Tunnels of Doom

Unlike most Gaming Weekend posts, I didn’t actually play the game I want to talk about in the technical sense. I suppose you can count painting miniatures as part of the game (I do) but it isn’t the same as rolling the dice. But I spent more time over the past week thinking about and peripherally involved in Blood Bowl than almost anything else so I figure it qualifies as being what’s on my mind the most this week.

What’s striking to me about Blood Bowl is that it’s one of those games that has a mechanic I struggle with. Specifically the blocking mechanic involves just a few too many variables for me to really get a handle on: Essentially you have two models each with a Strength attribute. When they are in adjacent squares, you can throw a block on the other. Blocks are handled by rolls on special six sided dice included in the game with various results. There are potentially unpleasant results in a third of the possible outcomes; in a game where one missed roll means your entire turn is over that’s tough odds. Typically Strength attributes are equal: When that’s the case you roll a single block die and simply accept the results. If the blocking plater has more Strength than the defender you get to roll two block die and choose the result you find most preferable. If the blocking player has more than double the defender’s Strength, a third die is added to the rolls (which is statistically very, very unlikely to result in an unwanted outcome).

Since most of the Strength attributes in the game are clustered around threes and fours, the principal strategy comes from the judicious use of block assists: Each player has an area of influence in adjacent squares. When a player has a teammate adjacent to their target when they attempt a block, that teammate provides a +1 Strength bonus for assisting the block. This is cumulative as well, so if you surround an opposing player on all sides, the blocking player Strength is augmented by +7 (almost certainly a three-die block). The trick is that in order to assist, a teammate can’t be adjacent to any other opponents simultaneously.

In practice these aren’t quite as complex as they sound but they are sometimes as difficult, for me, to determine quickly by looking at the board. The problem comes down to an overwhelming number of variables that I have a hard enough time sorting out in my simple brain when the play is right in front of me but when I have to visualize the possibilities to plan my actions, it’s almost guaranteed that I’ll overlook something critical, which is why I rarely win Blood Bowl games.

But as I planned my upcoming Blood Bowl league this week, I got to thinking about how much I appreciate intricacy in my games. Part of why I love Blood Bowl so much is precisely because it’s complex and the interactions are difficult for me. It feels like skill when I successfully engineer a Blood Bowl play versus something like Monopoly where much of the game is luck or at the very least “influenced chance.” It extends to all types of games I enjoy: Even games like Overlord have a certain intertwined system within it where you have to, by the end of the game, manage a variety of tasks and co-ordinate an increasing number of resources as smoothly as possible to really succeed.

I used to think that video role-playing games were my favorite type but as I’ve gotten older and found myself growing more and more frustrated with Japanese-style role-playing games I wondered what was going on. The epiphany I had this week was that jRPGs were, in the 8- and 16-bit eras, the most intricate game types you could find. By my disposition they were the ones I gravitated toward. But as video games matured the intricacy of RPGs branched out into other styles and jRPGs remained fairly static in terms of having a sort of arbitrary intricacy that lacked elegance: They felt on-rails like they had become more enamored with their brand of expository storytelling than they were with maintaining a sense of depth across their core mechanics.

I tried my hand at Crisis Core for a bit this weekend and found it to be so clumsy and smug with it’s random interface elements and mindlessly busy gameplay that amounted mostly to pounding on the X button and I thought, “This isn’t elegant, it’s just overwrought.” I contrasted it to Jeanne D’Arc, Blood Bowl, Overlord and even Lost Cities which all have a central conceit that facilitates a sense of accomplishment by being beautiful with their complexity rather than just crowding a hackneyed system with a bunch of needless layers of abstraction and inexplicable variables so it can make some false claim to testing a player’s dexterity or strategy. I find games I hate are typically ones that don’t start from a place of saying, “Here’s something that would be fun to play with” but that start by saying, “This is something we want to tell or say or explore as a concept.” Indigo Prophecy fell into that trap. Crisis Core ruined itself for that reason, and I wish it wasn’t so but every jRPG I’ve played with one exception since Final Fantasy VII has been exactly the same.

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