Rogue-Likes

DM: You see an encounter before you Party: I don’t recognize this one. Hmmm. Okay, everyone, brace up, we’re heading in! DM: It is a black hole. It immediately begins to suck you in. Party: Run! RUN! DM: You can’t get away. You are sucked in, everyone dies. Roll up a new party. After my original party was sucked in by a black hole, and I’d taken a new character with no experience or equipment down through the labyrinth to do a CR, I got to thinking how I would defeat the Black Hole next time I encountered one. Use the stopwatch we got to keep resetting its Action Time Bar (ATB)? Try and petrify it? ...

There’s been many efforts to define exactly what a “rogue-like” game is. Permadeath is definitely one. A different map every time you play is another. Having to discover each time what the magic items you discover do, that’s one. Descending into a deep dungeon, grabbing a quest item and making it back to the surface in one go, definitely. Rogue came out of a thriving ecosystem of similar dungeon-exploration games from the late 70s and early 80s. Its simple, quick gameplay was perfect for quick gaming sessions between classes, which is how I first encountered it at the University of New Hampshire back in the day. Universities, back then, were the fertile breeding ground for the progenitors of many computer game genres that we still play today. It was a wonderful time. ...