Dungeon Design: How Maps Shape Player Behavior

So, I was procrastinating around the internet when I stumbled across this blog post by a C Pruett, who describes the map design of the first Resident Evil. Reading this, I came to the realization, perhaps obvious to some, that the Spencer Mansion into which many of us have sunk countless tense hours of our lives is a classic tabletop dungeon.

Many know that the original Resident Evil and its director's cut defined the genre of survival horror, a genre specific to games in which the player experiences tension by facing threats with limited resources in a horror scenario. Fewer know that it has its roots in the gameplay and style of Alone in the Dark, and through that the wider genre of point-and-click adventure games.

The puzzles in the game exist to provide the player with challenges which, on completion, yield rewards and open up new areas. Unlike pure adventure games, these rewards can be not only new means of traversing the mansion, but also new resources with which to combat the mutants and zombies that infest it. It is essentially a classic dungeon with a horror twist: the player must accomplish tasks while defeating powerful monsters and solving puzzles, unraveling the mystery of why this mansion has become infested with zombies.

More than that, the Spencer mansion is a dungeon designed to guide the player through the experience using both the geography of the house and the placement of items. As the player solves local puzzles and acquires new items, new areas of the house open up, providing access to better resources like the magnum, as well as access to new puzzles that will further open the area.

Despite being known for its backtracking, this view of the game is fairly linear. The point of the your first journey through the Mansion is to find the Square Crank and open up the Guardhouse. The point of the Guardhouse is to find a key that further opens up the Mansion. The point of this leg is to find the Doom Books, and through them the Eagle and Wolf Medallions. The two dozen puzzles you solve between entering the Mansion and entering the Laboratory essentially guide you to those two items, or as Pruett says:

"...the player enters an area and then spends a lot of time in that immediate vicinity, visiting adjacent rooms several times before moving forward or heading back the way they came. You can see how an area will light up with activity for a few seconds, then the player travels on to some other part of the mansion. There's a little bit of micro-backtracking within these 'hot' areas, but very little retracing of steps across the larger map. At a macro level, Resident Evil is pretty much a linear string of these hot spots."

In the hot spots, items needed to solve puzzles and the puzzle rooms themselves are closely located, and once you solve the local puzzles you receive an item that allows you to move on to a different section of the Spencer Estate. The puzzles therefore are there to guide you, limiting access to more difficult areas and enemies until you have had the chance to acquire the resources and mettle necessary to overcome them. Every segment acts as a gateway that forces you to invest your time into getting better at the game and building resources, and that's a lesson we can take to heart in designing dungeons for tabletop games.

In D&D and other tabletop games, puzzles often do not serve constructive purposes. Rather than tools to guide player behavior, GMs often use them as simple obstacles that must be overcome. Puzzles and items appear randomly, and the players' capacity to find necessary items or useful resources is left to chance. Conversely, placing obtuse puzzle rooms directly in the way of a linear path does nothing to encourage exploration and can drag progress to a halt.

Instead, I think we should take a cue from Resident Evil's cluster method. Grouping rooms in your dungeon in related clusters to which the player gradually gains access encourages exploration by providing obvious rewards in the form of items that advance puzzles. Further, it guarantees that you can place potentially helpful items in locations you know the party will explore before facing larger threats, very helpful for an underprepared party. Exploration becomes a guided exercise in which the players feel they are making real progress, and valuable items appear where they are most helpful.

A lot of the time, GMs don't think of themselves as game designers, but when you design an area for the players to explore you are exactly that. Because you're now a designer, it's important to look at the techniques of successful professionals to help you create engaging games for your players. When it comes to dungeon design, one of the best designed dungeons in video game history is a good place to look.