The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games - Michael J. Tresca [61]
Player
In Castle Age, an adventuring party is called an elite guard. Elite guards improve prowess in battle and help in adventures. Class roles are assigned for 24 hours in the order that they join the player calling for the elite guard. The more elite guard members there are, the faster quest influence is gained.
All the standard fantasy classes are possible roles in the elite guard, each bestowing a different bonus to the entire group. Fighters, mages, and archmages bestow bonuses to attack. Clerics, guardians, high priests, gladiators, and paladins bestow bonuses to defense. Thieves, rogues, bestow bonuses to gold from quests and battles.
Tiny Adventures features avatars with prerolled statistics, race, and class combinations. It includes the standard classes from Dungeons & Dragons (cleric, fighter, rogue, wizard) as well as a host of others that range from the avenger to the shaman. The swordmage, warden, invoker, and avenger are available only after a certain number of “generations”—the player must play until his character reaches a certain level, retire him, and then begin anew. Character customization is very limited, differing primarily through the statistics and equipment they can use. Spells are unlocked for spell-casting classes only after a certain number of generations are reached, unlike their tabletop RPG counterparts.
Status
Like Dungeons & Dragons and its kin, quests and combat gain the player character experience. By accumulating experience, he increases in level. Increases in levels bestow bonuses to statistics, which can be distributed by the player in a limited fashion. They also immediately heal all of the player’s points to full, including energy, stamina, and hit points. At higher levels, this is the only way a character can reach full capacity quickly; otherwise, it requires the player to wait longer to regenerate his disparate points to the maximum.
Tiny Adventures allows characters to reach 10 levels, whereupon they retire. Each retired character constitutes a generation, and subsequent play bestows benefits to the next character and opens new character options. This encourages repeat play.
The character’s level is visible to everyone, which is most important for player vs. player combat. When a player is seeking a combatant, the program provides the player with a list of suitable challengers. What qualifies as suitable is a combination of the character’s level and followers. A low-level character with many followers can overwhelm a much higher level character with fewer followers. The targets a player may attack are randomized, ensuring that different foes of varying capability appear each session. There is a factor that encourages “trash talk,” however. When a player kills another character, some games ask if the player would like to brag about his kills.
To curb abuse of the player-killer system, some PBBGs also implement “hit lists.” By putting a bounty on a character, you essentially pay to have another character attacked. Other characters gain points (or gold) by attacking the character who has a bounty on his head. Theoretically, the more powerful players refrain from preying on the weak out of fear of the bounty. The system is unlikely to have much effect in influencing player-killers, however. Like goal-oriented players on other massive multiplayer games, those who enjoy killing others are fearless—they wouldn’t attack total strangers otherwise.
After playing Castle Age for some time I learned which combination of level and followers made an easy target. Because PBBGs are as much about the convenience of play as they are about the satisfaction of immediate results, I would attack as many opponents as quickly as possible, heedless of their condition. In fact, I attacked so quickly that I often didn’t notice my foe was “dead.” In other words, the impersonal nature of combat made it simple to cut great swaths