Volume 2: Blobbers/Dice ‘n Goblins
Before I sat down to tackle a new dungeon and get started on my second column here at Skybox, I had some missing knowledge to take care of. See, I’ve been noticing folks like Skybox contributor James Galizio refer to DRPGs as “blobbers,” and I had no idea what the hell that meant! Rather than looking like a dummy and asking, I finally remembered to look that ish up, and share my findings here in case it’d help anyone else. So yeah, here’s what blobber means.
In DRPGs, no matter how big your dungeon-crawling squad is, you’re typically playing in first-person. And since you aren’t an insect, compound vision wouldn’t make any sense, so you see the world through one pair of eyes, your own, which represents the whole party. In essence, you’re a group of people moving around as one, like a blob. Yep, that’s it. Blobbers are blobbers because you don’t see your party members as individuals, trekking through the dark, macabre depths of each dungeon as a sort of RPG hivemind. Mystery solved, albeit in a way that’s a little disappointing.
Anyway, on top of everything else I’ve had on my plate this month, I picked up a cute, little blobber called Dice ‘n Goblins. Although, I’m not sure if this one counts as a true blobber since you only play as one character, a scrappy little goblin named… Gobby. Sure, that’s not creative, but I’ll take it; the goblins need a W after all the degenerate isekai anime out there constantly portraying them as drooling, subhuman sex criminals. Gobby is a little homie, and we’re okay with that.
Dice ‘n Goblins is a DRPG tailor-made by and for sickos. Seriously, after bringing this up in the Skybox Discord (join us with Patreon money!), the aforementioned Mr. Galizio looked up developer Tsukumogami Software to discover these folks’ previous work is Itako, a user-friendly portfolio management software. When your resume is just stonks and a dungeon-crawler in the Wizardry style, it’s probably safe to bake in some expectations.
The key gimmick is capital-d Dice; everything you do is governed by dice. Progression adds dice slots to your kit, which is where you fit in weapons, armor, and items. Each thing in your bag is a new die to play with in combat, but this isn’t just D&D; simply hoping for good rolls isn’t enough for the stonks devs. There’s a whole system to game and manipulate. And I don’t just mean re-rolls, although you do get a couple of those per battle as well.
Items can have combos. Combos come from rolling specific numbers, such as getting a poison proc from a fancy dagger by rolling a two. Enemies play by the same rules, so packing an extra shield or finding other ways to interfere or deal with weird rolls coming at you is just as important. Building different kinds of dice with varying combo triggers changes your relationship with dice as a mechanic for combat you won’t see in a normie-friendly adventure like Baldur’s Gate 3. Dice ‘n Goblins, despite its adorable, hand-drawn art, is a proud resident of Sicko City.
You can see it in the map design, too. The dungeons themselves are relatively simple as far as these games go, but they’re built with verticality in mind; that means ways to go up and down besides stairs. As you fill in the map Gobby is holding, you’ll notice really intricate details helping you keep track of things, like color-coding to indicate depth across multiple “floors” within a floor. It’s a fun way for the devs to flex their muscles a bit in a part of DRPG design that’s mostly backed off from friction since the “draw your own shit” days of Wizardry. If you have to stick to auto-mapping, why not style on it a bit to show off your power level in a new way?
I’m not writing this column based on starting and seeing these games all the way through, so these are simply early-hours observations. I don’t have insights into how Dice ‘n Goblins sustains itself over its whole runtime, but so far it’s definitely cute and presents some distinct mechanics that help it stand out among the more serious and intense DRPGs out there. It’s nice to have one that’s cute without sliding into horny territory as well, something that’s a little too common in this space. Look, I don’t judge too much, but I’m still dealing with the repercussions of being the RPG Reviewer Guy during the Vita era, ok?
Until next time, dungeon delvers.
