How to design initial difficulty progression for a dungeon crawler without it feeling boring?

Question

I'm at a stage where I'm trying to design an initial world or set of levels to help me think about and test progression in a dungeon crawler. For some reason this has really stopped me in my tracks. I know that I want my player's heros to get stronger, and I want the game to get more difficult so they can't over power anything. This really is the game loop anyways.

So what I tried to do to distill the progression design down is to literally focus on nothing but HP and Damage increase. How do I make this interesting if the player power and enemy power looks something like this:

1. Level 1 Hero has 100HP/10DMG, Level 1 Enemy has 50HP/10DMG
2. Level 2 Hero has 200HP/20DMG, Level 2 Enemy has 100HP/20DMG
3. Level 3 Hero has 300HP/30DMG, Level 3 Enemy has 150HP/30DMG

As you can see, the balance ratio between the two always stays at 2:1. The fight will take the same amount of time. It will look the same from HP bars losing life. Why would the player keep wanting to play or even care about leveling up if this is how the game goes? This isn't fun. It isn't interesting. But it is a linear balance curve of 2:1. Ok, I've designed that I guess.

So of course the next step is to make the player be stronger than the enemies for a bit after they level up. They want to feel strong, right? Well how long do I do this for? How long do I wait until I make the enemies stronger and challenging again so the player wants to level up to get stronger again? How do I know exactly how strong a hero will be at each level in my world?

That's one problem.

The second thing to consider is that simply giving stat increases is incredibly boring. So instead, I'd like to give the player's spells and abilities which effectively increase their HP or DMG. How often do I give them these? How do I keep it fun between levels? How do I know how strong a hero will be at each level in my world?

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I think looking at it this way has taken the magic out of the game and design, but is there any other way? How do I get past this and is there common ways to look at this type of hero vs. enemy/level balance?

Answer 1

Feeling stat increases

My initial suggestion to help player's feel increase in raw stats is to let player's experience over-leveled mobs early. These OP mobs shouldn't block or occupy mandatory paths in your dungeon. If you let player's experience the power of high level monsters early, then in later levels, the player can rencounter the same mobs that gave them such difficulty previously, and will now be able to defeat them with relative ease and really feel their stat progression.

Implications on difficulty balance

Creating various levels of difficulty (through optional encounters) in a dungeon, will also help differently skilled players balance the game for themselves. A super skilled player might choose (and be able to) defeat level 5 mobs on the first level through superior knowledge and mechanics, while a new player might choose to only enter rooms blocked or occupied by lvl 1 mobs as they are still grokking the game's systems and timings.

Resources

Here's a related question which offers some topical game design resources to give you a base to jump off from.

Answer 2

A common approach to this is a lock-step approach.

1. Give the player more power
2. Give the player the opportunity to enjoy their power trip by using their newfound power on old opponents.
3. Introduce more challenging opponents which match the new power-level of the player, thus forcing the player to play serious again.
4. Repeat.

The result is that the gameplay will alternate between phases where the player feels challenged (by the introduction of a more powerful enemy), followed by a reward for overcoming the challenge (more power and a phase of curb-stomping what used to bother them).

This is why most dungeon crawlers with levelup systems are designed in a way that levelups happen in the middle of the dungeon crawl instead of between dungeons. The enemies stay the same, but the player gets more powerful. And new equipment is rarely found right before a boss fight. They are found either a couple rooms before the boss, or right after it a a reward for beating the boss.

Or let's take the example of a classic JRPG with an overworld with towns with equipment shops. When the player reaches a new overworld region, they will at first struggle against the new overworld enemies. That is until they reach a new town with the next equipment tier for sale. They will then buy that equipment and then keep exploring the same overworld region where they face the exact same opponents. But those opponents are now notably less challenging thanks to the recent powerup. That is until the player discovers the dungeon, where they then face enemies which measure up to their new equip.

Answer 3

HP and Damage increases for the player and enemies are just a tool that help you do some other things. Until you decide what other things you're trying to do, it's very hard to know what health and damage progression will give you good results. They can be used for:

Planned Obsolescence

If you have items to pick up, or abilities to learn, you can use HP and Damage increases to make old items and abilities grow less useful over time. Maybe at level 5 the player learns to cast fireballs which do 10 damage in a circle; at level 15 when you give them the ability to make cones of fire that do 30 damage in a cone, then they'll have little use for the fireball even though it has better range and is easier to avoid hitting your teammates with.

Grinding

If you give the player some control over how powerful they are, let them dwell in a lower-level area for a bit before moving on if they want to be a bit stronger, then the player can substitute patience for skill. But ideally the extra combat is more practice for them, which the less-skilled players probably need. It can be a bit difficult to correctly tune grinding mechanics like this to not be too bothersome though.

That nice back and forth between being a bit too strong and having to really struggle

As you alluded to, it can feel good to be powerful, and it can feel rewarding to win a really tough fight. It's actually not terribly hard to design this sort of oscillation, just look at how much XP and loot the critical path of the game rewards (aside from any detours for grinding use), and you can get an estimate of the player's strength over time and tune your enemy stats accordingly. As for how much: in a purely linear game, you probably want to have a short power trip section immediately after the player levels up, and before giving them some great treasure have a serious battle or two. In an open game, I'd have there be difficult fights at objectives, and then have the player cross back through areas that used to be hard to get from one objective to the next.

Answer 4

You can have stronger characters and more powerful items be more attractive to monsters, drawing them in larger groups