Hack And Slash

Hack and Slash gaming has three basic components: 1) Find the monsters, or discover where the action is, 2) Fight the monsters or bad guys, and 3) get the treasure. 2) and 3) take up about 95% of the time, and the motto usually is, "the more the better."

Just like it sounds, it is light on actual role-playing in the sense of "developing a character" as a personality and very heavy on character advancement and wealth-gathering.

This kind of game can get very tiresome very quickly. However:

--For some, it's just fine as-is, with very little in the way of "role-playing." It's heaven for "Monty Haul" players.

--For the majority of players, it can be easily saved by a good Dungeon Master to add spice to the non-player characters and situations, and generally add to the quality of the mood and story. There is a caveat here, however: DMs who are prone to Hack and Slash games are so because they aren't helping develop the game world into a rich environment. In other words, the kind of DM whose usual game is Hack and Slash isn't the most likely to add a whole lot of role-playing to a game.

--For folks who really just want to act out an interesting character, and are only slightly interested in treasure hunting or rolling lots of dice in combat, this kind of game is like slow death. And they tend to slow down the game for anyone interested in following the basic Hack and Slash plotline while they go off on their own tangents.

This pretty accurately describes most RogueLikeGames?, though not necessarily NetHack.

Hrm. I thought this was a stronger term for MercilessRefactoring. I know I've had the urge to take a machette to some of the LegacyCode I've had to work on.

CategoryGame