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Stakes, fiction and continuity

Written 2026-10-27 from the project's own design docs.

Three related ideas from designing The Crawl, a persistent online game where death matters: put fatal stakes only where they count, let the game's fiction explain its rules, and never break what a player has already seen.

Put fatal stakes where they count

The principle: permanent loss is powerful, but a whole game built on it narrows the audience. Give one part of the game real stakes and give everyone a way to keep playing.

The Crawl's founder started from the observation that permadeath games tend to be niche (roguelites aside), while the books The Crawl draws on are fatal throughout. The answer was two productions in each season (Seasons, death and the B-Roll):

  • The Main Show: one life, open PvP, full looting, no opt-outs. That's where the competition and the stakes are.
  • The B-Roll: the safety net. Respawns, revives, optional PvP, and no gear lost on death.

Some details that make the split hold up:

  • A death costs a place on the show, not the character. A character dropped from the Main Show keeps its levels and gets a copy of its dropped gear; the originals stay lootable on its Main Show corpse.
  • The second life is earned. Respawning unlocks only once a character has reached the third floor and chosen a race and class; generic early characters are simply deleted.
  • The safe side can't leak advantage into the dangerous side. The B-Roll always runs a floor behind, so nobody can scout a new floor safely, and nothing moves between the productions except one-way demotion and respawn.
  • Players can keep playing without having to stay at the competitive edge. The founder named that as the deliberate goal.
  • Seasons are self-contained. Every character is archived at season end, which caps how much any advantage can compound.

Let the fiction carry the rule

The principle: a rule players might resent reads better when the game's world explains it.

  • In The Crawl, being cut from the Main Show to the B-Roll is a demotion inside the fiction: the show's producers cutting you to secondary footage. Both productions can be broadcast.
  • In the books it draws on, the dungeon's own engineers publish daily "patch notes" inside the story, and rules change floor by floor. The research notes on the books point out that this suits a live-service game whose balance changes could happen in-world (DCC: the dungeon and its floors).

Never break a character's continuity

The principle: whatever a living character has seen or touched must stay consistent for that character. Anything else can be cleaned up.

The Crawl's founder stated it as the governing rule for world data (Worldspace): don't risk breaking continuity for the sake of memory; otherwise, clean up. Two refinements made it workable:

  • Continuity belongs to characters, not players. The founder corrected the rule from "player" to "character" continuity. A new character is owed nothing about what the same player's dead character saw, which frees a lot of data for cleanup.
  • Conservative by default. If a living character might notice something is gone, keep it. The resolved case: when a character moves on, its own changes to the earlier floors are deleted unless someone still there has seen them. The layout itself regenerates from a seed, so only changes ever need storing.

The rule also frames destruction: a wall a player saw blown up has to stay blown up for as long as they could see it again.

Density is a design lever

The principle: how crowded a world feels is a design choice, and it also sets the technical cost.

The Crawl wants early floors so large that meeting another player "feels rare but not unheard of". That's a feel goal, but it also made the hardest networking problem easier, since cost tracks who can see whom. The project's single-PC load tests went from about 200–300 players per space when everyone could see everyone to about 2,000 when each player only saw nearby regions, and the spawn spread alone changed how many neighbours each player had from 60–90 to about 5 (Tech stack). The places the design pulls players together, such as stairwells and safe rooms, are where the load has to be tested.

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