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This article is about the general style of adventure. For the computer game named after it, see Linley's Dungeon Crawl A dungeon crawl is a type of to run than a more complex adventure, and the " Hack And Slash " style of play common in dungeon crawls is appreciated by many players who focus on the action and combat aspects of the game. A dungeon crawler (or '''dungeon bash''') is a specific title that focuses on contained areas where the player proceeds through a dungeon collecting treasure, usually culminating in a Boss battle. The enemies and items (and sometimes boss) normally reappear after exiting and re-entering a major section. There may be only a token plot involved, in order to allow focus on extensive combat, skill, item creation, and loot drop mechanics. Luck is usually heavily involved, controlling which monsters may spawn in the area or the treasure they carry. Low percentage rates for powerful items encourage the player to repeatedly clear the dungeon in order to obtain them. DUNGEON CRAWLS IN DUNGEONS & DRAGONS Dungeon crawls in the Role Playing Game Dungeons & Dragons were influenced by J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit , the " Lankhmar " short stories by Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson's " Three Hearts And Three Lions " and by the "Cugel" stories from the '' Dying Earth '' books by Jack Vance .1 The word "dungeon" probably became a standard term in the role-playing context through the popularity of Dungeons & Dragons . However, the word does not refer exclusively to Prisons but to any dangerous area used as the site for an adventure, such as a cave, ruin, or shipwreck. According to Gary Gygax (in an interview with Dungeon Magazine #112), the first dungeon crawl was part of a wargame in which the invading force entered the enemy's castle through a former escape tunnel dug from the fortress' dungeon. The group had so much fun with this scenario that it was repeated over and over with increasingly complex dungeons until the wargame aspect of the game was dropped in favor of exploring the dungeon. POPULARITY For pen and paper RPGS, visual aids such as maps, models, or miniature figures are often used to represent the landscape of a dungeon in a dungeon crawl. Due to their potential for simplicity and the limited expectations most players have for plot and logical consistency in dungeon crawls, they are fairly popular in Computer Role-playing Game s. The Roguelike genre is a common and typical example, with endless randomly generated dungeon terrain and randomly placed monsters and treasures scattered throughout. DUNGEON CRAWLS IN OTHER MEDIA The dungeon crawl has also been a major influence on action-based first-person perspective computer games, notably ''Doom'', ''Doom 2'' and ''Quake''. The first dungeon crawl computer game was Pedit5 written in 1974 by Rusty Rutherford. SEE ALSO
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