The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games - Michael J. Tresca [95]
Courier
The heroes collect an object and deliver it somewhere else. Sometimes the adventurers start out with the object, sometimes they must retrieve it. In any case, the item is of some value, so they are likely to be attacked for it. Again, this parallel is found in the quest of the One Ring, which had to be brought to Mount Doom to be destroyed. In this way, the courier quest can also be a part of a search and destroy quest.
Protect
The player either escorts a nonplayer character safely or defends an area from attack. Like Theoden’s last stand, this quest has its roots in The Lord of the Rings.
Explore
The heroes must find something or someone, often as prelude to the courier quest. This almost inevitably involves navigating a dungeon, wiping out monsters, and otherwise providing a public service of exploring an area that most sane people avoid.
Quests serve important purposes. They function as tutorials in how to play the game and encourage the player to explore it. Quests also help in “chunking up” the game so that it can be played in incremental amounts. What collectively would be considered daunting to explore is filtered to the player in a way he can more easily digest (Walker 2007:307).
In the early days when computer processing power was at a premium, instruction manuals acted as part of the CRPG experience. Different parts of the CRPG would reference the manual, which the player would then read. CRPGs combined elements of gamebooks and interactive fiction, while allowing processing power to be reserved for graphics and number crunching, most specifically for combat. Temple of Apshai followed this format, as did Dragon Wars (Barton 2008:199).
The issue of disrupting narrative due to metagame considerations has been with CRPGs for decades. Ideally, the system is invisible (Moulthrop 2004:65), a challenge that becomes increasingly surmountable as technology advances. There are some promising developments. Heavy Rain, by Quantic Dream, is a film noir thriller that features four different characters, each with their own perspective on the plot. There is no standard system for interacting with the game—context-sensitive actions become available as they arise, further reducing the simulationist structure of the game. Death isn’t the end of the game; the player continues with the remaining living characters. If they all die, the story concludes (Quantic Dreams Staff 2010).
Personalization
The majority of CRPGs display statistics as if the player had a rulebook at a table—numbers, numbers, numbers. The format for character creation followed the traditional Dungeons & Dragons method, which was a series of randomized or static numbers assigned to the character.
Dungeons & Dragons originally advocated random ability score generation, wherein the player would roll dice to determine his character’s statistics. This had significant repercussions in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, where certain classes could only be taken up by characters with the right combination of statistics. As a result, players often rolled up characters over and over until they ended up with the character they wanted.
Eventually, players realized that this was a pointless exercise. Although some players viewed characters with significant flaws as a role-playing opportunity, others wanted to play specific character types such as paladins from the outset.
CRPGs worked hard to address these concerns. Players could keep rolling the (virtual) dice until they got the character they wanted, in much the same fashion as a tabletop game. A point system to ensure total player control over the character’s attributes while at the same time limiting just how powerful the character could become was common in CRPGs and became formalized in the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons, which in turn was reflected in Icewind Dale II and Dragon Wars (Barton 2008:353).
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