September 25, 2024: Today's Half-Baked Idea: Failure?

I've been experiencing the joy of roguelike games on my Nintendo Switch, which deliver a bite-sized batch of fun on the portable console.

For those who aren't familiar, roguelikes are – very briefly – dungeon-crawl-type games with more or less randomly generated environments. One element in some of the genre is the assumption of frequent failure combined with the promise of power-ups: You explore, you find (say) coins or gems, you die, you use the loot to buy upgrades and new abilities, which help you explore more. Each time you die, you (hopefully) have made some forward progress in the overarching game.

This general cycle of gaming seems like it'd be suitable for a tabletop RPG: You're underpowered, you explore/fight, you die, you get points that help you power up . . . and then you face the same (or similar) dungeon with the goal of eventually getting powerful enough to overcome the entire adventure.

The challenge I'm facing on my napkin-noodling is that I'm not sure how fun it is for players to face more or less the same threats over and over until they power up enough to beat the final boss. As a video-game genre, roguelike games are partly appealing because they're rather fast (especially at the beginning, when you're weak). However, spending 15 minutes alone on a run through a dungeon only to die and get more powerful is less to ask than spending a three-hour RPG session with a tableful of players to accomplish the same thing.

That's why this idea is half-baked for the time being. If you have any brilliant insights along these lines, feel free to share them on the forums!

-- Steven Marsh