Today, we continue working on our pretty good dungeon, Reclaim the Place. I guess I should say that we start working on our pretty good dungeon. All I did last time was introduce the project. Technically, we’re not even really starting work, are we? We have a couple of short, conceptual essays to get through.

Which is good because I’m still broken.

Recall that we want to map out a dungeon adventure in which the players must clear three infestations in some place’s underspace so a faction can restore the place. We plan to use good game design principles to ensure the best play experience possible, and we distilled those principles down to three goals.

1. The path of least resistance must lead to the best gameplay experience.
2. The players’ choices can’t be allowed to ruin the gameplay experience.
3. The needs of the mechanical system — Dungeons & Dragons in this case — must be respected.

Now, I’ve threatened you with three short, conceptual, preliminary discussions, and even the dimmest bulbs among you surely noticed that, not only is three the number of goals, but also that the discussions I threatened to unleash align conceptually with the goals outlined above.

Today’s the first of those three short discussions. It’s about critical paths. Except it’s not. That’s not my fault, though; dumbasses keep using the wrong word.

Let’s Build a Pretty Good Dungeon: Critical Paths

This can’t possibly be the first time you’ve heard the phrase critical path. It’s thrown around a lot in the video game space, and I know I’ve flung it around a couple thousand times myself over the years. Technically, though, video game designers don’t use the phrase correctly. I don’t either, but that’s just because I use it like game designers do.

See, the term critical path is an engineering and project management term. It was first coined by engineers at DuPont — yeah, the chemical people — and Remmington Rand — yeah, the e-machine people — in the 1950s. Then, in the eighties, computer engineers…

Hold on, I’m not supposed to be doing this rambling bullshit thing. Long story short, game designers crammed two different phrases hamfistedly together, and I need to separate them. Partly, it’s because the distinction is important and partly because it pisses me off when dumbasses hamfistedly cram words together. If I hadn’t lopped off my finger, I’d be doing a whole rant here about people saying affordance when they mean signifier and threatening to bludgeon y’all unconscious with my autographed hardcover first edition of The Design of Everyday Things.

Moving on…

A Tale of Two Paths

I’m going to talk a lot about pathing here. Or pathfinding. Call it what you want. Understand that pathing is a really broad term. It describes how players navigate through any scenario at all. It ain’t just about exploring physical dungeon spaces. Any gameplay scenario can be mapped or flowcharted or diagrammed. Even open-ended open worlds and open-ended open scenarios have terrains and paths or terrain- and path-equivalents. How players navigate those maps or charts or flowcharts or terrain-equivalent playspaces? That’s pathing.

We talk a lot about critical paths in game design, but we misuse the term a lot. A game’s critical path is the minimum necessary path that gets the players to the goal. Anything the players must do to reach the goal is on the critical path. If there’s a dungeon with a treasure at the end and a gate in the middle and a button somewhere that opens the gate, the critical path is like this…

Entrance – Lever – Gate – Treasure

Sorry… I still can’t draw diagrams.

In a mystery adventure, the critical path might be like…

Lead – Evidence – Perpetrator

That’s really oversimplified, but you get it. The critical path is the shortest path that takes the players through all the things in the way of the goal. If there’s something the players have to do to win, it’s on the critical path.

The critical path, though, ain’t necessarily the best path. In fact, it’s usually not. Consider, for example, the old “show the players the lock before you give them the key” adage. Say there’s a puzzle lock on a gate and the solution comes from interpreting a poem hidden elsewhere in the dungeon. The critical path goes from the entrance to the poem and then to the puzzle, but the best path is more like this…

Entrance – Puzzle – Poem – Puzzle – Treasure

By best path, here, I mean the one that leads to the best-feeling gameplay experience. It’s easier to solve a puzzle if you see the puzzle before you get the clues. Sidetracking and backtracking give players an enhanced sense of agency and control. Play experiences are better when the path forward is sometimes behind you. But all of that’s a long story for another time and told by someone with all their fingers.

Roleplaying games aren’t just gameplay experiences, though. They’re also narrative experiences, right? That can also play into what best path means.

For example, narratively speaking, by the end of a good mystery story, you don’t just know whodunnit and whydunnit and howdunnit, you also have a deeper understanding of the characters involved and the context around the crime. Maybe you understand the criminal’s psychology and deep-seated motives. Maybe you understand the victim better and how much damage the crime did. So the best path isn’t just the one that leads the players to the evidence they need to arrest the criminal, but that also exposes them to delicious backstory and context along the way.

Game designers often refer to this best path as the critical path too, but it’s technically correct to call it the golden path, which is also a term from engineering and project management. The golden path necessarily incorporates the critical path, but it can wander a bit and include non-critical elements that enhance the experience. It’s not the minimum required path; it’s the optimized path.

For a given definition of optimized anyway.

Required, Expected, and Optional

It’s important to note that not everything in an adventure lies along the critical path or even along the golden path. Hell, some adventures don’t even have critical paths. Or, rather, the critical path is as simple as “reach the goal,” with no intermediate requirements or gates to unlock, which is basically the same as having no critical path at all. Every adventure, though, however simple, has a golden path. If your adventure doesn’t have a golden path, you’re a shitty designer. It means you’re just drawing maps and throwing shit wherever without a concern for how the players are going to feel playing the damned thing. The quality of the experience is down to the player’s random choices and random chance. But, as I said in the introduction, I’m done arguing with lost causes.

But I digress.

Adventures have a lot of shit in them. They’ve got rooms, sites, encounters, treasures, goals, informations, backstories, characters, whatever. Some of that shit is required. If the players don’t do it, encounter it, overcome it, find it, or interact with it, they can’t win. That shit’s on the critical path.

Some of that shit, though, isn’t technically required. The players can still win even if they don’t encounter it or find it or do it or whatever. But if they do skip that stuff, their play experience is somehow significantly diminished. Maybe a challenge isn’t ruined or rendered impossible, but it’s made hard enough to border on frustratingly unfun. Maybe the players win the game, but they’re left with a dissatisfyingly incomplete understanding of what the hell actually happened and why. Or maybe they bypassed so many of the game’s challenges that the victory feels shallow and unearned. That shit is part of the expected experience. It’s on the golden path.

Of course, some shit is truly optional. It’s not only not required, but the gameplay experience isn’t significantly diminished for its absence. Finding that shit or doing it or whatever might change the experience and possibly even enhance it, though. Maybe there’s some extra context that provides a deeper understanding of the game’s events. Maybe there’s a reward that makes a difficult challenge easier in a way that feels earned. None of that’s on the golden path. It’s all off the path stuff.

Here’s the part some of you just won’t be able to wrap your heads around…

It’s down to your judgment as a game designer to decide what’s required, what’s expected, and what’s optional, and part of the design process is making it be the way you decided it should be.

Say I’m doing an adventure about killing a fire dragon, and I want to include an icebrand sword. I can decide that the sword is required. That means the sword becomes part of the critical path, and it means I make the dragon really hard or impossible to kill without the sword.

I can also decide the sword is expected. That means the sword is part of the golden path, and it means that I build the dragon to be the right level of challenging for a boss, assuming the party has the sword. Not having the sword doesn’t mean the players can’t win, but it’ll definitely be more challenging than a boss should be. The players will struggle to win.

I can also make the sword optional. That means it’s totally off the golden path, and it means also that I build the dragon to be just the right level of challenge assuming the party doesn’t have the sword. With the sword, the fight gets easier, and how much easier it gets depends on what it took to obtain the sword, but I assume the players are going to be fighting without the sword.

The same’s true if I’m doing the mystery thing. I have to decide how much delicious backstory context is the right amount for the expected gameplay experience and how much is optional enhancement.

Speaking of things you’re going to struggle to wrap your head around…

Optional enhancements don’t automatically, objectively improve the experience for all players. And, when I say that, I am not just talking about all of the hypothetical players in the world. I’m talking about all of the players at your table.

It’s probably a mistake to try to explain this in such a short, straightforward essay, but here we go…

Optional enhancements like backstory extras and lore revelations and bonus treasures and intrinsically interesting discoveries and alternative gameplay experiences? They’re usually things that appeal to certain player types or reward only specific characters, but don’t pay off equally for all reasonable players. Meanwhile, acquiring them does chew up table time and cost gameplay resources. So, you’ve got a mix of taste preference crap and diminishing marginal utility going on here.

Considered as a whole and across an entire playgroup, groups that get bogged down going for too much optional crap usually tip the game past the peak of best possible experience. The golden path really, truly is the best possible balance of resources and time and play experience payoff for the largest number of players. The optional shit is like spice or gravy. It can enhance the meal for the players with the right tastes, but it can also drown the meal.

Does that make sense? I hope so.

Just know that, with optional crap, more isn’t better. In fact, the presence of the optional shit is more important than its actual effect on gameplay. I’ll get to that next time.

Meandering Paths and Branches

I’ve been talking about the golden path like it’s a single route through a game, along which can be found the best possible play experience. The reason I’ve been talking about it like that is that it really do be like that. It’s just not always so simple. Golden paths aren’t always straightforward. They can zigzag and wander. Remember the whole gate-key-gate thing?

There are also times when the golden path is truly forked up.

Imagine, for example, an adventure where players can win either by assault or by infiltration. You know, the ole “charge in the front or sneak in the back” approach to taking an enemy stronghold? If you’re making an adventure with that choice, you probably want both choices to provide equally good, fun, satisfying gameplay experiences. Honestly, you’d have to be a special kind of stupid to design a branching path adventure wherein one of the branches leads the players to have a shitty time.

Players might get to choose the order in which they complete certain tasks and the order might not matter much. Maybe they need to gather the three ingredients where one’s in the swamp and one’s in the lord’s orchard and one’s with the merchant that disappeared on the road through the hills.

In those cases, what you end up doing is breaking the adventure down into chunks and designing each chunk around it’s own golden path that provides an optimal play experience. Does that make sense? It should. This shit really isn’t that complicated.

For that matter, do I even have to explain bottlenecking? That’s when you squeeze a bunch of different paths back together through one specific event or encounter so you can pinch off several different golden paths and make each more manageable to design. I’m probably getting too complicated for what I intended.

Let’s wrap this shit up.

The Path of Least Resistance

It’s really important to remember that all this path shit is just about highlighting one possible route through a dungeon or adventure or flowchart or open-world space or whatever. Imagine drawing a big, open dungeon and then taking a highlighter and finding the best way through the dungeon that’s the most fun and the right challenge and all that crap for the most number of reasonable players. It’s about acknowledging that such a path exists and being aware of enough of it to identify it. Or, rather, it’s about purposely building your adventure around and along such a route.

I need you to understand this: neither the golden path nor the critical path should be thought of as the only route, the required route, or the railroaded route through an adventure. There might be ten thousand possible ways to navigate a dungeon. The critical path is the shortest path that meets all the requirements necessary to win the adventure. The golden path is the path that leads to the most satisfying, rewarding, and properly challenging gameplay experience. All the other paths still exist.

That brings me to the end of the first design goal and the start of the next one.

It should be obvious how everything I’ve said above plays into that first design goal. When I tell you, “the path of least resistance should lead to the best gameplay experience,” you should realize I’m saying, “the golden path should be the path of least resistance.” That’s basically me saying, “the golden path should be the one the players are most likely to mostly follow.”

But if following the golden path absolutely does lead to the best play experience, why leave ten thousand other paths available? Well, obviously, you don’t want to leave ten thousand other paths available, but you do want to leave a couple. But, if you leave other paths open, how do you make the golden path the one the players are most likely to mostly follow?

That’s what we’ll be discussing next time. What is an explorable space, and how do players explore them?