ABSTRACT
Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) presents a huge problem for RPG designers: it does almost everything that an RPG can do. By the early 1980s, D&D already included hundreds of important RPG design ideas, and these were not small ideas. The designers of Diablo II took procedural generation and permadeath as they appear in Rogue and roguelikes and turned them into artistic resources. One of the most important things to know about Diablo II is that it plays with its source material and implements it in an idiosyncratic way. Rogue abandons all the parts of an RPG that do not directly relate to dungeon crawling. There are no towns, there is essentially no plot, and there are no mini-games or dialogue trees. There is only dungeon crawling. The goal of Rogue is to get a player into a dungeon as fast as possible, and keep him or her there indefinitely—always crawling more dungeon.
