The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games - Michael J. Tresca [45]
The fourth edition now features 17 skills along with skill challenges, a means for a character to overcome an obstacle through a series of successful skill rolls instead of through combat. The use of skill checks is a negotiation between game master and player, with the player advocating which skill makes sense to apply to a particular role. Most players advocate the skills their character is best at, encouraging characters to play to their strengths in skill challenges. Since all players get a flat bonus to skill levels, there is less imbalance in say, offensive capability, than in skill checks (Smith 2008).
One aspect of RPGs that is often overlooked but figures as prominently as combat in Dungeons & Dragons is equipment lists. Be it mundane equipment the adventurer needs to survive or endless lists of magical items that give the character an advantage, equipment provides a means of artificially inflating a character’s power level. As a result, adventurers obsessively catalogued every item they owned just to stay alive. Accounting for random encounters and potential traps, a typical adventurer was kitted out with something for every possible emergency; poles for setting off traps, rations for eating during long journeys, mirrors and whistles to signal for help, and so on.
Another RPG staple that became exaggerated in later fantasy games was the definition of magical items by their bonus to hit and damage. Magic armor bestowed a +1 bonus to armor class, magic weapons provided a +1 bonus to hit and damage, and so forth. These bonuses extend as high as +10 in some editions of Dungeons & Dragons.
All that equipment had a downside. Characters had to carry all that cool stuff. It has been my experience that encumbrance was largely abandoned by later incarnations of tabletop versions of Dungeons & Dragons—not because of any flaws in the game rules, but by players who found keeping track of all their characters’ equipment to be too much of a hassle. Computer and massive multiplayer games do not suffer from such difficulties, however, as we shall see in subsequent chapters.
The common language of gaming created a network of compatible players that would eventually lead to tournament play, special sessions in which different groups of player took part in an adventure at different times (Gygax 1987:39). Tournament play was adjudicated through the Role-Playing Game Association (RPGA). In the RPGA, if the majority of players determine a certain condition—death of a villain, retrieval or loss of an artifact, destruction of a village—it becomes part of the game universe. The RPGA set the template for MMORPGs; adventurers existing in the same world in a sort of megauniverse (Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin 2007:219).
Gygax felt that these kinds of tournaments helped players perfect their game. And yet, he made a point of discouraging Dungeon Masters from customizing their campaigns too much, for fear of making the game less challenging or “so strange as to be no longer AD&D” (1979:7). Although he encouraged variation, he wanted it kept within the bounds of the overall system. For Gygax, it was more important that players could create games that were fundamentally compatible with each other (1978:8). And he was right. Thanks to the enormous popularity of Dungeons & Dragons and the common language of hit points, armor class, levels, and experience points, fantasy gaming prospered.
Risk
Gygax identified three elements integral to all role-playing games: combat, battle, and conflict. “Combat” involves nonlethal and lethal varieties, “battle” covers larger-scale combat, and “conflict” is like any other form of nonphysical contest between groups.