Roll Playing

For someone who's enough of an avowed Ameritrash fan to start a blog on the subject, I have an odd and ongoing aversion to boardgames that attempt to simulate aspects of role-playing games. There seems to be an ongoing relationship between AT games and role-playing games, with role playing being a common path for AT gamers to get into the boardgaming hobby (myself included). Really this is not surprising given that both types of gaming have a tendency to emphasise theme and narrative. As a result dungeoncrawl and role-playing style boardgames constitute a fairly large sub-genre of the Ameritrash canon. So why do I shut myself off from these games?

Well I ought to start by admitting that in part my reluctance to invest in these sorts of games stems from the fact that I know I'd have a hard time persuading the groups I game with to play them. The people I game with can generally be categorised as hardcore miniatures gamers, hardcore strategy gamers and casual gamers, none of whom have any great interest in role-playing and by extension in board games that attempt to simulate the experience. But my dislike for these games does extend beyond mere inability to find an opponent - after all a number of them make good solo gaming fare - to my mind the genre is plagued by a number of problems which mostly stem from the very aim they're trying to achieve. Allow me to elaborate.

The first question I always ask when confronted with a game of this nature is - why? Role-playing is a gaming scene onto itself with its own design conventions and where players seek after different things than they get from boardgaming. What's the point in trying to combine the two styles of game into one? Too often it seems to me that the resulting games only succeed in capturing the worst aspects of both hobbies - endless repetitive "monty-haul" style games with labyrinthine rules that have neither the freedom of choice and expression offered by role-playing nor the tactical depth offered by a good board game. What you do get in terms of a system and components for simulating combat in a more understandable and satisfying fashion than the typical verbal melee of a role-playing combat can often be achieved simply by using some board gaming props to help you along in your role-playing session rather than trying to separate it off into a different game.

The nature of role-playing is that a group of players co-operate together against the challenges thrown at them by the games master. Although I have run and played in games where player versus player plotting was a significant element (and a lot of fun it was too, I might add) it's difficult to imagine how a role-playing game could be set up which allowed all the people playing and the games master to be competing against one another. An attempt to replicate this situation in a board game leads to two problems. The first is a personal one - I don't generally like co-operative games so that's another turn off for me. The other problem is that the Games Master role in a board version of an RPG is significantly less interesting. Gone is the need to assess and pass judgement on the effects of the players actions, the fun of trying to role-play non-player characters in a memorable fashion, and the challenge of fudging the dice rolls in the interest of driving the narrative. All that's left is that smug feeling of knowing things before the players find them out which, while pleasant, is hardly enough to make you want to put time and effort into the game.

Another issue that seems to arise in these games is that they often seem to degenerate into glorified puzzles - a complaint that I often level at the bulk of Eurogames on the market. Given that the hallmark of role-playing games themselves is the creative freedom they offer the participants this seems like a particularly bizarre problem to throw up but it does seem to be a recurring problem. Witness the number of these games that suffer from the "corridor problem" - the tactic of having the heroes line up behind a door in order to pick off monsters one by one. In general it seems that too many of these games have optimal play solutions and don't have the open, creative access to strategy that I, for one, look for in a satisfying game. I don't doubt this is something to do with the fact that these games often play well solo - almost every solo game is going to suffer from this problem because you don't have another human brain playing against you to do unexpected and creative things that you need to consider and react to. The old fashioned solution to this problem in these sorts of games was to offer the players a vast and mind-boggling array of possible encounters but even this tended to get bogged down in the inevitable limitations placed on game play by having a boardgame-like rules framework which needed to cover every possibility instead of leaving some decisions to the GM.

The solution, in turn, to this problem was to make games of ever increasing complexity. The apex of that design path is Magic Realm which is the most complicated board game that I've ever tried to play. It's an interesting game but the basic problem with it, in my view, is that the satisfaction of play in no way makes the effort of learning all those rules worthwhile - and the same is true of every single role-playing boardgame I've come across that tried to solve the issues I've outlined by increasing the number of rules. We come full circle with the arguments now - if you've produced a game with a rulebook the size of a role-playing manual then again, why not just play the role-playing game instead of accepting a hybrid?

On reflection it seems to me that I often use my space in this column to criticise things instead of lauding them. Essentially that's pretty lazy - it's much easier to write an interesting piece and get people talking by throwing down insults than praise. So I figured I'd take the second half of this piece to look at a few role-playing boardgames that I think have succeeded and why.

My absolute favourite in this area has to be DungeonQuest although in fairness this game succeed by breaking almost every convention of role-playing games and is basically a boardgame dressed up in a dungeon-crawl theme. There's no GM and al the players are competing directly one another. The game solves the problem of not having a GM to dish out the map as the players explore by having the relatively simple expedient of having the player draw a tile when they enter a new room and take cards to simulate encounters. You might immediately spot that this has the potential to create unfair situations - players drawing dead ends or corridor directions that are useless and so forth. You'd be right - in fact DungeonQuest makes absolutely no attempt to be fair and oddly enough this gives it a big part of its appeal. It's short enough that no-one cares and brutal enough that usually all the players get shafted by the game in some form or fashion before the dungeon trip is done. Simply brilliant and a great antidote to too much carefully considered strategy games.

Another one I still find myself pulling off the shelf occasionally is a left-field oddity from Tom Wham called Mertwig's Maze. This was published by TSR in an AD&D RPG module sleeve as a "Forgotten Realms Gamefolio" in spite of the fact it had sod all to do with AD&D or Forgotten Realsm and would obviously have benefited from being packaged in a game box. This again has no GM and has all the players competing against each other but the particular mark of genius in this design is to have each player running a party of adventurers instead of a single character. Recruiting new characters into your party in indeed an important part of the game play. The result is a game that does manage to feel like both an RPG (there's your party of characters - go out and seek for cool treasure to equip them) and a strategy board game (you're competing against everyone else and there's the potential to exploit the rules for creative strategy). Tom's sense of humour also helps add to the longevity of this one, although maybe it's just me that still gets a chuckle out of the "Bollock the Bear" card every time it comes out. "Ork" goes the Onyx Oryx.

A game which does look to be worth playing - but which I have never, and probably will never, play - is Descent from Fantasy Flight. It solves the problem of the impotent and annoying GM through the simple but ingenious means of making the Games Master compete against the players - he can win by having his minions slaughter them all. The game does still look to have repetitive strategy problems but at least all the people involved are trying to compete against each other on a relatively equal footing. The reason I'm never going to play this is just because it looks too much like a long time playing a standard dungeon crawl to interest my gaming circles into trying it.

My final pick in this category is a favourite of a number of other F:AT writers - Return of the Heroes. This succeeds by tearing up all the conventions that usually govern this genre and reassembling the basic theme in the image of a Eurogame. This actually works amazingly well - I've already mentioned that there is in fact a link between Euros and RPG-style games in the mechanical approach to strategy that often results. In Return of the Heroes you've got the challenge of solving the Euro-puzzle style game play with all the added narrative and theme of an AT game. It's the narrative aspects that really make this - the stories that you build as you play can result in surprisingly engaging solo game sessions.