Another day, another short essay about pretty good dungeon design that we’ll use in a few weeks to make a pretty good dungeon. Because that’s our goal, remember? We want to build a pretty good dungeon for an adventure about heroes clearing an infestation from a place and, in so doing, learn some game design best practices. Best practices like…

1. The path of least resistance must lead to the best gameplay experience.
2. The players can’t choose to ruin the gameplay experience.
3. The needs of the system due the jury — D&D for this particular jury — must be understood and respected.

Last time, we learned about what paths are and how we design around them. We covered both critical paths, which show all the required bits of an adventure that must be passed through to win, and golden paths, which show the route that provides the best possible gameplay experience. We also talked about distributing adventure elements in buckets labeled Required, Expected, and Optional for proper path planning.

In the end, we concluded that the first rule is all about making sure the golden path is the path of least resistance.

Today, we’re gonna talk about what a path of least resistance actually is and how it emerges from the intersection between game design and player agency.

Let’s Build a Pretty Good Dungeon: Exploring Spaces

Today’s secret passphrase is explorable space. It’s an important phrase, and it doesn’t mean what it sounds like. There’s more to it than some pithy bullshit like, “A dungeon is an explorable space because it’s a space the players are able to explore.”

To my knowledge, I stole the phrase from Mark Brown of Game Maker’s Toolkit. He talked a lot about the idea of explorable space in his Boss Keys series on nonlinear dungeon and world design in video games. Check it out. It has earned the Angry Stamp of Mildly Enthusiastic Non-Disapproval, which is a very high honor indeed.

Anyway…

The phrase explorable space describes how much freedom the players have to choose their path through a scenario. Kind of. We’ll refine that definition in a bit.

While we’re talking about dungeon design today, know that this concept isn’t limited just to physically exploring physical spaces. It’s not even actually about exploration, but that’s a discussion for later, too. The whole explorable space thing is equally valid when analyzing mystery adventures, event-based scenario flowcharts, Choose Your Own Adventure books, and really, totally, for real open-ended open-world sandbox games.

Defining an Explorable Space

Let me do this first for those pains in the asses among you who always demand precise, prescriptive definitions: the phrase explorable space is a way of qualitatively describing how much agency the players have when navigating a non-linear scenario by enumerating the possibility space at any given moment. Yeah? You like that? That’s what you get for always demanding bright lines and clear rules and turning everything into math. You get a bunch of overcomplicated, blathering horseshit.

Note, by the way, that I said qualitative. I know there’s gonna be some math and counting later, but if you try to turn this shit into math, I swear I will find you and bludgeon you to death with a copy of Principia Mathematica.

Really, it’s like this…

At various points, your players are going to say, “Okay, guys, where should we go next?” Or maybe they’ll say, “What should we do now?” Then, they’ll list a bunch of possibilities. They’ll maybe say, “Should we keep following this stream deeper into the caves or should we check out that side passage over there or should we go back to that tunnel we passed with all the red crystals?” Or they might say, “Should we go talk to the witness or check out the crime scene or check in with our informant or maybe see what the medical examiner’s autopsy turned up?” Or maybe, “Should we sign on with a trade caravan and go with them to Cityburg or should we hike there ourselves along the road or should we maybe take a shortcut through the Forest of Disembowelment?”

You get that, right?

If the players list a lot of possibilities, we say there’s a large explorable space. If they’ve only got a short list, we call it a small explorable space. It really is that fucking simple. If you try to complexify it beyond that, stop it. Get some help.

But note a few notes here.

First, note the implicit at this moment that precedes any question about explorable spaces. That’s important. The explorable space is always about how many possibilities the players think exist at a given moment. How many paths are there when they enter the dungeon? How does the explorable space change after the players beat Gruggan the Gruglugg and claim the Silvergold Key? What possibilities exist after the players get the key lead from Tony Two Nostrils?

Second, note that this ain’t about how many paths the players can see from where the characters are standing. It’s not about how many doors lead from the room the characters are in. Rather, it’s how many multiple choices exist to answer the question, “What now?” It includes not only the routes from the current location, but also every route the players didn’t choose in every previous location, and also every route that was blocked and now might not be.

Third, note that this is how players parse the possibilities, not the reality of any physical space. When it comes to crossing the overworld, there are technically an infinite number of paths between any two points. The players don’t think like that. They think, “We can get to Cityburg by following the road or by cutting through the forest or by riding with the traders.”

Explorable Space is a Hell of a Drug

This explorable space crap is all about agency. It’s about letting the players pick their paths. Now, linear sequences and linear adventures are totally fine. In roleplaying games, players have lots of different kinds of agency. A linear adventure focuses on how the players approach the challenges and conflicts in their way. But roleplaying games, as a medium, implicitly promise a sense of exploration and discovery. That kind of agency comes from navigating nonlinear explorable spaces.

That said, it’s the fact that explorable spaces exist that’s important. Size doesn’t matter. Or, rather, size does matter, but only insofar as there’s such a thing as too big.

See, you’re used to looking at adventures as graph paper maps or flowcharts or whatever. The players are trapped inside the adventure. They can’t see the whole space and can only navigate by making one next choice at a time. That’s why I focused on the multiple choice checklist thing above.

Explorable spaces only work if the players can actually keep the options in their heads. If they can’t list the possibilities, those possibilities don’t exist. That’s true even if they have a map or a visual aid. If your players have to refer to a map to see where they can go next, they’ve either got too many choices or those choices are so indistinct as to be meaningless. Sure, they can check their map and see twelve unopened doors they could check out next, but if they can’t remember which door is which and why one is more attractive than another, the choice doesn’t mean anything. They’re just ticking off chores on a list. There’s a point where a countable list of options just becomes an indistinct blur, and then it’s no different than just walking in random directions to see what’s hiding under the fog of war.

This is where the hand rule is really important. Remember the hand rule? Never have more things than you can count on one hand, preferably with a finger or two left over for later.

Options are like boobs; anything more than a handful is a waste.

I’m sorry. It was either that boob thing or yet another joke about how my writing’s constrained because I tried to treat myself to homemade scalloped potatoes with Christmas dinner and Misenplacius, Roman god of food prep, demanded a tribute of flesh.

An explorable space is small but satisfying when the players routinely find themselves with mostly two possibilities in their heads. A moderately-sized explorable space has the players keeping around three possibilities in their heads. Large spaces offer four or, briefly, five. But this ain’t math. Don’t math this. It’s just rough guidelines. Especially because, as the players explore, paths open and paths close, so the numbers ain’t fixed.

The count isn’t all that matters either. The players have to be able to differentiate the options. If the whole list of possible future paths is just a bunch of nondescript closed doors, the list is useless. That’s because, crazy as this sounds, exploring isn’t the same as wandering aimlessly. You sometimes end up wandering aimlessly when exploring, but real exploration is about moving deliberately and with purpose. It’s about choosing to see where that water is coming from. It’s about wanting to know what’s behind that big fancy door with all the ancient Zethinian warning labels you can’t read and returning to it because you just found the key.

Let me drop a truth bomb on you. This isn’t about exploration because exploration isn’t an activity. It’s not a thing you do. It’s a purpose. It’s a motivation. It guides action, but it isn’t action. Exploration is satisfying curiosity. It’s about asking yourself a question and deliberately seeking the answer. What’s that? What’s behind that door? What’s over that hill? What’s making that noise? What’s the deal with those crystals? What’s in that cave?

You can explore by wandering aimlessly, but that ain’t satisfying for very long. If your wandering doesn’t keep resolving itself into new questions, you lose the drive. “What’s in that cave?” must give way to, “Where’s this stream coming from?” or “What’s the deal with those crystals,” or “What’s making that sound,” or “Is there any valuable treasure in here?”

That’s why players tend to open all the closed doors in a room lined with nondescript closed doors and peer down each hallway. They’re desperately looking for something to actually be curious about. They need some way to decide which of the possibilities is more attractive to them than the others.

Thus, a small number of clear, distinct possibilities is always better than a large number of nondescript pathways.

And now that I’ve told you what exploration really is, I can tell you that this explorable space shit and the whole game design and pathing thing isn’t really about exploration. Exploration is actually just a subset of what we’re talking about.

Navigating Explorable Spaces

Let me try to tie all this shit together and put a neat little bow on it. Then, I’ll admit I fucked up royally and change the whole damned plan on all of you. Then I’ll wish you a Happy New Year and get the hell out of here.

Forget exploration for a minute. Exploration is a motive; it’s a goal. Exploration is a psychological gameplay need to satisfy. Exploration isn’t something you do; it’s a reason why you do.

Explorable spaces aren’t about exploration; they’re about navigation. They’re about players finding their way through nonlinear gameplay scenarios. All of this is about how the players pick their path through a dungeon or how they decide what next step to take at each phase of their investigation. Exploration is one factor that might motivate their choices, but there are other factors as well.

Let’s look back at our game design best practices and see if we can finally unknot how to make the first two ideas work. How they fit together. Our goal is to design a nonlinear dungeon space through which the players can freely pick their own path. But we want to ensure they have the best possible play experience as they do so. That the pacing is good, that the challenges are good, that the players never feel lost or confused or goalless, and they never suffer a true gameplay screwjob.

So, we design our adventure around a golden path. That’s the route through the nonlinear space that provides the best possible play experience. Ideally, we want the players to follow that path, but we want them to do it of their own accord, which means we also have to let them not follow that path, but if they do don’t follow that path, we still want them to have a pretty good time, because the freedom to pick your own path is intrinsically valuable enough to offset the difference between the best possible play experience and a merely good gameplay experience, but it’s not so valuable that it’s worth letting the players have a shitty gameplay experience, so we have to make sure that none of the non-golden path paths ruin the game for the players.

The golden path lays out the best route through the nonlinear space.

The explorable space lists out all the routes that reasonable players can see through the nonlinear space. Or, at least, it lists all the possible next steps.

So what is the path of least resistance that we’ve been talking about thus far? Well, it’s not really a path of least resistance. It’s not the easiest path to follow. Rather, it’s the path that the players, behaving like players, are most likely to choose to follow.

Do you get that?

Do you see what I’m driving at?

We draw a map. We identify a golden path. We put the best experience along it. Then we turn the players loose inside it. They wander around, build an explorable space checklist, and periodically decide what to do and where to go next, which updates the explorable space checklist. So all we have to do is make sure that the most attractive option on the explorable space checklist is always the next step on the golden path.

And that’s designing a pretty good adventure. It’s just that simple.

Except we also have to make sure that none of the other options on the explorable space checklist ever lead to sucky gameplay town.

Also, the actual making of options to be the most attractive such that players will be mostly likely to mostly choose them does get a little tricky sometimes. I mean, really, you just have to exploit absolutely everything you know about what makes some paths more attractive than others, which also means exploiting everything you know about what makes options memorable enough to stick on the players’ explorable path checklist, and then exploit absolutely everything you know about how players actually make their navigational next-action decisions based on their current goals, mood, personal play preferences, and the constantly evolving context of the gamestate.

Look, I’m gonna need an extra one of those short, direct, conceptual essays. Three ain’t enough. Expect it next time.

I’m sorry.