Yesterday — literally — I regaled y’all with 6,000 words of thesis-worthy player psychology to explain why your dumbass players act like they do when they explore dungeons. Today, I need a breather level. So it’s a bullshit day. I’ve got a quick, punchy, rambly essay about a thing I want to write a rambly essay about. No structure, no headings, just me blathering away about ice centipedes and monster hunts and heists and mysteries and Battletoads and why you shouldn’t be Battletoads.

Here’s the backstory…

The members of The Angry Discord’s Quick and Dirty Dungeon Club were having one of their little creativity jam sessions or whatever. I don’t know what they actually call them. The Quick and Dirty Dungeon Club ain’t my thing, it’s theirs. But, as the Grand High Overseer over The Angry Discord, I see all, I know all, and sometimes I even participate in all.

Actually, that backstory probably needs some backstory…

Several years ago, I published a two-part series about throwing good-enough adventures together because homebrewer Game Masters always overthink and overcomplicate when they should learn to aim for functionally fun. Here are some links…

Let’s Build Baby’s First Dungeon (Part 1 of 2)
Let’s Build Baby’s First Dungeon (Part 2 of 2)

Despite the infantilizing title, the template for adventure design I laid out there became known as Quick and Dirty Dungeon Design.

Generous, long-time supporter @NoxAeturnus thought it would be fun to start a kind of newslettery magazine club thing. I gave him some space in The Angry Discord, and he’s been compiling submissions every few months into collections of Quick and Dirty Dungeons ever since.

As I said, it’s his thing, not mine. He runs it, he gathers submissions, he hosts jam sessions, and he compiles the Adequate Adventures E-Zine. All I did was actually build the community and inspire the whole thing, and basically write the mission statement and submission guidelines. So, it’s Nox’s thing. His and his contributors.

Incidentally, I’m trying this new thing called humility, and I don’t like it at all.

Also incidentally, Nox has written several pretty cool modules of his own, and he’s made them available on his Ko-Fi page. They’re worth checking out. Guy’s got good adventure-design chops.

So, that’s the backstory’s backstory. Now back to the backstory…

The theme of the particular discussion I was half-watching was rhemorzasses. You know, the paradoxically fiery ice centipede monsters I don’t give enough of a shit about to look up the proper spelling of? Those things. And then I had to jump in and yell at everyone for doing everything wrong. Because that’s what my supporters pay me for.

The club was trying to write an adventure in which the players had to capture a rhemhorhazh for a wizard or a zookeeper or whatever. Most of the discussion was about how remoras are hot and burrowy, and so players would need plans, tricks, or tools to deal with that crap. But it all boiled down to the same thing. “Get an edge, then fight the razzmatazz and stop just shy of actually killing it.”

But that wasn’t working for Nox, and this adventure was his babby. He wanted a genuine monster hunt. He wanted the players to act like monster hunters and engage in an actual hunt for an actual monster that felt like a monster hunt. I think there’s a video game series that probably inspired him, but I can’t remember the name.

Seeing that, I threw out some ideas about how actual big things were and are captured in real life. Like, how did Hannibal capture his elephants? How did cavemen catch mammoths? That kind of shit. Ultimately, I offered the following structure for a monster hunt.

First, you find the creature’s lair or trail. Next, you flush it out or grab its attention. Then, lead it to a previously agreed-upon ambush point. Maybe one that traps it against some terrain. If it wasn’t a burrowing centipede demon thing, you could flush it into a big pit, which was a very common approach, but that issn’t going to work here. Once you’ve got it at the ambush point, wear it down. Get it down to bloodied or staggered if you use such things as I do. Just deplete it. Once it’s depleted a bit, signal the dozen or two stout yeomen hiding in place to set upon it with hooks, chains, and catchpoles so it can’t flee or burrow away. Then wear it down until it stops fighting.

That ain’t the only way to hunt a big monster, but it’s a pretty standard way. You can use bait instead of flushing it out, and you can even drug the bait. Meanwhile, to add some padding to the adventure, which is necessarily just about one long, three-part encounter, you can throw a sudden reversal in. Maybe the razzledazzle’s mate shows up while the stout yeomen are tying the thing down. Maybe a druidic PETM activist attacks and tries to free it.

The problem with that big, beautiful plan is that most players of Dungeons & Dragons and similar fantasy adventure tabletop roleplaying games just won’t come up with it on their own. Tell most DNDaSFATTRPG players to catch a ramalamadingdong, and they’ll just walk up to the first one they spot, start hitting it, and stop when it passes out. It doesn’t help that most modern DNDaSFATTRPG systems let you just declare your final hit as a non-killing blow after the fact. I call that the JK I Meant To Knock It Out LOL rule, and it’s shit.

In this case, the solution to the problem with that big, beautiful plan is obvious. Just don’t ask the players to come up with the entire plan. Assign them a part of the plan that fits the adventurers’ wheelhouse. Maybe don’t ask them to work for Zazzyx the Zoologist of Zanthia. Let them work for Bobbert Dulmoon, former monster hunter turned game warden of the Zanthian Zoological Park, Preserve, and Pretzel Stand. He’s got the big plan mostly figured out, and he’s hired the stout yeomen, but he needs some big, brave dumbasses to flush out the monster, draw it into the trap, and then beat it without breaking it while his team keeps it ensnared.

Alternatively, maybe Zazzyx suggests the party start the mission by convincing the biggest, baddest monster hunter ever, Bobbert Dulmoon, to come out of retirement for one last job and help the players with a plan because, really, capturing a huge-ass anything without killing it isn’t a job for four murderhobos and it’s not in their area of expertise.

See, it’s easy to forget how much of learning to play a game has nothing to do with the dice you roll or the buttons you press or the game mechanics. Take, for example, a certain video game series about hunting giant monsters, whose name I always forget. There are two parts to learning the game.

First, you have to learn how the game’s mechanics work. You need to learn what the different buffs do, how to use the controller, and how to activate environmental hazards, and what button makes the poison hornet come out of your poison hornet halberd and spit colors at monsters because, yes, a halberd with a color-spitting poison hornet hive is considered a basic-ass weapon in that series. Seriously. It makes the workshop hunters in Bloodborne seem sane. Even restrained. Compared to a color-spitting poison hornet halberd, swinging a spinning sawblade on a stick isn’t crazy at all. “What if we put the sword back in the stone and just hit werewolves with that?” Sure! That’s a completely rational thought to have.

Sorry… where was I?

Right. Learning how to play Monster Hunter has two parts. First, you learn the mechanics. You learn the weapon movesets and what the tools do, and what the different environmental hazards do, and what cat-hair-covered food gives what bonuses. That stuff’s easy to cover with our bestest buddy, tutorial textboxes. “When a monster is standing underneath something, you’ll see an icon that’ll tell you to drop the hazard on the monster to stun it. Try attacking that stalactite now.” “Press X to make your halberd hornet spit the purple.” You know, shit like that.

The other part is learning how to actually play the actual game. It’s learning the gameplay loop and the different phases of a successful monster hunt. It’s learning the basic strategy so you can build on that later. You have to learn to start a hunt by considering your target and selecting useful consumables and traps that are likely to help for your rucksack, and maybe craft some equipment with specific elemental affinities or whatever. Then, pick a pre-hunt meal that’ll give you a good stat boost for the upcoming mission.

After that, you’re dropped into the map. Take some time to explore. Familiarize yourself with the layout. Keep an eye out for your prey, but don’t attack right away. Learn its patrol path, find its lair, and observe its habits. Also, note the different environmental hazards on each screen. Get used to the layout. Once you engage with the monster, you’re going to be stuck in this skirmish-chase-skirmish loop; you need to be able to navigate in a hurry and quickly capitalize on opportunities to stun, lock down, or debuff the monster. Maybe think about laying some traps in convenient locations the monster’s likely to run to.

Then engage the monster. Go for a quick, decisive opening and try to deal a lot of damage right away. Once it recovers, you might have to get defensive, or you might have to start chasing. Defend yourself until you can create another opening for a decisive attack. Chase until you can catch up, maybe try to head off the monster if you can, and use a hazard or trap to lock it down again for another decisive damage spike.

Or whatever. I don’t know. I don’t play Monster Hunter. I think that’s the gist of it. It sure as hell sounds good, right?

Tutorials can teach you this shit too, but they mostly just cover the very basics. For things like gameplay loops and phase progressions, players learn by doing. Once they get the basics down, you can throw a wrench at them, and they’ll probably figure out how to unwrench it because they understand the underlying game flow. As they keep playing, they’ll face more powerful monsters, and they’ll figure out how to deal with each because they understand the overall shape of how it all works.

Every kind of gameplay genre has an underlying structure. There’s a way monster hunts work. That underlying structure is what makes things feel like the things they feel like. When Nox says, “Let’s design a monster hunt adventure that feels like a monster hunt,” he wants the adventure to feel to the players like they’re playing Monster Hunter, or whatever the inspiration is or whatever the activity is that he imagines simulating. That means the adventure has to capture the underlying structure.

It’s the same with mystery adventures and espionage adventures and heist adventures. A heist adventure has to follow a structure that’s something like, “scout the area, identify the hardpoints, identify the weaknesses, gather experts, gather assets, develop a plan, execute the plan, adapt when the plan breaks, have a Mexican standoff, outwit the mole with a retconning flashback, drive off into the sunset.” If the players aren’t doing those things, they’re not playing a heist adventure, even if they’re breaking into somewhere and stealing something, and even if someone betrays them.

I’ve had mystery adventures on my mind a lot lately. Mostly because other people want to run them. I don’t. If I wanted to run mystery adventures, I wouldn’t run DNDaSFATTRPG. Actually, I am currently running a mystery adventure in a mystery-running system, so I can’t really pretend to have too much disdain for mystery adventures, but they’re not like my go-to or anything. Lots of people ask me about them, though, and that’s why I had to promise my supporters a two-hour live stream — coming soon — talking about how mysteries really, actually work, and man has scope creep hit that promise.

But, back to the giant-ass fiery ice centipede in the room. How do you build Capture the Remorhaz? Well, maybe start with the players finding some bait to attract it. Then they can find a magical anti-burrowing snare. Then they can gather the ingredients for some magical burn-proof ointment. Once they’ve got that shit, they go to its lair, jump the thing, and beat it unconscious. That’s how most Game Masters handle this kind of thing. They turn the adventure into a checklist of things to gather or a sequence of steps to execute that ends with the final encounter. It’s a boss fight with a series of sub-objectives to make the fight winnable.

That ain’t really a monster hunt, but it also isn’t actually the worst approach. The worst approach comes from Game Masters who are smart and creative and clever and have a total blind spot for the invisible underlevels that make gameplay genres actually playable.

Let’s say you’re almost as smart as me. You’re smart enough to know what makes a monster hunt feel like a monster hunt. So you know you need a big, but ultimately constrained region, and a few deliberately placed ambush points, and you need to figure out the monster’s patrol path, and you need to give it a lair, and you need to make some tricks and traps available to the players. You give them everything Monster Hunter gives them. Or so you think. Because you figure, you learned how to play Monster Hunter, so the players should be able to figure it out if you just give them the tools.

But what you’re doing now is dropping a group of idiots who’ve never played Monster Hunter into the Lava Caverns and saying, “Here’s everything you need; go bag yourselves a bazelgeuse.” It should not be a surprise, then, the players find a bazelgeuse, try hitting it to death, and fail over and over. Because that’s what every new player does the first time they play Monster Hunter, which is why the game starts them in the Shrine Ruins hunting great izuchi.

Homebrewer Game Masters love variety. They like to change up their gameplay genres. I’m no different, honestly, even though it seems like I am. I get a lot of crap because I focus on traditional site-based or quest-based adventures away from civilization. But I do that precisely because I understand the problem I’m about to explain. The Battletoads Problem.

In addition to liking variety, HBGMs are also very prone to current hotness. If this were my last long-ass essay, I’d call it Novelty Bias, but this is bullshit, so it’s current hotness. You start playing Monster Hunter Rise, have a good time, and suddenly you want to run a monster hunt for your players. Next, you play Return of Oprah Deen and you want to do a time-traveling mystery puzzle. Years ago, after replaying Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, I built a massive dungeon complex based on constrained teleportation between two different versions of the same site in different realities. That I never finished running, dammit.

The problem, as I noted, is that there’s a foundational layer under every gameplay genre. If it’s not there, you don’t get the feel of the gameplay genre you’re trying to capture. But if it is there, then the players can’t really play the game until they learn how the game works and how it’s different from a standard dungeon crawl or adventure quest.

This is The Battletoads Problem.

I have a strong, personal attachment to Battletoads. OG Battletoads. Battletoads by Rare released in 1991 for the Nintendo NES Entertainment System. It’s the first game cartridge I ever bought with my own money that I saved up by myself. It wasn’t a gift; I didn’t even buy it with gift money. I did chores for an allowance, I saved, and I bought Battletoads. Because Nintendo Power told it was chocolate-covered 14 karat golden awesome.

I learned a lot of harsh lessons when I got home from Kaybee Toys that day, let me tell you.

You see, Battletoads was infamously hard in an era where Disney games were impossible to beat. Battletoads is the thing that other things used to be the Battletoads of. You know how people say, “Cuphead is the Dark Souls of run-and-gun games?” Well, folks of my generation called Dark Souls the Battletoads of action-adventure roleplaying games.

That said, while I’ve never actually finished the game, I did beat and can still beat the game’s third level, the infamous Turbo Tunnel. In fact, I play Battletoads every year on my birthday because if I ever can’t beat the Turbo Tunnel, that’s how I’ll know I’ve gotten old.

As of January 18, 2026, I am still not old.

Anyway…

What made Battletoads so ass-clenchingly, controller-snappingly hard was that it never let you get comfortable with how to play it. The first level is a side-scrolling punch-em-up in the vein of Double Dragon or most Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games. The second level involves rappelling down a shaft in a sort of vertical autoscroller with a different moveset and some instakill hazards. Then comes the Turbo Tunnel, which is a fast-scrolling, wall-dodging, ramp-jumping speeder bike race. Then there’s a 2D platformer level with brutal jumps, falling platforms, and spike traps. Oh, and that was also an ice level, because fuck you, that’s why. And so on, and so on, and so on. There are twelve levels in Battletoads, and they comprise something like nine different gameplay genres.

Not that anyone knows that, because no one could beat the Turbo Tunnel, which is funny because the world maps were split, so many people didn’t even know there were more than three levels in the game. I think later rereleases just left everything after the Turbo Tunnel off the cartridge to save space.

You see what I’m getting at here? When homebrewer Game Masters chase gameplay genre novelty, they often fall prey to The Battletoads Problem. The players can’t settle into any kind of gameplay and get good at it. Worse yet, the gameplay never gets a chance to realize its full potential.

See, if you’re smart enough to do more than just cram a gameplay genre into an encounter-based gauntlet, maze, or checklist, you can make standalone gameplay genre shifts work. Consider the solution I offered above for the Capture the R… Fiery Ice Centipede above. Take the target genre, isolate the best part of the experience, make that part the player’s responsibility, and handle all the rest for them. Hence having Bobbert Dulmoon hire the heroes to play a part in his grand ice centipede hunt.

But that approach leaves most homebrewer Game Masters unsatisfied. After all, what you’re really doing there is just running the tutorial level for every gameplay genre you want to try out. You’re just running Baby’s First Monster Hunt, then Baby’s First Heist, then Baby’s First Spy Thriller, then Baby’s First Metroidvania, and so on. Can players enjoy that shit? Absolutely. Variety is fun.

The real problem with that approach is that you never get to run the third level of the game. That sucks.

It’s like this…

The first monster hunt is the tutorial one, right? You hold the players’ hands, you let them do the exciting stuff, and you show them the strategy behind the rest. The second monster hunt is where you let the players play a perfectly normal monster hunt all by themselves. You see if they learned what they were supposed to. It ain’t until the third monster hunt that you can change things up. Only once you know the players can do a hunt by themselves can you start throwing them curveballs. And that’s the monster hunt that Game Masters really want to run.

Capture the Fiericeapede is a great third monster hunt. The monster resists certain tools like ropes and nets and things because it bleeds fire, and because it can burrow, it’s evasive and hard to pin down. It’s the sort of thing you go after once you know you can reliably capture a dire boar unharmed, not the sort of thing you bring down first.

I actually have to compliment supporter and Discord sticker contributor @Whoosh here for spotting this shit during the discussion in the Quick and Dirty Dungeon Club. He proposed making the adventure two hunts: a tutorial hunt for a bait animal or something, followed by the main event. Or something similar. I tend to forget what people say who aren’t me.

Honestly, though, it’s best as a homebrewer Game Master not to give in to the siren song of variety and chasing hotness. Dance with who you brought, as they say. Then, you not only get to run the third adventure, but you get to run the fourth and the fifth and the sixth and however many more you want. It’s really great when the players do work up to bringing down a bazelgeuse in the Lava Caverns. Or heisting the Pentagon. Whatever.

I love variety, and I’m constantly feeling lured by the current hotness myself, but I know nothing compares to that sixth adventure or that tenth adventure, even if it’s just the tenth dungeon. You can do things with a tenth dungeon you could never do with a third.

If you like variety, pick a couple of different genre tastes that taste great together, and flip between them. I don’t exclusively run dungeons when I’m running DNDaSFATTRPGs. And if you do succumb to the temptation of a younger, hotter gameplay genre, don’t make an adventure out of it. Instead, look for a way to incorporate a few of the current hotness’s best elements into a game you’d already run for your campaign. I don’t run mystery adventures, but I do sprinkle a little mystery zest over a lot of my quests and dungeons. Lots of my adventures have a frisson of mystery.

And if you really are committed to the variety thing, maybe don’t run long-term campaigns. Run shorter campaigns. Or run campaigns with distinct arcs, each of which involve a genre. Maybe, for three months, your players are living in Monster Hunter town. That’s enough to build up to a third adventure before you go chasing the next hottie.

But please stop switching gameplay genres every other adventure. Don’t make your players play a beat-em-up this week, an ice platformer next week, and the Turbo Tunnel after that. Especially not the Turbo Tunnel. Don’t make players play the Turbo Tunnel.

Unless I’m at the table. Because I’m not old yet.