What The Legend of Zelda can teach DMs about open-world adventures

Lately, I've seen a lot of DMs who are running or who'd like to run an "open-world" D&D adventure. A lot of excellent video games are open-world, and one of the biggest advantages tabletop games have over video games is the ability to go off-script.

A traditional video game is built up of relatively small, obsessively-designed maps with borders you can't go beyond. In D&D, you're only limited by your imagination, game balance and what you feel is right for the fiction.

But how do you build an open-world game without going so far that things seem pointless? How do you make a world where players can go anywhere and still make sure there's something for players to do?

Take any road you want

When I think about about open-world games in D&D, I keep coming back to the first game in that style I ever played: The Legend of Zelda. There's a lot the Nintendo classic can teach DMs about world design. Of course, classic video games can't compare to the complexity of a D&D campaign, and they're often maligned in tabletop forums for that reason. The limitations those early game designers were faced with, however, can offer DMs elegant, minimalistic skeletons on which to build worlds that can bear serious weight without sacrificing flexibility.

A bit of a side-note: Don't let the well-worn tropes in what I'm about to say next scare you off — you can build whatever unique world you like on top of this basic structure. Structure does not equal stereotype.

Two-layer world design

In The Legend of Zelda, players can roam a vast "overworld" with few restrictions. (Or at least it seemed vast to me, as a kid.) If beginning players wanted, they could explore areas that posed greater dangers than they were equipped to handle. Heck, they didn't even have to take the Wooden Sword if they didn't want to.

They called it the overworld because at various points throughout that sprawling map, staircases took you down into levels. The levels were numbered 1-9, but you had to find them on your own. Inside the dungeon-like levels, players could choose how they progressed from room to room, but there was a starting point and an end boss. In between, a variety of enemies, challenges, puzzles and hidden secrets. Sound familiar?

Zelda's two-layer world design combines the freedom and exploration of an open world with the challenge of gauntlet-like levels that are more linearly designed but still offer some flexibility.

A similar approach works great for open-world D&D: You campaign setting is the overworld, and player characters can roam it freely. But often in their travels — about once per session is nice — they find or are sent to a pre-designed "dungeon." The dungeons, of course, don't have to be literal dungeons. A dungeon can be a cave, or a mansion, or a canyon or a city district or some other area full of monsters, traps, puzzles or other challenges. At the end of the dungeon, the party finds treasure and whatever quest object they were looking for.

Four-layer world design

Lord British's castle is nice, but is it necessary?

I use Zelda as a starting example because of its popularity, but actually some of the game's predecessors had more layers than the overworld-dungeon model. Zelda's world is so simple because it's an action RPG — its gameplay emphasizes combat, and the high-water mark for social interaction is when you blow into a rock, find a cave and a cranky old man inside steals your money for "door repair." (Hey, old man: You didn't have a door until I made one for you. You're welcome for rescuing you from a living tomb.) Ultima I, on the other hand, is widely recognized as the first open-world RPG, and its world design has two more layers; I call it the overworld-castle-town-dungeon model.

We're already familiar with the overworld and the dungeon layers, but unlike Zelda's no-plot-hook, roam-the-overworld-until-you-find-a-dungeon approach, the heroes of Ultima go to castles where lords assign them quests that advance the plot. There are also towns, where the heroes can trade money, goods and services.

A happy medium

But if our goal is to boil open-world design down to its basics, we can just make towns a place where you can pick up quests and lose the castle layer.

The overworld-town-dungeon model is a natural fit for D&D campaigns. The overworld is dotted with towns, and the towns (and their surrounding areas) are dotted with dungeons. People in towns have problems, and heroes solve those problems by going into dungeons. You don't have to know where your players are going next in order to deliver satisfying gameplay as long as you have a few predesigned NPCS, plot hooks and dungeons ready. It's a good balance between improvised and designed gameplay.

Note: I'm writing a more step-by-step breakdown of the overworld-town-dungeon model, and I'll likely update this article with some of the graphics I make for that, as well.