The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games - Michael J. Tresca [94]
Role immersion involves relating to the character. It’s considerably harder for a player to role-play an entire party, with their varying genders, races, and classes. And yet the adventuring group is very much in the spirit of Tolkien’s Fellowship and Dungeons & Dragons parties. It also increases the strategy of the group exponentially; more characters means multiplying the complexity of the game by each person in the party. Tarturian is one example, which allowed a large party of up to ten characters.
It was rare to have a party be developed as anything more than pawns of the player. One notable exception was Ishar: Legend of the Fortress by Silmarils in 1992, which put the removal of a party member to a vote ... by the other party members! (Barton 2008:241).
On the other hand, someone playing one character makes it easier to roleplay the hero. It also allows considerably more control over the game environment. The player achieves more agency and the game can use the frame of reference “you” without pulling the player out of the game’s immersion. Current trends seem to point to the single-hero model (Barton 2008:73).
A compromise between the two types of parties is to start with a single character but then allow him to recruit other party members. These can be “henchmen”—characters just like the player character but in his employ. Or they can be hirelings, mercenaries employed for a fee (formalized in CRPGs in Magic Candle III), or summoned monsters.
Narrative
The aesthetic problem with CRPGs is that they seldom tell good stories. Unlike books or movies, CRPGs emphasize the setting and system over story. Instead CRPGs are actually simulations, almost entirely in the cognitive realm. Unlike interactive fiction, there are underlying numbers determining the majority of events that take place within fantasy CRPGs, turning any element of the game into a series of tactical and statistical decisions.
Because CRPGs tend to focus on combat and its statistical framework, the combats lend randomness to conflict. Different outcomes via a wide range of variables ensure that each playthrough is fresh. This seems to be the driving force behind sandbox games, wherein the game environment is made as expansive as possible—through enough combination of variables, the game generates its own narrative (Barton 2008:28).
With combat the main focus of many CRPGs, the rationale for such conflicts varies little. As Aarseth put it so eloquently, Diablo is basically Rogue with better graphics (2004:50). The nature of what makes games appealing isn’t the stories they tell, but the worlds we experience—which is why a randomly generated map or monster is as satisfying to gamers as a humanauthored character.
One player of Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind summed up the problem with telling stories in these sorts of games:
It’s quite an involved game, with an immensely complicated storyline. But that didn’t matter, because I was hopping and skipping my way to my next Acrobatics skill point while firing off random Destruction magic to try to master more powerful spells. If I saw something in my way I’d stab it for more Dagger experience, and then loot its corpse in an attempt to scrape together enough gold to study cool new spells. In doing so, I completely missed the storyline. I’m sure it was all very interesting—I went back and looked at parts of it later. But what was the point? Just words, right? I could be killing stuff instead of reading! [Smith 2010].
CRPG narratives can be grouped into the following categories (Walker 2007:307).
Search and Destroy
The adventurers are responsible for finding a particular villain and defeating him. On a micro scale, their goal is to fight a series of foes, each more powerful than the last. On a macro scale, the adventurers defeat the main villain, not unlike The Lord of the Rings’ Sauron. You might think the end goal would be the destruction of