The Scones Alone

Continuation from Part 1 .  So I already talked about my quest to run dungeons for my players that feel as tense to them as Dragon Warrior 's dungeons did to me. I talked about trying a game, Torchbearer , that had systems built around emphasizing the things I thought that tension was about: the importance of light, limited resources, dwindling life. And about how I eventually found more of my mental energy going to managing those systems than to my campaign. Let's take a detour back to Dragon Warrior / Dragon Quest . More specifically, let's look at combat in Dragon Warrior . It's pretty basic. Only 4 actions to choose from: FIGHT, RUN, SPELL, ITEM. Seemingly worlds apart from the "free to try anything, and your referee will come up with a ruling" land of OSR and other tabletop RPGs. Even by comparison to other JRPGs, it looks like a limited and kind of boring list of choices. Compare it to, say, Final Fantasy 5 , with its huge system of jobs, skill...

To me, this is the most tense I have ever experienced a dungeon: Dragon Warrior / Dragon Quest 1  for the NES. Likely the first RPG of any kind I played. Doesn't look like much, but everything about the way DW  handled its dungeons evoked tension to me: The limited light. When you first enter a dungeon, you only see the square you're in. Light a torch and you can see adjacent squares. The actual distance you can see isn't too different from, say, Wizardry , but something about the overhead view made you keenly aware of how little you can see. The absolute pitch darkness beyond your field of vision. No gradual fade (as later remakes, in my opinion, mistakenly had). No hints of what might be beyond. Just black. That awful sound it makes every time you bump into a wall, which happens a lot , because you can't see. The way the radius of the Radiant spell (which lights a 7x7 area) gradually shrinks. You feel the darkness encroaching. I don't think torches e...