Scampir

Be the Choster you wanna read

  • He/Him + They/Them

One Canuck built the #ttrpg tag and the #mecha tag. And that was me.

Cohost Cultural Institution: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots
Priv: @Scampriv


Scampir
@Scampir
folly
@folly asked:

why do you think dungeons are a good idea?

I assume you mean like, why are Dungeons a good premise or tool for play; ie what do they have to offer to the practice. If that's not true, then please follow up and I will try to explain more.

This is a good question but I cannot answer it without setting up the context from which I end up reaching for context.

That context is a lot of PbtA and FitD prep. We come up a world, we come up with agents in that world (factions and individuals) and then we play through "scenes." A huge part of these games, and why I was initially drawn to them, was that liberation of the terms of engagement and player-driven gameplay that blew me away. I got so much more narrative control that I felt like my character's motivations were propelling the game forward. A good point for this is playing Armor Astir: Advent and Spire, where we have characters doing things in locations that are kind of film sets. We are taking them and engaging with them as a kind of tonal backdrop that spurs a vibe. That affect from imagery is very cool, but there is a limit to it.

I define the Dungeon as a game artifact. It doesn't have to be an underground prison, a treacherous castle, or an enemy base. It could be a shopping mall, the inside of someone's dream, or a factory. Things are contextualized into game form by becoming dungeons.

And when traveling through this game artifact, your verb is to Crawl. This method of going from room to room, making incremental process restricted by it's architecture, is fascinating to me as an exploration of being subject to architectural design. In my own approach, I like when arriving in a Dungeon sample's it's content, but engaging with it is at the Player's discretion. This decision is just to keep players free to decide what, well if you saw my previous ask, sub-topic of the dungeon they actually want to sink their teeth into. It's not all friction moving through the place, and sometimes you find a little loop that let's you skip around 1. And now we're ready to chat about why I think the Dungeon is a good idea.

I think that by playing with a Dungeon, you are roleplaying in the shoes of someone who engages with the space as a subject of it's design. You get this a lot in video games, and when it's good (Myst, Outer Wilds, Control, Echo) it's VERY GOOD. But you also get this a lot in real life. You get in places like, oh if you've seen my Cohost Profile you've might wonder what I mean by Junkspace Enthusiast right?

my Cohost Profile with the phrase "Junkspace Enthusiast" circled

Junkspace is an article by Rem Koolhaus decrying an architectural trend for which the article has been named. Briefly, this design sacrifices texture and meaning for ultimate utility. Stewart Hicks has a great video on Liminal Space that goes into it 2. Shopping Malls, are an example of Junkspace because ideally any store can be set up in any kind of unit, but they leave behind no trace beyond that in a ledger or in visitor's memories. This is close to what Marc Augé means by a non-place. Anything that made it a "Place," it's significance, it's presence, the relationships with the people there, has now concluded and all signifiers have been stripped.

How are you a subject to the shopping mall in this way? Take Koolhaus's example of the bench in a shopping mall. Benches in these malls faced outward from the center of a hallway so that when you rest you must face a storefront. Your moment of rest is an opportunity for Advertisement. But now the storefront is empty and your moment of rest is a cruel reminder of what's going on outside this little manicured commercial garden. That's a result of the architectural, structural design of the place first rendering you a subject, then cruelly lampshading a broader economic trend when the surrounding world cannot support the design.

In play, we temporarily suspend out identities and when picking up dungeon crawl games subsequently submit ourselves as subjects to the Dungeon. Rolelplaying, beyond the context of games, is a practice where we do this to learn and explore things that are important for us to know how to handle (this is why so much literature about roleplaying is about professional development and managerial training!). So why is playing in a Dungeon a good idea?

Playing in a Dungeon is a good idea because it let's us engage with how architecture and the people with the means to develop it influence our lives. The Crawl is a procedure that all participating characters will be subjects to that architecture, and the experience can be a good opportunity to share experiences and reflections about how we interact with spaces differently. Like other roleplaying games, we can introduce real-life obstacles or frustrations in a fantasy or sci-fi trapping to remind us that we're dealing with the play-version, and then move on, though here in the Dungeon these obstacles mostly have to do with the architecture, politics of, and people in the space.

The Dungeon Crawl is thus just another way to frame the topics for the conversation of roleplaying games.


  1. this feels good for players because it can mean that they will not have to re-experience the friction they had to endure to get to this new path. Like the classic Dark Souls elevator.

  2. I differ in how I think of Junkspace because well, I grew up in the empty malls of small town Northern B.C. Koolhaus writes something that shook me to my core in his article Junkspace: that the place for youth in shopping malls is sitting in hallways and under stairwells. If anybody else sat in a hallway because you and your nerd friends couldn't get privacy anywhere else, hey same.


You must log in to comment.