Inspiration Deep Dive: Dicey Dungeons
As I approach the launch of BARGE. I feel like I should start by talking about things that influenced my design. Yes, while every TTRPG ever has to draw a line between themselves, Gygax and Arneson. It is impossible for me to think about BARGE without Dicey Dungeons.
What is it? Dicey Dungeons is this incredibly slick roguelike dice rpg built on this funky game show premise. It is built on a d6 dice pool system with deck building elements in the form of equipment and character classes. All tied together with an incredibly funky soundtrack by Chipzel. It is available on Steam in addition to major consoles and mobile.
Designer: Dicey Dungeons was designed and developed by indie developer Terry Cavanagh.
How I found it: I ran into it on Xbox Game Pass back in 2021. It had already been out a few years by then. If I recall, this was during the lockdown era and I was teaching from home and playing a ton of games to deal with the soul-crushing dread of teaching on zoom.
It really didn’t take me long to start to formulate “multiplayer dicey dungeon” in my head. I was running DnD 4 times a week at this point after all. It was a really novel idea to me how Dicey Dungeons worked. It was this very pre-luck (or “input randomness”) centered game that sort of had all of the trappings of a classic fantasy RPG. Input randomness was something that had been a sort of tick in my head since playing subset games “Into the Breach” and in my practice as a Game Dev teacher, I spent quite a bit of time talking about Into the Breach and comparing it with other strategy games at the time.
I loved the way Cavanagh used Dice. It is baked everywhere into the game's aesthetic, to the point that you play as a “dice-a-pomorphic” version of the character. It also used deck building equipment elements to force strategic decision making throughout a run. The way Equipment works in the BARGE quickstart is heavily influenced by Dicey Dungeon’s UI.
If you play Dicey Dungeon, it won’t take long to find a ton of mechanical influences on BARGE, it’s fingerprints are all over the place. From the characters, the equipment, the different ways to interact with and manipulate dice. So many of the earliest drafts of BARGE were really built heavily around Cavanagh’s work. Obviously, it took a whole bunch of hacking to start to shape it into a TTRPG, but so much of the fun translates.
One of the biggest challenges was expanding this super tight and cohesive combat system into a larger game that does things outside of what DD set out to do. It took a lot of messing around with the systems around it and another major influence to be covered later, to really bring BARGE to life.
My favorite thing in Dicey Dungeon by far is the Robot. It is the textbook example of flipping your own game on its head. While all the characters in Dicey Dungeon Operate on different wavelengths, playing the Robot is so fundamentally different because of how its relationship with the dice pool operates. In a game with all of this input randomness, the Robot takes the gambling subtheme of the game and leans all the way in.
The CPU system the Robot uses was a huge inspiration for the Faith system and is one of the most interesting design spaces for BARGE to me. Because it is so jarringly different, it really met one of my design goals of separating out divine and arcane magic. It was one of (and probably still is) one of the hardest things to translate for new players, but it just meets the aesthetic goals I have for the chosen so perfectly that I really work to make it work in an analog setting.
I still go back from time to time to jam on Dicey Dungeons, strangely enough, I don’t think I am particularly good at the game. I am a good ways away from clearing all of the episodes and I am sure there is still some goodness locked away in there for me.
As I approach the launch of BARGE. I feel like I should start by talking about things that influenced my design. Yes, while every TTRPG ever has to draw a line between themselves, Gygax and Arneson. It is impossible for me to think about BARGE without Dicey Dungeons.
What is it? Dicey Dungeons is this incredibly slick roguelike dice rpg built on this funky game show premise. It is built on a d6 dice pool system with deck building elements in the form of equipment and character classes. All tied together with an incredibly funky soundtrack by Chipzel. It is available on Steam in addition to major consoles and mobile.
Designer: Dicey Dungeons was designed and developed by indie developer Terry Cavanagh.
How I found it: I ran into it on Xbox Game Pass back in 2021. It had already been out a few years by then. If I recall, this was during the lockdown era and I was teaching from home and playing a ton of games to deal with the soul-crushing dread of teaching on zoom.
It really didn’t take me long to start to formulate “multiplayer dicey dungeon” in my head. I was running DnD 4 times a week at this point after all. It was a really novel idea to me how Dicey Dungeons worked. It was this very pre-luck (or “input randomness”) centered game that sort of had all of the trappings of a classic fantasy RPG. Input randomness was something that had been a sort of tick in my head since playing subset games “Into the Breach” and in my practice as a Game Dev teacher, I spent quite a bit of time talking about Into the Breach and comparing it with other strategy games at the time.
I loved the way Cavanagh used Dice. It is baked everywhere into the game's aesthetic, to the point that you play as a “dice-a-pomorphic” version of the character. It also used deck building equipment elements to force strategic decision making throughout a run. The way Equipment works in the BARGE quickstart is heavily influenced by Dicey Dungeon’s UI.
If you play Dicey Dungeon, it won’t take long to find a ton of mechanical influences on BARGE, it’s fingerprints are all over the place. From the characters, the equipment, the different ways to interact with and manipulate dice. So many of the earliest drafts of BARGE were really built heavily around Cavanagh’s work. Obviously, it took a whole bunch of hacking to start to shape it into a TTRPG, but so much of the fun translates.
One of the biggest challenges was expanding this super tight and cohesive combat system into a larger game that does things outside of what DD set out to do. It took a lot of messing around with the systems around it and another major influence to be covered later, to really bring BARGE to life.
My favorite thing in Dicey Dungeon by far is the Robot. It is the textbook example of flipping your own game on its head. While all the characters in Dicey Dungeon Operate on different wavelengths, playing the Robot is so fundamentally different because of how its relationship with the dice pool operates. In a game with all of this input randomness, the Robot takes the gambling subtheme of the game and leans all the way in.
The CPU system the Robot uses was a huge inspiration for the Faith system and is one of the most interesting design spaces for BARGE to me. Because it is so jarringly different, it really met one of my design goals of separating out divine and arcane magic. It was one of (and probably still is) one of the hardest things to translate for new players, but it just meets the aesthetic goals I have for the chosen so perfectly that I really work to make it work in an analog setting.
I still go back from time to time to jam on Dicey Dungeons, strangely enough, I don’t think I am particularly good at the game. I am a good ways away from clearing all of the episodes and I am sure there is still some goodness locked away in there for me.
