The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games - Michael J. Tresca [15]
I am not a Tolkien scholar. My knowledge of Tolkien is limited to reading The Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, seeing Peter Jackson’s films many times, and role-playing games that have incorporated Tolkien’s world into their system and setting. My goal in this book is to draw a connection between roleplaying games and their ilk from Tolkien’s vision, not to provide an expansive analysis of his work—a task left to far more qualified scholars.
Fellowship
Although the lone hero is popular in fiction and simplifies plotlines, roleplaying games create heroic narratives through cooperation. The Fellowship created the foundation of what great tales are made of: a community of diverse races, cultures, professions, and aims brought together for the greater good.
As mentioned previously, the number of members of the Fellowship was created to counter the number of Ringwraiths. And yet this trope has not carried over to the traditional fantasy adventuring party. Traditional Dungeons & Dragons suggests two to six characters (Slavicsek 2005:12). The Middleearth Role Playing game features four players in its example of play. The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Game features just two players in its example, considerably less than the Fellowship’s nine, but counsels having separate and distinct characters to avoid overlap (Long 2002:76).
The Fellowship number of nine doesn’t translate well across fantasy genres. Even Tolkien broke the Fellowship up into smaller, more manageable groups. Older Dungeons & Dragons adventures detailed up to ten members of the adventuring party as sample characters, implying that all ten might be played at once.
The number of characters played in a Dungeons & Dragons game is often restricted by the number of players available. Nine players are hard to find, much less cram into one room. A survey of gamers at ENWorld indicated that 62 percent played with five or six players (Lorne 2007). Less than 2 percent numbered over eight members, a far cry from Tolkien’s original vision. In comparison, World of Warcraft limits the maximum party to five (WoWWiki Staff 2010).
Narrative
What Tolkien achieved in his epic works stretched the boundaries of standard novels and plot structure. The world was as much an important part of the action as the characters that lived in it. Game developers are attracted to this form of world-building because it enables spatial storytelling, which in turn lends itself well to multiple entry points in the narrative—an important part of multiplayer gaming in particular. These fleshed-out worlds provide a stage for game developers to perform their art (Jenkins 2004:122).
The Lord of the Rings established the basic outlines of a quest: disparate characters with a foe in common come together to destroy him by retrieving an object that represents his power (Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin 2007:3). This standard quest is sometimes known as a “fetch” quest in computer gaming parlance. There are usually weaker but no less formidable minions defending the evil nemesis and his object, sometimes numbering nine, sometimes less. Other quests involve defeating each of them in turn, descending through dungeons or progressively more dangerous areas until the final climax. Sometimes this is a two-step process; retrieve the item, then destroy the villain with it (Barton 2008:32).
Middle-earth’s narrative includes a strong sense of history, respect for nature, clearly defined forces of good and evil, and fear of power, death and corruption.
Tolkien’s world is suffused with history. It is present in every scene, every character, every conflict. The setting beyond ancient; it is a world that has been long lived in, with all characters keenly aware of their lineage and their place within it (Long 2002:256).
Middle-earth is also very much in touch