by shnar
I tend to think of "Dungeon Crawls" as having the following:- Tactical level game play (typically miniatures on square/hex boards)
- 'Heroes' or characters that have "level up" (increase in abilities)
- Loot (and lots of it) to be found through exploration
- Lots of "evil monsters" to kill
- Some level of exploration, discovering the unknown
The 'classic' dungeon crawl for me stems from the days when I was much younger and would spend hours with a piece of grid paper and draw maze like structures inside a mountain with rooms, monsters, treasures, and then my friends would bust out their D&D (or in our case Rolemaster (1st, 2nd & Classic Editions)) Characters and explore the dungeon. The more a game can capture that feel, the more I consider it a "dungeon crawl".
-shnar