Dot Dungeon
".dungeon is a
tabletop roleplaying game with mechanics inspired by social games
like Werewolf and Munchkin where the real world (and you as a person)
affect the game. The world of .dungeon is inspired by MMO's, both
fictional (like .hack//sign) and real (Guild Wars 2) and is set in a
mysterious game engine that is growing and feeding on itself,
ever-changing."
—.dungeon collection
.dungeon is a ttrpg
that emulates MMOs in a heavily narrative way (note I used narrative
not narrativist because forgisms are awful). One player players the
World (GM), and the other players play Player Characters—but there
are also PCs that aren't played by players which are distinct from
NPCs—in a MMO that may or may not be on its final days, or other
such narrative reason for the campaign to end. Aspects of it are very
meta. It's acknowledged that you're either playing yourself playing a
character or, if that makes you uncomfortable, that you're playing
someone who a real person playing the game. The stats are meta skills
and knowledge, and the classes while given game style names are ways
for you the player to bring who you are directly mechanically into
the play of the game. Shape-shifting into your pet. Making art of the
events of the game.
But for all of that,
it is still effectively a DnD—a dungeon crawlery kind of game—as
most MMOs are. But, the group rather than individual characters, has
one hit point total, or connection. When connection hits zero, the
game ends, and there are several suggestions on narratively what that
could mean, and the way connection is lost and restored is designed
to slowly dwindle to zero. The campaign will end. The campaign IS a
character. It is rather melancholy. I do in general like this. It
helps alleviate the problem of a campaign dragging on forever.
The system is pretty
simple. Stats are dice. When dice are rolled, it's simply a matter of
rolling die vs die, and the difference is how much connection is lost
from either side. Simple. But, this makes everything in combat.
Almost every contest is an attrition of hit points. It makes sense
since connection isn't hit-points, it's the connection the characters
have to each other and the world, and it's slowly dwindling. Failing
to pick lock? Frustrating. Getting sass instead of help from an NPC?
Frustrating. Dying repeatedly to monsters? Frustrating. All these are
things that will make people quit games, or put them down never to be
picked up again. Loss of connection isn't necessarily negative since
it's ok to finish a game, regardless of how "finished" it
is.
BUT. It still
bothers me that everything is "combat." And no, don't try
some, "well in the conversion section is talks about jenga and
clocks," malarkey. Clocks are just fancy hit-points. Jenga
towers are also hit-points. SURE it is a bit reductive since even in
other games pass/fail is one hit "kill." BUT in .dungeon
it's all one pool for the players. This isn't a flaw, necessarily,
even though I fundamentally have a problem with everything being
resolved the same way with the same result, loss of connection.
And it's messy and
vague. Fighting goblins reducing the connection of individual goblins
kills that goblin, but deal damage to the players as a group. How do
you adjudicate one character dying and needing to respawn, remember
characters don't die permanently in MMOs. The simplest take would be,
the character that failed dies and has to respawn, while the group
loses connection, but this feels bad. Even in "hard" games
like the souls series, common enemies don't necessarily one-shot
characters, and in MMOs that definitely isn't a base assumption.
Don't get me fully wrong here. I'm used to making my own rulings and
I do leave stuff vague or out that is commonly spelled out. This
though, is frustrating. I don't think it's good design. It leaves
something out. Dying repeatedly in game is frustrating—hence of
lost of connection—but the character death in video games comes
from the mechanics of that game. Your character in Dark Souls or
Legend of Zelda or any number of games, takes damage and dies. You've
"lost"—spent really—the time it took to get there, the
loading screen time, and then time to get back to where you
were—you're losing connection with the game, it's community, your
friends that play THAT game. .dungeon doesn't model that. I think it
should. I think that for as much detail the book goes into on other
topics, there could have been more under respawn.status than "some
contests may result in a character needing to respawn..." Can I
make my own decisions on how to determine whether or not contests
will kill a character? Of course I can. But this puts a roadblock on
me playing this game rather than cutting it up for parts.
.dungon doesn't
model PC advancement in a manner consistent with most of the source
materials source material. Yes you the player of a game accumulate
experiences independent of your avatar, but generally an avatar has
mechanical means of advance, even if it's not a clear cut numerical
manner like levels. Which granted, most MMOs have a Sisyphean
relationship with levels and hazards. Higher levels mean more
powerful foes which means in many respects the numbers didn't really
get bigger. It's that meme of the dude fighting lobsters with a club
and then fighting lobsters that are pallet swapped etc etc. Thing
don't really change, so in one respect this kind of advancement way
likely discarded or maybe not even considered by Batts. Instead
character advancement is finding skills that can be improved. And
there is no hard list of skills, something I like. I love it when a
game says "yeah here are skills are, and this is what skills do,
but I'm not making a huge list because the scope is too broad."
The way .dungeon is
written and set up wants you to slot in modules from other games.
Explicitly. Treating them like cartridges and the like. Because that
is the setting, an MMO devoid of anything more than a generic fantasy
allusion.
This is good though.
It's a build your own setting premise. Yes I do know by now there are
3 zines with adventures and setting material, but the main premises
are "here is some shit to play with that acknowledges some of
the meta nature of playing a game, and how to reuse materials you
already love or use any of the millions of adventures modules hanging
out collecting dust.
But there is a flaw.
Which character improvement being built around collecting and
improvement skills, how do you gauge relative power when converting
I6 Ravenloft? How powerful is Strahd?
Actually. I'm gonna
convert him here.
Count Strahd von
Zarovich, Vampire
FREQUENCY Rare
NUMBER APPEARING 1
ARMOR CLASS -1
MOVE 12"/18"
HIT DICE 10 (55 hit
points)
% IN LAIR 90%
TREASURE TYPE F
NUMBER OF ATTACKS 1
DAMAGE/ATTACK 5-10
(1d6+4)
SPECIAL ATTACK
Energy Drain
SPECIAL DEFENSES +1
or better weapon to hit
Additionally he's a
vampire so all the other vampire specials apply to him.
I'm not going to
detail the rest of this full page stat block because most of it
doesn't require numbers specific to AD&D's system.
There isn't an
example monster/obstacle block in .dungeon, so we'll do our best.
Connection_Rating 55
(which is slightly more than the starting CR of the whole group)
Difficulty.info
Heroic/d12 (you could argue that difficulty would be relative to the
characters or that Strahd is Legendary/d20 or even that he's Medium
or Hard since Ravenloft is for levels 5-7 which is about 1/2 to
almost max hit dice for AD&D and he's the big bad for the module)
do_something_cool.info
Needs a magic weapon of some kind. There would be a bunch of the
other things I'm not going to bother to type out.
That's just him, not
the rest of the adventure or even just the castle. It could be that
I'm approaching this from the wrong angle entirely. Maybe a module
like this should be approached as a campaign finisher. Because I
don't know else I can envision the attrition the group go through
since connection rating can never be fully replenished. I just don't
know.
Game Over isn't
written to be a bad thing. It's there to let the campaign end. It's
over. Talk about the good and bad times. Maybe lament the game ending
before you could finish the last adventure before summer ended, the
server died, or whatever.
It still feels like
something is lacking in the spaces between connection rating,
respawn, and obstacles use connection rating. I don't know. This is
effectively just a surface level read. I don't have time to run this
for anything longer than maybe one or two sessions. So I won't stare
at this too much thinking about "fixes" to problems that
may only appear from my ignorant perception.
Now lest this seem
to be an unrelenting complaint or disparagement, there is a lot of
things that I really like that haven't commented on.
I enjoy the
dichotomy of Non-player Characters and Non-player Player Characters.
NPCs being the general AI driven NPCs in games, shopkeepers and the
like, and Non-player PCs being characters that fictionally are
controlled by other players, just players that aren't real. Those
characters are the random people you meet PUGing or run into grinding
in the wilderness in MMOs, or the helpful summons in a souls game.
The most interesting
thing is modeling the group's relationship with this Non-player PCs
with a dungeon, at the end of which that character goes their
separate way. Kind of a microcosm of the eventual end of the game.
Also the oracle
section is kind of cool. It's intended for solo play, but I also
think maybe this system isn't super suitable for solo play. It does
in a way demonstrate a tension between playing a game solo and with a
group, since one of the draws to playing an MMO with a group is the
group, but if the group breaks up the people slowly lose interest in
the game. While when you're playing a game solo, barring servers
dying or other external factors, continued interest in a game only
has to contend with one player's desire to play it.
Overall, I like that
Batts is playing with this concept. It's kind of a parallel to My
Body Is A Cage since both are about two sides of people, the Real vs
the Unreal, Waking vs Dreaming, Life vs Game, but saying both are
Real.
Would I do Playing
as Players who Play Characters in an MMO the same way? No. I feel
there is an void where the PC Avatar is. It lacks mechanical weight
to me. But Batts's inspiration isn't just MMOs but also fiction
inspired by MMOs. The characters in-game avatars are just as or
equally important to the overall character as any real world
qualities. The stories rarely engage with the mechanics of the
fictional game in much depth. I'll admit I'm not as deep of a fan of
this genre as I am other genres like real robot mecha or magical
girl, and I feel the way I've treated and will treat interpretations
of them to ttrpgs is similar to how Batts did the same with .dungeon.
And I think I'll end
it on that note.
You can buy .dungeon
in print here Nerves .dungeon collection and digital
here itch.io and here
Drivethru Affiliate Link
I don't get any money if you buy direct from Batts which is the way I recommend. They get
more money and you get a book.