Tunnels of Doom

I finished Dragon Age: Origins this week (next week’s Edition will cover it in greater detail) and while I enjoyed it for the most part I kept feeling like there were parts where it reverted back to standard fantasy provisions that we’ve seen over and over again and which, at this point, I think need to just be put to pasture for a while. Not all of these are specific to fantasy RPGs though I’m thinking of that subgenre specifically.

I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Clichés, which shows that in some ways we’re still basically playing Dragon Warrior I. Plus I have to point out this page for the BioWare RPG Cliché Chart which is fun but also includes (allegedly) a response from a BioWare rep who kind of takes the whole thing a little too personally.

1. The Arena
   To clarify, it isn’t that I don’t understand why these clichés persist in role-playing games, especially video game RPGs which are typically very combat oriented. In the case of the ubiquitous area battles you can showcase your combat engine and fill up a couple of hours of game time having players hack and slash with the barest of necessary plot development. But for the role-player that lack of context mostly serves to highlight the basic flaws in your combat system. I rarely—perhaps never—play RPGs for their dynamic fighting mechanics, rather I play them in spite of often awkward combat because I like the stories they tell. When you surgically excise the latter I tend to sit there grinding my teeth as I nitpick the former.
2. The Perfectly Balanced Attribute System
   I don’t want Intelligence to factor into how effective my brutish half-orc is at finding chinks in opponent’s armor. I don’t want Strength to determine how many spellbooks my mage can carry. I don’t want Charisma to factor into how good my thief is at sneaking. It should be okay to have a borderline mentally retarded barbarian and a physically frail wizard and an unremarkable, forgettable rogue. Trying to discourage min/maxing in single-player games makes no sense to me, so let me ignore stats that don’t matter for my character class and stop trying to make me well-rounded. Of course the corollary for this is that every game needs to accommodate each class: I should be able to be just as successful as a magic user as I can be as a warrior rather than having to always be some kind of spell-casting, sword-wielding hybrid assassin.
3. The Hero is the Guy Who Does the Most Damage
   Combat is an integral part in a vast majority of video games. Video role-playing games are no exception. But RPGs have for too long eschewed the potential drama of the non-combat resolution. It’s a tired truism that no matter what dialogue options you choose, no matter how high your Negotiation skill, no matter how many non-violent solutions you can come up with, ultimately 99% of your interactions result in either you giving someone cash or services in exchange for goods or information or you hit them with various sharp objects until they stop moving.
4. There is Only One Way to Do It
   There are few things more infuriating in games than having obvious solutions to developer-fabricated problems staring you in the face but having to jump through the sorts of mind-reading hoops that adventure games used to be famous for because some level designer deems it so. This applies to large set-piece puzzles (see the Resident Evil example from this GameSpy article) as well as simpler activities like, say, opening chests. Even the ASCII-based Nethack allows non-thieving characters to access chests via a brute force approach, although there is the potential for breakable items within to be, well, broken. But this is the tradeoff to the alternative which is having a particular skill (rogues) or performing some sort of elaborate series of steps to locate the correct key. Some games have allowed for alternate actions like forced locks but often these inexplicably rely on the same skill as bypassing them. In a way this is the counterpart to the unbalanced attribute system: Let characters be specialized but then allow them to approach every given obstacle from their own unique perspective.
5. The Stationary World
   Few things make a world feel less living and vibrant than one which never changes. Then again, like the Uncanny Valley, the closer you get toward a world that feels like it has its own pulse, the more noticeable it becomes when everything about an environment exists to accommodate the hero of some epic story. Games with no night/day cycle, shopkeepers who never sleep but stand in the same spot for infinity waiting for the hero to come by and give them a single moment of purpose, NPCs who only ever offer a single scrap of information and then simply repeat themselves like malfunctioning robots, all these things can be lovingly rendered in the most visually striking HD but they utterly ruin the spell of a game.

I read The Alexandrian’s series on Dissociated Rules in D&D 4th Edition with interest. Among the points discussed in the longish series, Justin Alexander speaks about the mechanics of storytelling vs. role-playing in the context of 4th Edition. As a counter-example to what Wizards of the Coast is doing with the D&D franchise, he points to a storytelling system called Wushu.

Having never heard of Wushu before this, I read its description carefully and felt my imagination beginning to spin. I, too, feel that D&D 4th is primarily a tactical miniatures game although perhaps unlike Mr. Alexander I don’t really take it as some affront to the D&D brand. I happen to like tactical miniatures games and grafting a light narrative mechanic on top of them isn’t directly offensive to me. However, I also appreciate the story-heavy mechanics of the kinds of role-playing he and other 4th Edition detractors crave and reading about the far-afield Wushu principles was exciting.

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I took some time today to look at the aftermath of the D&D Fourth Edition release, mostly because I finally broke down and ordered the Player’s Handbook (after much hand-wringing) from Amazon. Dude, it was like $15 off the cover price.

Some of this greatly intrigues me, especially since a lot of what I read sounds like Wizards stepped directly into my head and picked out some of the stuff I was asking for. Tougher low-level characters. A more fluid approach to combat. Online tabletop role-playing. I can’t actually speak about the rules themselves yet since my book hasn’t arrived, but I’d be a liar if I said the things I was hearing weren’t stirring a bit of excitement in me for the chance to dive into an adventure.

I like the RPGnet review of the game as a good place to get a broad sense of the changes. Random Average lays out the influences behind some of the adjustments to core mechanics and sirtayls on Dragon Avenue rolls his eyes at the flamewars that erupt as people dissect the new edition. And then Dork Tower’s John Kovalic notes some strange decisions made in the Monster Manual, and decides to run with it.

Part of this intrigue is because, now that tabletop gaming is back in my forebrain, I’m interested in finding not necessarily a steady campaign to participate in but some willing folk to join for a run through a session or two. I also have some ideas for one-shots bubbling in the back of my mind, so goes my fascination with clattering dice (at the moment). In pursuit of this thought I did some digging on other settings and systems and found the free quickstart guide to Call of Cthulu. It was almost enough to make me regret my decision to buy D&D4e instead of the CoC core book. Which suggests there was some sort of internal debate between the two that didn’t exist. It just turns out that buying D&D prohibited me budget-wise from also picking up COC.

But man do I love the base system mapped out in the overview. It’s percentile-based for the most part, but the game also uses other polyhedral dice (bonus) and most delightful to me is the character advancement system which has skills improving as they get used. It’s elegantly handled and very attractive to someone like me who has always, like most role-players, loved advancing a character but personally I’ve always felt the abstraction was pretty hokey.

Some people collect role-playing games mostly to reverse engineer their mechanics and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. I’m not really that kind of guy, though I’ve toyed with plenty of different systems from Palladium’s d20-based concepts to the strict percentiles of DC Heroes through various D&D incarnations, Hero’s low-roll mechanics and more. I enjoy comparing them but my attraction to a particular game is either strictly mechanical (like GURPS) or, more frequently, primarily based on setting (Shadowrun). Which may be why I’m so fascinated by CoC’s impressively intuitive mechanics, because I was drawn to the game because of the setting and I found myself unexpectedly surprised by the rules.

Which brings me back to D&D and I wonder for a minute why I’m intrigued at all with the game. Part of it is the culture of games, it’s kind of like my day-one purchases of Halo sequels. I’m not a huge Halo fan but it matters to gamers so it matters to me. D&D is that way; if you want to guarantee you’ll find a game you can dive right into at a convention or with an impromptu gathering of gamer nerds, you better learn D&D. And like it or not, D&D is a force in the community so it merits attention.

It’s just good they keep making changes or I don’t know what we’d all have to fight about.