In theory these two features might disincentivize exploration, but in practice they actually make things more exciting.

Without the dead space, finding the reward wouldn’t feel that special, one might go down every dead end just to loot all the stuff, but it would likely feel more like a chore than it does.  Without the traps, finding the rewards wouldn’t feel like there was any element of risk involved, and thus exploring every nook and cranny wasn’t really a choice, it’d be the optimal strategy.  While in a video game which you can save and reload, this is still the case, and you might as well clear out the trap corridors too because if they are TOO bad, well you have your save.

In table top RPGs, however, I would argue that traps (or other non-trival dangers) are even MORE important than they are in video games.  The choice of “risk of danger for the chance of treasure” is a lot more meaningful in a game where that danger could lead to the loss of a character you’ve invested a lot of time and emotional energy into.  The empty spaces allow the characters to take breathers, consume time, and ratchet up the tension for the next thing that they KNOW is coming.

I’m not sure I’ve really learned anything I didn’t quite already know about OSR dungeon design, but it was generally nice to see the principles in practice and experience them in an alternate medium.  The one thing LoR fails at, is that too many of its dungeons were linear with only one (real) way to attack a given problem or reach a specific destination, a few floors avoided this but for the most part I’ll just chalk it up to the weakness of the medium and video game’s general desire to give a more curated experience.

Current PaDC score: 9/31 (Barely made this one!)

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Still Not Dead! Gaming in the Last Month

From my last post:

That’s where we will pick up tonight, I might be too busy to get tonight’s session written up by the weekend, but I will try to get it done by monday.

Apparently that’s code for “You won’t here from me for a month”, sorry about that guys! I got out of the habit of writing, feels bad, I should have made time for it. I figured I can at least give a state of the union update.

Devil Survivor is actually going fairly well, even if I hadn’t written about it. My excitement levels have gone a bit down on it, and I don’t find myself thinking about it outside of game time as much, but given how long it has been running, I don’t think that’s really that unusual. It helps that the players are starting to surprise me more, so the sessions are needing to become more improvised anyway.

Plot wise, the two managed to make it out of the Cult’s sanctum without any real incidents, they can tell the cult wants something from them and so isn’t going to just kill them, but they can’t tell what that is yet. Overnight, it seems as though O’Connor’s group has kicked things off with a bang and assassinated one of the Admins. Security and the rebels are now at each other’s throats and not really willing to help the PCs deal with the cult, so they’ve been trying to play both sides to get shit to calm down. There were some scenes I really wish I was playing a game with good social mechanics for (like Burning Wheel), because the pure RP versions felt a little lacking.

Speaking of Burning Wheel, I am in the process of organizing a new game to finally replace my old Sunday night game! It is a pair of One on One games with a guy I met through the Burning Wheel G+ Community, I’ll GM one and be the player in the other. Session 0 for both games is this Sunday, so I’ll try to fill you in on all the details next week.

I still really want to do my Torchbearer West Marches game, and this feeling has only been hyped up even more by the fact that a playtest of the overland travel rules, was released today. It seems exactly like the missing piece I needed to pull this off mechanically, now I just need the real world time to put in the legwork to get a group together. Finding that might be tricky as there is some other, non-gaming obligations I am looking to take on as well (with a bit higher priority). But it is still on my mind.

In videogames, e3 happened recently. Personally, I thought it was a rather underwhelming year, but some of Nintendo’s stuff looks pretty sweet (Mario and Metroid). Rabbids Kingdom battle actually looks really fun which probably was the surprise of the show. I don’t think the e3s can all be winners, what with how long game development cycles are, and so I hope next year will be even better.

Personally, I have been playing Crusader Kings II, Story of Seasons Trio of Towns (Married Illuka), and have just dipped into Ever Oasis and Tropico 4 (which I picked up in the steam sale). I was a bit iffy on Ever Oasis, and still not sure if I like it, but I’ll play it a bit more and see. Tropico seems pretty fun so far, and I do love the occasional management game.

In board gaming, my buddies and I actually met for a game night on Sunday, which was the first in a while. We played a round of Dungeon Busters, which finally gave me an excuse to punch the cardboard bits out of it! I ended up playing too conservatively, and so while I never lost any gems, didn’t pull in enough to win. I also finally got to play the Betrayal at House on the Hill expansion. That game ended with a friend of a friend having the choice between a collective victory, and a victory for only him. I’ll leave it at that the rest of us were not happy with his decision. We rounded out the night with two games of Secret Hitler, a hidden identity game where I ended up on the bad team with the same partner both times. We managed to pull of a win twice in a row, which managed to annoy my other friends that we fooled them twice. I’m hoping we can have another one soon!

That about covers my last month in gaming, I’m not going to make any hard promises about writing more entries (because we’ve seen what those are worth), but I am going to at least try, especially with my new Burning Wheel game coming up. Either way, see you next time I hit that publish button!

Not Quite Dead Yet! A Quick Recap of the Last Month

Wow, it has been almost a month since I posted anything here, that’s my bad. Been a bit hectic during my normal writing time and on top of that I was busy with some fun gaming stuff as well.

The Good Shepherds: We’ll start with the bad news. Since I last posted about the Shepherds a full month and a half ago we have played exactly twice. The second time being on the 26th, during which we finally all came out and admitted that we didn’t feel all that much investment in the game. It’s a solid group, and we wanted to keep playing with each other, so we decided to put the Shepherds away and try a different game for a while. Right now it is looking like we’re going to be playing some version of Mage, I’ll keep you posted.

Devil Survivor: We got 2 sessions in during the last 4 weeks, one I had to miss because of a dental appointment, and the one this week Caine’s player had a scheduling conflict. I’ll include a more detailed recap when I write up our next session, but the short version is that our pair of heroes have armed a rebel group with the demon summoning program and Caine got himself a new demon.

And here is a quick rundown of the fun stuff that kept me from writing about fun stuff.

Triforcebearer: A lot of the writing time I DID have was dedicated to this instead. It is a collection of Zelda races as classes for Luke Crane’s old school dungeon crawl game Torchbearer. It was a pretty fun exercise making them (even if a good chunk of the class abilities are just lifts from existing classes), not to mention I am happy I actually FINISHED a homebrew, instead of just stopping at the half-baked idea stage. I haven’t got a chance to playtest them yet, but I hope to do so in the future if I get a chance.

Video Games: Probably really my primary hobby, even if I blog about RPGs more often. The fact that you don’t have to schedule play time with several other busy people contributes to that a bit, I’d say. Eitehr way the last month or so has been a sweet time for gaming for me, with some highlights including:

• Breath of the Wild – Probably an obvious one given the fact I just mentioned my Zelda homebrew above. It’s a high quality game, and the ability of the switch to play it on the go is pretty neat as well. I still actually have like 10 shrines left to get before I get all of them. Might not be my favorite Zelda game of all time, but it is really close.
• Nier: Automata – Picked this up after hearing some really good things about it, and was not disappointed. is solid in both the story and gameplay department, something Platinum Games, does really well. Would highly recommend
• Persona 5 – Just came out Tuesday, and I have had class and other things keeping me from diving deep into it, but I have been hyped about this game for a while, hopefully it lives up to it.

Gamestorm: Just this last weekend we had our local gaming convention here in the Portland/Vancouver area, focuses on boardgaming and RPGs and all around a good time. When I first went, I’d go with a huge group of friends and we’d just check out games from the game library and hang out together the whole con. As folks got busier and the price has gone up, less of my friends go, and this year it was just down to me and a few that were working the convention. I spent a lot of time in organized games with randoms this year, which has some of its own charms. Some highlights:

• Twilight Imperium – Game was scheduled to start at 9am. I ended up leaving at 8:30pm. It took a while to set up and tear down (the game owner had been at it an hour before we were scheduled to start), but most of that time was just due to the fact that we were playing with 7 people. I generally don’t much care for “I have to wait for my turn” as a complaint in board-gaming, but it was a lot of downtime in the game, and there were so many people that you couldn’t really interact with them. I think it was worth the time investment, but I think I would prefer to try it with 3 to 5 players instead of 7. At least I get the gamer cred for having finished a game of it!
• 5e – I wanted to get some D&D in, and they had a lot of slots open. I grabbed the wizard pregen and named him ‘Mizzerio the Great’ and spent my time speaking in the wizard voice. Not exactly a deep character but was fun for a big con game. I generally prefer 4e, but 5e isn’t really a bad edition altogether. Killed some Kobolds and lava demons, and had a good time all around.
• 13th age – Killed more kobolds, AND a corrupted dragon! I hadn’t played 13th age before but it was pretty neat. Fun fact that in both this game and the 5e game the Kobolds attacked us immediately after my character tried to greet them. Not like you show up to con games expecting to talk your way out of a fight, but the parallels were pretty funny. GM did a good job getting some roleplaying in for everyone considering how many people we had, so that was nice.
• Shadowrun: Anarchy – tried out Shadowrun’s new “lighter” version. Still a pretty big book, but it is noticeably smaller than the 5e one, so I guess that counts? This session was early morning on the last day of the convention, so there was literally only one other player for this game. Our goal was to kidnap this guy, and drop him off at another corp (who didn’t want him there). The kidnapping went smooth as it could go, we basically convinced the mark to walk right up to our van and my Troll gangleader just put him in a choke hold and off we went. The other place was guarded, and we thought we could try to talk our way past them, but then they asked for my ID (which I did in fact have a fake one, but it was in much smaller print than my characters real, criminal id). I pulled my gun on them and we got in a fight. I ended up arrested, and my partner ran away cause of some bad luck with dice on our parts. Mission failed, but still a fun time.
• Battlestar Galactica – Got a chance to play this with about 5 people. There were no cylons in the first deal of the cards, so the human side did really well and had practically won by the time the cylons second set of ids were dealt. I and the other brand new player were both dealt Cylon cards at that time, and so we had no real chance. Still a neat game though.
• Dungeon Busters – A cute tiny game about beating monsters in a dungeon. Play the lowest card and you get points if the group still beats the monster, but lose points if the group loses. Really small but I thought it was fun enough to grab after the convention.

I’ll try to keep you all more up to date in the future!