The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games - Michael J. Tresca [102]
MERCHANTS • A staple of fantasy games, the merchant is the beginning and end destination of most adventurers. It is through the merchant that they buy equipment necessary to survive and sell the loot recovered from a dungeon incursion. Early merchants were merely a currency rate exchange, as in Wizard’s Castle, where there is no actual personality to interact with. The merchant himself was a cipher, simply conducting transactions in exchange for treasure. Most of these merchants lived in the dungeon where the adventurer was engaging in a life-and-death struggle with horrible monsters just next door.
Merchants often altruistically sold items at cost. Eventually, this changed, and soon merchants in more advanced CRPGs were influenced by a variety of external factors including the player character’s charisma, his race, his allegiance, his country of origin, and even his gender.
HENCHMEN • Players who wanted to flesh out their party relied on a different NPC, the henchman. Henchmen differ from other NPCs in that although they are allies, the computer still controls at least some of their actions. This is similar to the henchmen in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, who had their own morale modifiers to help determine their reaction to danger. Perhaps the best known implementation of these features was Baldur’s Gate, in which henchmen took into account alignment considerations, distinct personalities, and morale (Barton 2008:346).
The age-old problem with computer-operated henchmen is that they do not perform as well as a player character. Beyond fighting, defending, and engaging the enemy in a strategic way that meshes with the player’s tactics, the most often mentioned challenge with henchmen is pathfinding.
Pathfinding is a henchman’s ability to find his way around obstacles and even opponents. Players understand how to navigate around a table, through a door, and into the next room. A computer-controlled henchman, however, might stop at the table, or, deciding that the door is too much trouble, walk out of the building and take a circuitous route to reach the rest of his fellows. This is particularly dangerous in monster-infested dungeons, where a moment’s hesitation can mean death. More than one player has been frustrated by a henchman wandering off due to poor pathfinding, never to return.
MOUNTS AND PACK ANIMALS • Despite horses and pack animals being standard fantasy fare all the way back to The Lord of the Rings, mounts rarely made an appearance in CRPGs. When they did appear, mounts were primarily mobile containers, there for the sole purpose of expanding the characters’ ability to carry more equipment.
Dungeon Siege featured mules as important members of the party. Mules were so critical that they took up a slot that would normally be filled by a henchman. This forced the player to choose which he valued more, an extra arm in combat or the mule’s considerable equipment-carrying capability (Barton 2008:335). Dungeon Siege II expanded mules and other animal companions so that they advanced in level like other henchmen by feeding them unwanted equipment.
Status
Advancement in most CRPGs is through the standard accumulation of experience points gained by killing monsters. Few CRPGs stepped outside the experience point “grind” paradigm. Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind was a notable exception, in which skills were improved through practice. While this theoretically ensures that characters advance only in the skills they use most, in practice players can easily abuse the system by endlessly repeating a particular action to artificially boost its efficacy.
Levels in CRPGs, with their sped-up time cycles, made adventuring around the clock much more feasible. The Dungeons & Dragons rules that were originally created