“I’m agreeing with her on this,” Bonnie said, leaning forward slightly as she spoke. “You can’t just keep stealing women until you build some creepy stolen princess harem.”

“Hey, I’m down for stealing another woman if you need me to,” Nick offered, looking over at Viola.

“Please don’t be so lecherous,” Bonnie shot back. She produced her healing scepter, causing Nick to flinch away when he saw it.

“I’m just saying that the dungeon doesn’t need him around to operate,” Nick pressed. "He can focus on other stuff, like whatever cupcake here is about to say.”.

“Which is?” Lucas asked, pointedly turning toward the princess.

“MONSTERS!” Viola shouted. “Don’t you know anything?! What kind of villain doesn’t know that the quality of a villain is determined by the quality of his minions?!”

“Ah . . .” Lucas couldn’t argue with that.

“MMOs are just fetch quests, which most players ignore. Yeah, they’re interesting sometimes, but the conversation and dialogue are secondary to the awesomeness of the monsters that the quests send players to kill. If you want to really be a successful villain, you need a monster,” she elaborated. “If a dungeon is challenging and takes multiple tries to defeat, and it has a cool boss with fun mechanics, then, of course, it’s going to be successful! It wouldn’t even matter if the quest were just to get a loaf of bread that can only be found at the end of a haunted kitchen, players would still line up to do it.”

“Actually, yeah,” Nick said, suddenly more agreeable. “I hate some of the boring quest dialogue in other games. It stinks when they belittle me with mediocre writing and expect me to be pumped up about helping the umpteenth villager with the exact same problem the last ten had. But there’s nothing better than taking down the giant demon leading an army of undead.”

“What they said,” Bonnie added with a nod.

“But . . . what makes a monster interesting?” Lucas asked, crowdsourcing ideas for how to work on his dungeon. He had been following the guide—get a dungeon, generate a quest, create a need, defeat any challengers—so well that he had forgotten a step crucial to appealing to players.

“It’s gotta be tough and make you feel awesome,” Nick said, excitement creeping into his voice. “I hated it when I used to play C&C—Castles and Cave Trolls—and I’d build a really tough melee character, and then the boss would be relatively easy but have a super-high armor class, making physical characters seem inept. Or I’d build a great mage, and then the boss would have no armor class and be super strong against magic. It was so frustrating. My favorite games were the ones where I’d build a really good warrior and then fight a boss that let me use my attacks.”