Your host Ian McRae, alias FM, explores video and sometimes tabletop gaming as an art form and celebrates the things that make us love our controllers and dice.
The main column will be posted once a week, with other content posted whenever.
I dabble in tabletop game design sometimes, too. It's an RPG heavily inspired by Armored Core.
Aeon Genesis deserves more love for all the great work they've brought us. Go visit them, won't you?
Playing by the Rules
Roleplaying is a curious hobby, in that it has different goals depending on who you ask and when you ask them. If you asked, say, someone who picked up tabletop gaming in the past few years - let’s say by about 2005 or so, and possibly after some freeform roleplaying in an MMO or other video game - tabletop RPGs are a collaborative storytelling activity and fun battle system. If you ask someone who started gaming before that, well…the answer becomes a bit more complicated.
See, pen and paper roleplaying games are still games, in that they have defined rulesets and states of play. However, where video games are limited by the programmer and machine, unable to deviate from their rulesets, tabletop games essentially have no limits whatsoever but the players’ and Game Master’s1 patience and creativity. Thus, everyone involved could be playing a different game from the one everyone else thinks they’re supposed to be playing.
As you might expect, this can be problematic.
Advert for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons on the Intellivision.
Modern Love
Ultima IV is one of the classics of the RPG genre. Considered the first great entry in what once was the greatest RPG series in gaming, long before Japan showed up with its Dragon Warriors and Final Fantasies to show us how it’s done, Ultima IV pioneered gaming’s first true morality system, in which completion of the game required one to follow the Virtues, a series of moral axioms, becoming the Avatar thereof and bringing hope to the land of Britannia.
This is what we can all agree on. Unfortunately, there’s a dark secret to this classic game: it’s basically unplayable.
Of course, try to tell that to certain people, and they’ll call you illiterate. They’ll claim that modern gamers are spoiled by their quest compasses, their voice acting, their tutorials. They’ll claim that we cruelly dismiss a true classic for our hollow, hedonistic pleasures, with no difficulty or effort involved in the enjoyment.
This is, of course, completely false. Yet at the same time, it’s also true. But the fact that there’s truth to it isn’t, in fact, a harbinger for the end of intelligence in gamers or anything like that. It’s perfectly natural.
This week, I’m going to explain why a game can both be a classic and unplayable. More importantly, though, I’m going to explain why it’s okay for things to be that way.
I’m pretty sure that everyone, no matter what side of the edition war they’re on, knows this is an idea doomed to failure…except the Coastal Wizards, for some reason.
Exciting news for anyone who isn’t sick of edition wars! (I like 4e best, myself, but I play 3.5/Pathfinder as well.) This strikes me as kind of a bad idea, but we’ll see how the game turns out.
Someone named Rolibar made an insightful comment, which I’ll reproduce here.
Dungeons and Dragons is a product that is a real head scratcher for Hasbro.
Dungeons and Dragons just doesn’t fit the Hasbro sales model, a product that uses pencil paper and imagination was always a tough model for a business model. The fact that the brand name is so widely recognized in popular culture only makes the product more frustrating for Hasbro. The logic that “Rome wasn’t built in a day” just didn’t fit the Hasbro toy model of mass printed fire and forget games and toys, and the Holy Grail status of Dungeons and Dragons inside WOTC just didn’t neatly fit a balance sheet, and as Pokemon sales trailed off they started looking at the whole WOTC product portfolio.
As a practical example I can remember in 2001 when the Psionic Handbooks came out and all 50,0000 copies of the first printing sold out at the distribution level. Anthony Valtera who was a Business Manager for the D&D brand was thrilled, only to have a Hasbro executive ask why in the world we even made a product that only had a run of 50,000 copies. Now this was early in the Hasbro/WOTC merger, but it gave an idea of the disconnect on the product line. Hasbro couldn’t get a handle on how such a big name brand could generate such little revenue and demand such a large development team.
I can’t even begin to describe the level of tension between WOTC and Hasbro in late 2000 and early 2001 when Hasbro sold the electonic rights to D&D (Peter Adkinson resigned) which was seen as undermining WOTC’s ability to revive the brand. Of course there was Peter at Gen Con running demos at Gen Con 2001 for Dungeons and Dragons out of sheer love of the game. That sort of put it all in persepective, those grew up with D&D would love it forever. I guess the point is that while most of gamers might not like the churning of editions, it’s just business.
It’s been nearly a decade since I was at WOTC, and I had nothing to do with the gaming development, however I can say that the development team always asked first, is this good for our players, not will this increase sales. It’s a tough act to balance passion and profits!
