Game Design: Emulating the Table?
The appearance of Dungeons & Dragons coincided with the appearance of commercial videogames. And no, I don't remember the actual appearance of either. I wasn't even in school yet! I was apparently playing cowboys and indians or something at the time, tying up my cousin to a tree (true story, according to her mother, though neither of us remember it!).

Since the early videogames of that era were not exactly stellar fantasy simulations, D&D was really where it was at for us geeky young fantasy & SF fans. Except for joining the SCA or something, D&D was as close as one could get to being able to participate in a medieval fantasy like Tolkien's books. That was still the case when I started playing, in 1981. A friend of mine, Boris, once exclaimed his professions of faith prior to a session, "It's the best game there is, and the best game that ever was!"

Arguable, definitely. But I wasn't about to.

And our games were filled with arguments over the rules, silly behavior, party infighting, out-of-character tangents, downright asinine antics, and probably some revelations about the darker side of our souls and fantasies than we'd ever want anybody to analyze. But we kept coming back, because we were having a blast. I'm still playing (albeit with a different rule system) every weekends, nearly thirty years later. That says something. I'm not sure I want anybody to analyze what that it actually says, but hey... there ya go.

So it's no surprise that the early computer RPGs (back then neither D&D or the games referred to themselves as "role-playing games" - the games came first, the inadequate name came a couple of years later) sought to emulate the tabletop experience. Minus the rules arguments, I guess, though often keeping some of the other elements. Even the party infighting, in some games. The rules were remarkably similar. A player familiar with D&D would have no problem "rolling up a character" and playing the computer games without looking at the manual. Maybe "Constitution" was renamed "Health" and "Wisdom" was renamed "Willpower," but the players already knew the basics of games before they opened the box. All they needed to know was the keyboard commands.

So here we are, thirty-ish years later. The tabletop experience has changed a bit - we're on a 4th major revision of the D&D rules (well, 5th to 7th if you include the ol' "Basic D&D" editions 'n stuff), and there is a plethora of games that explore different aspects of the social RPG experience. I played one indie dice-and-paper game called "Inspectres" a couple of years ago that used a reality TV-style "confessional" to influence the direction of the storytelling. Weird, but cool. On the flip side, you have D&D 4th edition, which more closely resembles a board-game or MMO than it's immediate predecessor (though in some ways it's probably moved a little closer to its original incarnation in function, if not form). Some other games, even back in the day, embraced a deeper simulationist approach, with detailed charts and dense rules for everything. For some folks, that was the improvement. For others, it was exactly that kind of thing their games "evolved" away from.

And the computer games! Computer games have leapfrogged their tabletop cousins in potential for living out fantasy. I mean, with a Wii controller you can literally swing an air-sword in the air to slay stunningly rendered 3D monsters now... who needs to be rolling dice? There's no need to call out, "I waste him with my crossbow!" and then determine what happened - you just aim and pull the trigger - or press the button. And your average gamer has quite possibly never rolled a twenty-sided die in an honest-to-goodness table-top game of D&D in their life.

So is it finally time for computer RPGs to bid their ancestral home goodbye, to quit trying to be a copy-of-a-poor-copy, let the niche hobby tabletop RPGs do what they do best, and evolve into something greater and different and more *cough*mainstream*cough*? A lot of noted game designers believe so. I probably shouldn't blame them if they do.

Clark Peterson, co-founder of Necromancer Games, once shared a story from GenCon when he and a bunch of friends from the industry were playing D&D. Some obvious fans of the World of Darkness series (by White Wolf) walked by his table, and began making loud, disparaging comments about the kinds of unenlightened, unsophisticated gamers would actually derive entertainment from such a poor, hack-and-slash game like D&D.

Little did these folks realize that the people at Clark's table were some of the very designers of the game system they held as superior. They just chuckled to themselves, kept right on playing, and had a blast.

I think that story may be analogous to how computer RPGs may be "evolving" away from their tabletop roots. Sure, hiding the stats, focusing on the immersiveness (back in the 90's it was referred to by the overly-grandiose term "virtual reality") and action may be a great way to go for many games, and may take good advantage of the strengths of the platform, as well as the experience and preferences of the development team. But is there really nothing left of the tabletop experience worthy of emulating in a computer RPG? Is there nothing else the dice-and-paper RPGs and cRPGs have to teach each other?

I don't think so.

Labels: Game Design, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:30 AM (Permalink)