[Book Club] A Dungeon Hiding in Blindsight (part 2)

This continues my discussion with Anne of DIY & Dragons on the dungeoncrawling implications of Peter Watts' Blindsight. You can read part one here.

Trey: Going back to the alien a minute, it strikes Rorschach's innards are perhaps less a dungeon and more a haunted house. A number of the dangers are really psychological (or neurological) but not less real for that. In that respect it resembles other sci-fi haunted houses like in Planet of Vampires or Event Horizon.

Anne: That's a good way of describing it and gets at one of the things I found most fascinating (and frustrating) about Blindsight as a book. Because on the one hand, it's really interesting to see someone take the various real-world quirks of the way human consciousness works and try to turn them into dungeon hazards. On the other hand, there were points where one character is explaining something to another where I felt like, "ah yes, Peter, I too read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. I may be off on a tangent, though!

I think both the Rorschach and the Borg illustrate the difficulty of trying to represent an intelligent but non-conscious entity trying to communicate with humans. Presumably that's something that dungeon masters would find challenging to represent too. I wonder if the rise of chat-bots will make us more accustomed to the way that computers talk and make it easier to fake, though?

Trey: That's a good point. We're becoming more aware all the time of what non-self-aware AI is capable of! For dungeon purposes I think the easiest way to handle this is to have the creatures not communicate really. 

Anne: Or maybe be really obviously like old video game NPCs? They have a line or two of dialogue, and if you try to keep talking to them, all they can do is repeat it.

Trey: I like that. I've toyed with something like that with some monsters in my games, but I don't know if I pulled the effect off.

Anne: It might also be worth noting that killer dungeons of this or any sort seem to work best with either the tournament or zero-level funnel format. To experience them as intended, you need a good supply of characters to get killed, without slowing down the overall momentum of the game too much.

Trey: That's a good point. They are dying dungeons, for sure. 

A Blindsight like or inspired dungeon potentially allows for a different sort of exploration, though. Rather than only the physical exploration of a space, it allows the unraveling of a mystery, though not of the whodunit sort.

Anne: Yes! The payoff for flinging all these imaginary lives into an imaginary meatgrinder can't just be imaginary money. It needs to be knowledge. Ideally, some kind of understanding of the rules for how the killer dungeon operates, so you can learn to avoid its dangers.