A dying genre?

FF also produced Runebound which is what I think you are talking about if not lighter.

thought I'm not sure of the demand for such games I know that I found Runebound quite fun and worth the cost

Sorry, but I totally have to be a fanboy for a minute.

TALISMAN IS THE ROXXORIZEST GAME EVAR!!!11!1one!111!won11!!

OK, thank you for indulging me.

Hmm, the only one of the games you mention I've played is Talisman, which in my opinion is pretty light on both role-playing and boardgame-type strategy.

It seems to me that you'd need a game that somehow managed to be really good at both aspects in order to compete with the "pure" RPGs on the one hand, and with more conventional boardgames on the other. But this is hard to do. Dealing with many frequently changing character stats gets very fiddly in a boardgame context, and it's tough to allow for the variety of scenarios of a real RPG in a boardgame.

I'd agree, it's a niche. It's not enough of an RPG to hook role players, and not enough of a boardgame to grab those players.

I think that these are, for all intents and purposes, just very simple role playing games. They just lack most detail, and don't sell themselves well as RPGs, simply because an RPG can do so much more than these games can as far as setting. Maybe the dungeon crawl role playing experience is to 1970's for people.

But, as board games, the story elements seem arbitrary, since the characters are so clearly just a stat line, and challenges can be piled on until the players either succeed or fail, and who's to say it's their skill, or the GM just relenting? At least in a competitive game, you assume the other guy's out to destroy you, and your victory overcomes that.

So, not enough of what makes both type of game good, in my opinion.

This is a problem I tried to meditate on. I asked my self, as a role player who have played RPG, what is my interest in playing something less than and RPG. The only advantage I could find are :

1-More visual, you can see where you move and have a map of the area.
2-The rules are generally easier to learn.
3-The combat flow faster since the rules are easier.

So I said to myself, maybe we should make sure these kind of games have something that RPG and board game does not have to attract players.

Once, one of my friend said that there was no RPG that looks like diablo (1 hero vs 100+ monster). I know that there is an diablo adaptation for d20, but maybe a dungeon crawler is more appropriate for this kind of game.

Another alternative was to make a dungeon crawler like a video game arcade (Like gauntlet). You have a number of lives, life points, you get temporary power up in the dungeon and you try to reach the exit. There won't be really character devellopment. Then again it could become boring after some time.

In the game "dungeon crawl", there is the arena which reproduce many kind of multiplayer games like in Unreal tournament ( ex: capture the flag). This is interresting.

Does anybody have other ideas to increase the interrest for theses kind of games?

Several people have mentioned common "problems" (features?) of this genre:

1) There seems to be a bias against board games where a single player controls the "board" and everyone else is a character.

2) The current market seems to favor "competitive dungeon crawls" as opposed to cooperative ones.

I've been mulling over WizWar and Zombies!!!, which have similar play mechanics to these dungeon crawlers but are slightly different. I think by munging together all these games, it might be possible to create a hybrid that has some interesting properties.

Picture a classic dungeon crawl game:

There are archetypical characters (mage/warrior/thief/priest/whatever). There is a pseudo-random map (tiles placed using special rules, etc).
There are monsters to kill.
There are traps to disarm.
There are treasures to claim.

Now add some rules twists from other games (like Wiz-War and Zombies!!! and All For One (hope Sedj doesn't mind!)):

Players secretly draw a Character card that identifies who they "are" that game. There are always at least 4 Characters in the party, and never less than 1 Character per player (making it hard to know which player owns which Character).
Players can move/use any Character during their turns.
The "goal" of the scenario will usually involve some permanent upgrade like an Artifact, Transformation, etc. The "winning" player will choose which Character gets the upgrade.
At the end of his turn, a player will be called upon to move monsters, place treasures, and set traps (i.e., serve a GM function).

Players earn VP by performing certain goals:

Killing a monster: +2 Killing a Character (via monster or trap): +1
Your secret Character is killed: -3
Treasures collected: +0 to +2 (depending on treasure)
Disarming a trap: +0 to +2 (depends on trap)
Saving another Character: +1

When a character "dies", he is considered healable (others can use magic items to save him). If all characters die simultaneously, the game ends, players reveal their Secret Characters and choose 1 Upgrade from the Character to lose permanently.

If players beat the scenario and achieve the goal, they can cash out their treasures to purchase equipment that increases their effectiveness.

This isn't a perfect design by any means, but it has some interesting features:

1) Players are encouraged to work together to beat the scenario.
2) Players are encouraged to rough each other up to gain points -- but not so much so as to threaten the party victory.
3) Players might be assigned to any Character, so changing gaming group rosters won't be a problem (no one "owns" any particular Hero -- though this is also a weakness).
4) There is no fixed GM.

Would this still qualify as a dungeon crawler?

K.

Another Idea I had was by mixing genre. For example, mixing a customisable card game with a dungeon crawler. Let say all players has a deck representing their characters with card that represents: spell, items, Manuvers, etc. Then they move in the dungeon and use their cards at the desired situation. It could also prevent the need of having a character sheet, it's all on cards.