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asutra - Features - Game Design Essentials: 20 RPGs

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Gam e Design Essent i a ls : 20 RPGs

By John Harris

[ In the latest in his popular Game Design Essentials series, which haspreviously spanned subjects from Atari gamesthrough 'mysteriousgames', 'open world games', 'unusual control schemes'and 'difficultgames', w riter John Harris examines 10 gam es from t he Westerncomput er RPG (CRPG) t radition and 1 0 from the Japanese console RPG(JRPG) t radition, to figure out what exactly m akes them t ick -- and whyyou should care.]

I n t r o d u ct i o n : ( Or i g i n al ) D u n g eo n s & D r a g o n s

Designed by : Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson

I n f l u e n ce d b y : Braunstein, a game that Dave Arneson is known to have played, predated D&D. There were also weirdfiction and pulp fantasy stories and tabletop war games dating back to H.G. Wells' floor game Little Wars.

Series: No less than seven editions and many side-products. Not to mention all the CRPGs that claim to be derived fromits rules. Also, those CRPGs that steal mechanics from it without attributing them.

Legacy: Nearly all RPGs.

Although it's not a CRPG, let's begin with a discussion of the original role-playing game, the edition of Dungeons &Dragons that started the role-playing game craze in 1974. It might not seem relevant to the discussion, but there aresome things about the RPG genre that only really make sense when viewed in comparison with this particular game.

It may not actually have been the first role-playing game; word is that Dave Arneson participated in another game prior

to its release. But D&D 1974, referred to among fans on the 'net as "OD&D," was the introduction of RPGs to practicallyeveryone else.

First: the term "role-playing game," it seems, was not used in the original set. A search through the books andsupplements of the OD&D game show a good number of uses of the word "role," as a general term for a character playeby either a player or the referee, but none for "role-playing game." Neither is it used in any of the supplements.

The earliest published use seems to be either the Holmes version of the game, which slightly predates AD&D, or the lastissue of TSR's early publication The Strategic Review, where it's used in describing their shiny upcoming magazine TheDragon. Until then, it seems there may have been no good name for what Dungeons & Dragons was.

This is important because "role-playing game" is one of those terms that is proscriptive in its use. It implies that playerto an extent, personify their characters. D&D arose out of a marriage between wargaming and fantasy fiction, so narratis in its blood, but early on the most frequent type of adventure was a simple free-form dungeon crawl. If you countOD&D as a role-playing game, then you necessarily have to admit that RPGs don't have to be games of storytelling, or

least not games of "top-down," DM-driven storytelling. (RPGs have always been games of what we might call"storywriting".)

In this sense computer versions have more in common with early social roleplaying sessions than later ones. Few peopleplay CRPGs with an eye towards acting out their characters' roles.

Second thing, the game was hard. Really hard! Characters dropped like flies! Only a small percentage of characters wouever reach level two. That might seem harsh, because it was, but it didn't chase players off because people didn't identias strongly with characters. One tends not to get attached to characters who stand a good chance of not making it out their first trip into the dungeon. Without storytelling, and with the game's much-simpler system -- compared, even, toAD&D 1st edition, which is not really all that dissimilar to OD&D with all the supplements applied.

This is important because many early CRPGs, and even some early JRPGs, took a similar attitude to character death. ThWizardry-influenced style of game makes death common, especially at low levels. Wizardry charges a good deal to reviva dead character, the process has a good chance of failing, and if it does it costs even more to try to revive the pile of
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ashes the corpse becomes. The roguelike genre continues to hold up the tradition to this day.

Third thing, the game had a strong setting and a reduced scope. OD&D is a game about exploring dungeons, and otherdangerous places, and that's mostly it. High-level characters may get the opportunity to start their own little fortress ortower, but with level nine, "name level," so far away and the game so deadly, this isn't something a player can do morethan hope to reach. Because dungeon exploring is ultimately a loot-harvesting game, and treasure can be obtained inways other than fighting, characters gained one experience point per gold piece acquired. This knowledge can seemsurprising to us computer gamers today, as nearly every CRPG that uses an experience system anymore doles it forfighting alone.

The XP-for-gold rule implies strongly that the DM must carefully guard his riches and not hand out gold on a whim. Thisneed led, at times, to a kind of DM vs. players rivalry. If a DMs failed to realize this they could end up subtly nudged

towards giving out extra wealth, leading to what became known as "Monty Haul" campaigns, with vast amounts oftreasure distributed for little work. Second edition remedied this by switching to all combat-based experience, offeringtreasure XP as an option, as well as XP for completing quests.

Handing out experience points for collecting gold fits in with the '20s and '30s pulp fantasy works that inspired the gamewhich are fairly gritty tales with heroes are mostly in it for personal enrichment. Characters in pulp fantasy are, by D&Dstandards, fairly weak. Even the most powerful ones, like Conan, face significant danger from some angle or another, inhis case from magic and gods. OD&D characters are never completely safe, at least not if the DM is competent.

So, why is this important? Because this attitude, that role playing is a game of loot acquisition first, is everywhere in earcomputer RPGs. Even those with strong save-the-world quests have a lot of loot gaining along the way. It also explainsthose "strange" games, like PLATO dnd, that allow characters experience, or even direct improvement, for the simple acof money-harvesting.

Fourth thing: OD&D did not include a mandatory combat system. The first books referred players to Chainmail, a prior

game of Gygax's, for ideas for how to resolve battles. It had a section marked "Alternate Combat System" that wouldlater become the standard combat mechanism D&D would use for years, but Chainmail was the official solution, andbesides its use of armor class and hit points, its rules were quite different from what is now seen as standard D&Dcombat.

This is important because it shows is that combat play, ultimately, was not considered the defining aspect of the game.was a replaceable system. When played with Chainmail, D&D looks a lot like a special form of wargame campaign. Thismay well be a contributing factor to the strong split between "exploration mode" and "combat mode" that many RPGs uto this day. OD&D didn't get the system that would ultimately become the combat method used in AD&D 1st edition, anlater mutated into the "d20 System," until the first supplement, under the heading "ALTERNATIVE COMBAT SYSTEM."

Related to this is the fifth thing, and perhaps the most important of all: OD&D was poorly explained. It is impossible toplay Original Dungeons & Dragons with just the first three rule books, and even the supplements left important things oGygax and Arneson wrote for a presumed audience of wargamers. It still managed to become popular because the gamprimarily spread by word-of-mouth. People didn't learn from reading the books; they learned from other people, and ththe rules of the game followed the principles of oral tradition, with the rules used as reference.

This is important because it let a hundred rulesets thrive. Different regions tended to play the game in different ways.When more rigorous rules were written, some people decided they liked their old system better and invented competingRPGs, codifying those rules, to compete with D&D. It is this very proliferation of rules that produced the wide variety ofgames and approaches among early CRPGs.

I am not trying to argue that the game was better or worse than present-day RPGs. It is not hard, really, to find peoplewho would say otherwise; there is a burgeoning field of "retro-clone" RPGs out there whose purpose is to make gamesvery much like those old systems. But the original game of Dungeons & Dragons was surprisingly different from what wremember today, and it turns out that many of the oddnesses of RPG gaming, some persisting right up to the present,have their roots in its evolution.

Some of the ideas for this introduction came from the following blogs:

- Delta's D&D Hotspot- Jeff's Gameblog- I Waste the Buddha With My Crossbow- RetroRoleplaying- Lamentations of the Flame Princess- Grognardia- Always Go Right

PART ONE: W ESTERN GAMES
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1 . W i z a r d r y (se r i es )

Designed by : Andrew C. Greenburg, Robert Woodhead (original designers, creators), others

I n f l u e n ce d b y : D&D, PLATO RPGs

Series: Eight games, the last one a critically-acclaimed 3D extravaganza. In addition to these, a surprisingly largenumber more were made in Japan.

Legacy: The Bard's Taleseries, Might & Magic, AD&D Gold Box games and more. Inspired an entire category of grid-based 3D RPGs, out of favor now but still, if you know where to look, around. The Etr ian Odysseygames for the Nintend

DS owe a lot to Wizardry.

This article focuses on the early Wizardrygames, which are distinctive enough to be the style of play most people think today when they consider the series.

Wizardry is not the first CRPG; there were a number of earlier games. It isn't the first 3D-view, step-based dungeon craRPG either; there are older games for the PLATO multiuser system that look a fair bit like Wizardry. The game Oubliettesimilar, down to sharing many of the same spell names.

The key unit of game content in Wizardry is the encounter, a scripted event that occurs when the player's party enters aparticular square. Some encounters are monsters, which can be either friendly or hostile. Some are treasure chests. Soare deadly traps. Some are special devices that are manipulated through menus. Some are NPCs that provide informatioor ask questions, or might attack.

W i za rd ry (Sc reensho t cou r t esy h t t p :/ / w w w .g a m i ng w i t h c h il d r en .c om / )

There are set encounters, which occur when a specific spot is entered, and there are random encounters, which have aslim chance of occurring whenever the player enters a square within some region. Encounters, when they happen, mayhave a graphic tied to them but in nature are textual events, relayed to the player using narrative and asking him tomake a menu choice in response.

Encounters are housed on a dungeon map, a region of maze laid out along the lines of a grid. The grid itself is not showon-screen; instead, the player's perspective is shown as if standing in the maze, facing either north, south, east or westA simple algorithm, much-used in RPGs of the time, is used to render the walls and corridors in the party's sight.

The grid-based layout of the dungeon and atomic, space-by-space nature of the party's movement combine to makerendering relatively easy to implement; this is how Wizardrywas able to present a 3D world to players a decade beforeWolfenstein 3D. It was much copied, to the extent that it shows up in some far-flung products: the original Phantasy Stuses a much more attractive implementation for its 3D dungeons; retro action games like Fester's Quest and Golgo 1 3also implement their own takes.
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The 3D effect makes mapping essential. The grid layout both makes mapping easier, by conforming it to a grid, andharder, by making it easier to trick the player using map gimmicks to fool him into mapping incorrectly. (Mapping tricksare explicitly mentioned on the OD&D books as a useful tool for the DM, so blame them.) One such type of trick, aparticularly mean one, is the teleporter, which invisibly sends the player to another spot in the maze, sometimes one thlooks similar, but not identical, to the previous one.

Another cruel gimmick is the spinner, which randomly flips the player's facing direction to a random direction uponentering. If the player didn't notice that his facing has changed, a spinner can easily mess up an entire map. Wizardryeven has dark areasthat provide no vision of the corridor ahead, requiring that the player deduce where the walls aresolely though the "Ouch!" messages that appear when the party collides with one. These tricks make coming up with anaccurate map one of the biggest challenges of the game, and as a result it's rather satisfying to finish out an entire leve

Of all the games listed here, none is as inseparable from the act of mapping as Wizardry. An automapping feature woularguably ruin the game, because it'd reveal information, such as having been teleported or spun around, that players aresupposed to deduce for themselves. Many players now would view that as being screwed with and abandon the game, bit's important to remember that being screwed with, and overcoming it, is one of the great joys of classic Dungeons &Dragons.

Even though there are many scripted encounters, or "specials," a key difference between Wizardry and the D&D sessionit seeks to emulate is the absence of a flexible DM to allow the players to try things that aren't offered in the basicruleset. There is no jumping up on tables, swinging from ropes, prodding with 10-foot poles, knocking on walls, orlistening at doors or using them to block pursuers. Monsters don't exist until they have been triggered, and once a fightbegins it takes place entirely in that square of dungeon map, and cannot sprawl out into the dungeon.

It is important to note that, in the 25-plus years since Wizardrywas released, no CRPG has satisfactorily addressed thislimitation, that of system inflexibilty. The lack of verisimilitude remains the most grievous difference between them and

pen-and-paper games.

Wizardry's dungeons feel more in line with the D&D archetype than has been in vogue in more recent times. It casts thedungeon as bizarre magic place where things don't always make sense. The player has no way to determine what's inthere before he enters it, unless told by another character. If the player explores every space of the dungeon but the onwith the essential object in it, then he'll still have no hint that it exists. This is usually partly countered by dungeondesign: a 3 x 3 room with a door will have its relevant encounter placed by the door so as to provide the illusion that itfills the space.

One thing about these early RPGs is that it's much easier to get them into an entirely unwinnable state than in morerecent games. A dead low-level Wizardrycharacter can only be revived by paying at the temple, and that costs goodmoney. This is entirely in line with early D&D, where a hopeless case can be simply re-rolled, and indeed this can be doin Wizardry too, generating a new character to replace the dead old one. This idea is nearly alien in later games, but stishows up in weird places; one of the best Dragon Quest games is the third installment, which isn't so easy to makeunwinnable -- but still has this sort of replaceable character system.

A consequence of the system is the failed game, a way that a game ofWizardry, and some Wizardry-like games, canactually be lost. It's possible for your whole party to die, and be so low on money that they cannot be revived. This statis most common at the beginning of games, and often it'll take a player several attempts before he is able to get a grouof characters to a survivable level.

Wizardry is hard -- almost as hard as early OD&D and AD&D. Wizardry, however, provides the player with a way aroundthis through its use of saved games. In D&D, players are not supposed to go back to prior states of the game. If everyoagreed to there's nothing to say they couldn't, but they don't. This aspect ofsimulationism has never left pen-and-papeRPGs, even those that don't try to simulate anything pose irreversible choices, primarily because, with multiple playersinvolved, it's unfair to the other participants to back up for one's convenience. But the effect is more profound than youmight suspect; the ability to save and load games makes CRPGs allows those games to subtly focus on exploring multipbranches of the game's probability-space, instead of going down a single path.

2 . U l t i m a (se r i es )

Designed by : Richard Garriott (main designer, creator)

I n f l u e n ce d b y : Difficult to say. Definitely D&D, but the dungeon exploration mode looks too much like thePLATO/Wizardry system to be accidental, although it's possible the algorithm was independently-derived.

Series: Nine "core" games were made by Origin, but Ultima VII had a couple of large expansions that are by all rightsgames in themselves, there's a still-extant MMORPG, and there are several other side-games made by them. Japan has couple more games, the Runes of Virtue sub-series.

Legacy: The Ultima series is the forefather of the vast main category of CRPGs.


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Wizardry didn't change much among the majority of its lifespan, but the Ultimagames changed greatly during their earlyears. This article is mostly concerned with the earlier games, but the flow of its design can be traced up as far as UltimVI I, generally regarded as the zenith of the series' popularity and influence.

The first games (technically the first Ultimagame was Akalabeth) were dungeon-crawly things, but without the benefit oWizardry's many specials or mapping tricks. Dungeons were primarily just places with monsters, and the occasionalimportant plot item. They tend to be less interesting places than Wizardry's treacherous dungeons.

That's okay however, for Ultimabrought us what has become known as an "overworld," a tile-based world in which thedungeons are set as special locations. It also brought us real towns, and a routine for speaking with people (instead oftreating them as another thing to handle with specials).

Later Ultimas would even allow for interactive conversations with characters. This was usually handled using keywords,where speaking with people would reveal some things that could be asked about, either with that character or others.

U lt i m a I V (Sc reensho t cou r t esy h t t p : / / b r a id - g a m e .c om / )

Another difference between the two is that story is of much more import in Ultima, and ties more deeply into the playmechanics. One result of the difference in focus is that the original Wizardryholds up much better today than the first twUltimas, whose story was rather slight, and even a bit goofy. Later Ultimas, however, have a world with nearly unequaledepth and complexity. The third installment has a whole hidden continent to explore, Ultima IVbrings NPC relations to ttrue heart of the game in its virtue system and bossless design, and Ultim a VII may have the most engaging RPG worldever devised.

Sadly, the last Ultimagame was released over a decade ago now, and between Richard Gariott's exile from the companand Electronic Arts' decided lack of interest in their older properties, this state of affairs might never change. UltimaOnlinecontinues to cling to life, but the days of it being the MMORPG leader are long over. When it finally goes dark, it'

be the end of the greatest series of CRPGs ever known.

Fur t he r read ing : Blogging Ultima

3 . Waste l and

Designed by : Brian Fargo, Ken St. Andre, Alan Pavlish and Michael A. Stackpole

I n f l u e n ce d b y : Post-apocalyptic pen-and-paper RPGs, with a bit of D&D wilderness exploration.

Series: Wasteland's sequel wasn't produced by the original developers and is widely regarded as inferior. The Falloutgames, three of them as of this publication, are similar in many ways.
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Legacy: The Fallout series. The Elder Scrollsseries also seems to borrow from its wide-open design. Its implementationof multiple ways to solve some problems, is influential... but nowhere near as influential as it should have been.

In the early days of computer RPGs, there were a good number of games that were more wide-open in design than weknow today. The lack of computer power, in a perverse sort of way, helped the cause of these games; because peopledidn't expect their eight-bit machines to be capable of realistic graphics and greatly-detailed world maps, developersdidn't have to spend the manpower to provide them. Those days ended when games started showing that they werecapable of providing a bit more meat on their grid-based worlds, and Wasteland, still fondly remembered by many, wasone of the games that showed what those machines were capable of.

Wastelandhas a weird position of being a kind of companion game to The Bard's Tale(a highly popular Wizardry-like

game also made by developer Interplay). It contains a couple of sly references to that earlier game, and the screen hasthe same half messages/character roster, quarter character portrait, quarter display/battle messages system. Fights plaout similarly too, down to using Bard's Tale's enemy groups and distance elements of combat.

And yet, behind the scenes, it appears that Wastelandis rather more ambitious than BT in its combat system; monstersexist as an entity on the tile-based map, and combat begins when the party enters their view.

Although the action of the fight, after actions are determined, is played as a stream of battle reports, as the monsters athe party close in for battle the player can check their locations on the area map at any time.

It's even possible to split the party up into multiple entities, each moving independently of the others in almost aroguelike fashion, and characters can even be in combat simultaneously in different areas, although as the developersnote in the manual, playing the game this way is probably too annoying to be worth it.

W aste l and (Sc reensho t cou r t esy h t t p : / / n u t t er s m a r k .c om / b l og / )

One interesting thing about Wastelandis that, despite the harsh setting, the game is actually more forgiving than youmight expect. Running out of health will often not spell doom for a character. This is particularly good because there is nway to revive a dead one. So long as a character remains no worse than Unconscious condition, he'll naturally regain hi

points and wake up before too long.

Sometimes combat will reduce a character to Serious condition however, and that requires rather a bit more to overcomincluding applications of another character's Medic skill. If not treated, Serious characters worsen over time and eventuadie. There are also ailments characters can catch that can only be fixed by visiting a doctor.

The main reason Wastelandseems to be remembered today is the depth of its game world. It was one of the earliestgames featuring quests to solve that offered multiple ways of carrying them out.

Some item-based goals had multiple copies of the needed object placed in the game world, allowing players to completethem from different places. The skill system aided in this; each of the player's four characters had skill ranks in a varietof skills, ranging from brawling to perception to lockpicking to more esoteric specialties.

Skills are quite expensive for a character to begin with. The first level in a skill costs one or two skill points, but each lev
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beyond that doubles the cost of the previous one. Skills also increase with use, however.

There are too many skills for one character to know them all to any degree of quality, but by having them each specialiin some field, the player can cover most of the bases, and the holes in the party's skill set, once out in the world, help tdistinguish each playthrough from each other -- and also, if one of the characters should happen to die, to make it easito recover from the loss.

4. D& D Gold Box ser ies

Designed by : Jim Ward, David Cook, Steve Winter, Mike Breault (Pool of Radiance), others

I n f l u e n ce d b y : D&D, obviously. Also Wizardry, especially in its use of specials.

Series: SSI made many of these, at least seven. SSI also made a couple of Buck Rogers games using the Gold Boxengine, and the original Neverwinter Nights (an early AOL offering) was essentially an MMORPG Gold Box game. Therewas even a publicly-released Gold Box AD&D construction kit in the form of the Unlimited Adventurestool.

Legacy: Probably every D&D-licensed RPG to come after owes a tremendous debt to the Gold Box line.

And so we return to Dungeons & Dragons for a moment. Let's first review the progress of the pen-and-paper gamebetween OD&D and AD&D 2nd edition, which is the version that the Gold Box games utilize.

OD&D gave rise to two different, popular branches of the game, a version called just "Dungeons & Dragons" and washanded to TSR staffers to design, and "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons," which was Gary Gygax's baby, and substantivelooked like a version of OD&D with all the supplements rolled in, as well as some additions.

OD&D contained a good number of "rule hacks," weird little special cases introduced for one reason or another. Forexample, in the original books, elves were the only race with special status, able to play as either Fighting Men or MagicUsers, but only one at a time, per adventure. A supplement turned this into D&D's strange "multi-class" rules, giving thethe ability to do both, splitting experience between their classes.

It also opened up the ability to pick different classes, and allow other races to multi-class. But since the purpose was toallow races to seem special compared to ordinary people, humans didn't get access to these rules. But then humansbegan to look like a fool's choice for race, so they introduced the "dual class" rules.

The result was that the rules became ever more complex, and only really understandable to people who had played fromthe start. Then 2nd edition came out (after Gygax had been forced out of the company), and the rules became simple insome ways, but combat became even more complicated. These are the rules upon which the AD&D Gold Box games arebased.

Up until that point, TSR had viewed the burgeoning field of computer RPGs with suspicion. They had released a couple otools for 1st edition DMs (shamefully, still the best such official tools ever produced), but nothing much in the way ofgames. This changed with the introduction ofPool of Radiance.

AD&D was not designed to become a computer game, and thus there are some unusual interface challenges at work heA big advantage coming from its trying to replicate a official pen-and-paper RPG is that some aspects of the game worlwhich almost invariably get simplified out of a concession to workability on a computer did not with the Gold Box games

Take, for example, Vancian magic, the (in)famous aspect of D&D versions 0-3 that had wizard and cleric charactersmemorize spells at the beginning of an adventuring day. At "the beginning of a day," even in table sessions of DungeonsDragons, is a simplification; 2nd Edition established complex rules determining how many hours of preparation magicusers had to undergo before beginning to memorize spells, then the actual amounts of time needed to commit them toretain them. In play sessions DMs usually, and rightly, glossed over this needless complication.

In most computer RPGs, something as weird and flavorful as Vancian magic (something that is only really effective for

people who have read Jack Vance's fantasy work) would be considered too much of an interface hassle to make up for tfairly-minimal atmospheric effect from using it. The Gold Box games do include Vancian magic, even though it required great deal of interface programming at the time to accommodate it -- the games even accurately tally up the hours spein memorizing spells. They also track encumbrance, and even the funky multiple coin types D&D used at the time, with least one inn even refusing payment in anything but platinum.

The games themselves are remembered fondly by many players, probably because of their strong non-linear nature andchallenging play. Like a semi-directed tabletop campaign, players are given many different possible tasks to accomplishand can do them in the order the wish, or switch between them. Many of the obstacles have multiple ways of overcominthem.


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Poo l o f Rad iance (Sc reensho t cou r t esy h t t p : / / w w w .j o y st i ck d i vi si o n.c om / )

For example, to enter the dragon's lair at the end ofPool of Radiance, the player's group can either fight its way directlyin, or find the laundry and dress up in disguise to avoid some trouble, or rescue a prisoner to get a password to infiltratthe castle, or find a teleporter to take the party directly to the dragon. Pool of Radiance, in particular, was designed somuch like an actual D&D adventure that TSR later released a module based upon it.

Second Edition D&D was still a fairly difficult game, and the Gold Box series didn't skimp on that difficulty, but they areleavened tremendously by the save game feature. Second Edition had the most complicated character generation of allthe books, so abuse of the save game feature was pretty much required to make headway.

Technically players could switch out permanently dead or ruined characters with new ones, Wizardry-style, but thenewcomers would join at the lowest level allowed by the scenario, but without the benefit of all the early experienceopportunities his predecessor was able to claim.

I should say a few more words about ruining characters. D&D had resurrection spells, but they were risky. If thecharacter failed his roll he'd be left dead permanently, and even if he survived he'd lose a point of Constitution, whichmeant lost maximum hit points for some characters.

Additionally, there was the Haste spell, which doubled a character's actions and movement for a short time, but at thecost ofa year of perm anent aging. Aging is one of those things that gets thrown around as a different kind of drawbackother games, but D&D aging is fairly difficult to overcome. And the Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance Gold Box gamesare arranged in a sequence, allowing for characters to move from scenario to scenario. Aging a few Haste-caused yearsper game, characters could easily be too old to function effectively by the end of one of the later games.

Pool of Radiancegets most of its exploration interface from Wizardry. Those games with an overworld present it as singscreens of wilderness, with encounters sprinkled around. One of the things that 2E brought to D&D, and works fairly wefor the computer games, is its "non-weapon proficiencies," which we might know better as, simply, "skills".

The crowning achievement of the Gold Box games was their fidelity to the 2E rules, which were generally unsuitable to

computer play. They are not a direct port; there are plenty of spells, even the basic ones in the core rule books, thataren't present. (Some of them, like Reincarnation, would by mere implication have made the game much harder todevelop.)

Many previous CRPGs unofficially used some version of the D&D rules as their base. (One of the telltale signs, visible inWizardryand Bard's Tale, is the use of "armor class," and whether it counts down as it's improved.) AD&D 2E was thezenith of the game in terms of independence from computer simulations. It has been observed that a likely inspiration f3E was its suitability to adaption as computer games, and that 4E seems downright MMORPG-like.

Fur t he r read ing : GameFAQs hosts an excellent guide to the 2nd Edition AD&D rules.

5 . Ques t fo r Glo ry
http://www.joystickdivision.com/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgotten_Realmshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonlancehttp://www.gamefaqs.com/computer/doswin/file/564785/8566http://www.gamefaqs.com/computer/doswin/file/564785/8566http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonlancehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgotten_Realmshttp://www.joystickdivision.com/


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Designed by : Corey Cole, Lori Ann Cole

I n f l u e n ce d b y : D&D, graphic adventures (Sierra style).

Series: Five games. Even though considerable time elapsed between the later installments, it's still possible to take acharacter through all five adventures.

Legacy: RPGs seem to be coming back around to adventure game design, particularly in their use of object manipulatiopuzzles.

The time was that adventure games and role-playing games were considered close kin. Pen-and-paper Dungeons &

Dragons adventures are held in what could be termed "narrative space," the players forming a mental image of the areausing a description provided by the DM, stating what their characters were doing, which the DM folded back into his owninternal representation.

Back and forth their descriptions go, defining the world's progress in an iterative fashion. Early adventure games wereinspired by this kind of interaction, and even drew from some of D&D's other aspects; Zorkhad a fight with a troll theoutcome of which was determined randomly.

But then the two genres split apart. Adventure games became about puzzles, especially object manipulation puzzles, buusually things that worked the same way each time. Meanwhile, RPGs went towards statistical simulation: things thatwere influenced by numbers and contained a strong random element. Further, the narrative gap between the two genrewidened. In an adventure game, you played the part of some specific someone, someone like Arthur Dent, King Grahamor Roger Wilco, all of whom have a personality -- even if it's a fairly generic one. RPGs let the player create a charactertake the role of protagonist.

But the key aspects of adventure games and RPGs are not incompatible; they just evolved along different tracks. In factmost RPG characters end up doing many of the same kinds of things that adventure game characters do, just in adifferent interface.

They take things from place to place, they speak with other characters, they solve puzzles that often have to do withputting a specific object in a specific-object-shaped hole, they push magic buttons and pull switches. The real differencethat in RPGs this stuff is just a means to an end, something to break up dungeon exploration and combat sessions. (Thialso means adventure games tend to have rather better puzzles, since they aren't distracting from the "real" game.)

Considering the two genres' common roots, it's amazing that there aren't more crossovers between them. Probably thebest known, most popular such crossover is the Quest for Glory series, a sequence of Sierra On-Line graphical adventurthat handily combines the best of both worlds.

Q ues t fo r Gl o ry (Sc reensho t cou r t esy h t t p : / / h g 1 0 1 . cl a ss ic g am i n g . g am e s p y .c o m / )

At the start of a game, the player chooses a class, Fighter, Thief or Wizard. The choice of a class determines which skillthey get. There's an experience score, but it's mostly just points, without an effect on the game. Skills can be advanced
http://hg101.classicgaming.gamespy.com/http://hg101.classicgaming.gamespy.com/


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practicing them, however, causing them to creep slowly upward.

The most interesting thing about the game is that it is filled with skill checks that demands a player have one skill oranother, but all the major puzzles can be solved with every class. There's multiple ways to solve most puzzles.

There's also a few things that can only be one with one character, but they aren't required to win. Ultimately this is thesame idea that was used in Wasteland, indeed all skill-based RPGs, and it gives the game a surprising amount ofreplayability.

Best of all, like Wizardry, the games in the series allow the player to import a character from one game to the next. It'spossible to take a hero from the beginning of the first game to the end of the last one, four games later, taking his skilland some equipment and money with him.

Very few games try to do anything like that today; it's a feature that seems to have mostly died off from gaming,although it still shows up in strange places; the Gamecube/Wii Fire Emblem games allow the player to import his partyfrom one to another, which remains, to this day, the only use a non-Gamecube game has had for the memory card poron the side of the Wii unit.

6 . Migh t & Mag i c

Designed by : Jon Van Caneghem (original designer, creator, producer)

I n f l u e n ce d b y : Old-school D&D and Wizardry.

Series: Nine games, plus the spin-off "Heroes of Might & Magic" (itself a revision of New World Computing's King'sBounty) and some other side games.

Legacy: Difficult to say. Of all the classic RPGs, Might & Magic is the one entered most shamefully into obscurity.

Might & Magic is a series that's fallen into disuse lately, which is a great shame because, in many ways, it is the mostfaithful homage to the old-style, exploring-for-its-own-sake D&D campaign ever sold as a computer game.

First off, it is highly non-linear. Each game's dozens -- maybe even hundreds -- of quests and tasks tend to be scatterearound the world in a semi-scrambled fashion. Players are left to their own devices as far as figuring out what to do andwhat level they should be at to do it.

I must remind the reader that this is a style of game that relies on the use of unlimited game reloading, so players canrecover when they unpreparedly run into that group of Cuisinarts while less than level 200. Usually the player has no cluan area is out of depth for him until the monsters wipe him out.

Once granted this quirk, the M&Mgames are marvelously open-ended and wondrous experiences. They remain one of tfew games to adequately express one of the most unique joys of the old-school RPG experience: that of unabashedpowergaming. Might & Magic I I has a magic space in one of its caverns that grants all the characters, one time only, athousand free max HP.


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M i gh t & M a gi c

The series does have a story but it tends to be fairly... I suppose the word I'm looking for is "crazy". For example, in thWorld of Xeen games, the players are quested by the Dragon Pharaoh to save the world from the two evils of Lord Xeenand Alamar.

Along the way they beat up elemental lords, fall out of cloud worlds (probably multiple times), befriend a bunch ofpalindrome-talking monks, collect Mega Credits with which to pay for building a castle, stop a witch who likes turning kiinto goblins, and many other things; these are just the top of my head. Most of these things can be done in any order,

and there are literally dozens of other things to do in the game.

In Might & Magic I I the players meet Lord Peabody (after rescuing "his boy, Sherman"), travel in time to prevent a fightagainst an undefeatable Mega Dragon, sack innocent orc villages, and at the end must solve a cryptogram within in a tilimit.

These kinds of things could have felt like a massive series of fetch quests, but Might & Magicis too varied for this tobecome too noticeable by the player. The game allows players to spend time wandering around and getting into troublehowever he wants.

It's not uncommon to have accomplished a half dozen quests before the player even knows someone in the game wantsthem done, and so ends up getting rewarded the moment the quest is officially granted. I'll tell you right now that I donconsider this to be a bad thing at all.

One of the most interesting design choices made by designer Jon Van Caneghem is the use of two types of currency, th

usual gold pieces, and gems. Awards of both areas tend to rise as the player explores harder and harder areas, but theyalso both tend to ultimately be limited in number.

They're not always hard-limited, but there comes a time towards the end of many (if not all) of these games where all othe areas have been explored and there's no more to be found, even if there are ways to continue to earn experiencepoints. The thing is that gaining a level requires both experience and gold, and while experience is the limiting factor inthe early stages of the game, it is the player's gold reserves that more often limits towards the end.

Gems are an even more useful type of wealth that is used up in casting the more powerful spells. All of the revival spellparticularly, cost gems, as do spells that can permanently enchant items and perform other tasks that would break othegames.

Tying this magic to a second type of wealth, and allowing scarcity to limit the supply of that wealth, helps Might & Magispell system to avoid some of the limitations that magic in other games suffers from.


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They're supposed to be wizards after all; what's the use in having a wizard if you don't get to bend the rules sometimesMight & Magic's chief innovation is in allowing just this sort of thing to happen, while keeping it within the balance of alarger game.

7 . Nethack

Designed by : Jay Fenlason, Andries Brouwer (original Hack), Mike Stephenson, Nethack "Dev Team" (Nethack), manycontributors

I n f l u e n ce d b y : Rogue, Hack, D&D.

Series: Just the one, although I suppose one could count variants as being of the same "series." In that event: NethackTNG, Nethack - - , Nethack + , Lethe Patch, Wizard Patch, SLASH, SLASH'EM, Sporkhack and others.

Legacy: Diabloand Diablo II were not directly influenced by Nethack, but they share Rogueas a common ancestor. Along-lived JRPG series, Mystery Dungeon, is informed by Nethack's design strengths.

For useful background inform ation on t he concept of a " roguelike", check Gamasutra'searlier articleon the t opic ofRogue.

Above, in the section on Wizardry, I remarked that the biggest thing that pen-and-paper RPGs had, and still have, overCRPGs is lack of flexibility. The player characters cannot do everything they could in a real situation because the computcannot generalize the environment to the degree that this could be done, and doesn't have the creativity to improvisethings in response to player actions.

The standard CRPG method of dealing with this is to provide the most important and obvious actions: Move, Attack,Search, Eat, Rest and stuff like that, and to specifically reduce the importance of other things. Nearly always this resultsa game world that's lacking in scope for player action, since a truly ingenious player can often come up with somethingbizarre and useful to try.

The only RPG genre to make any headway against this long-standing limitation of the form is the roguelikes. Of all ofthem, they're the one to have overcome it the most. Indeed, the shining beacon that shows us that after all these yearthe problem may yet prove not to be completely insoluble is Nethack.

Nethack's solution, admittedly, may not be universally applicable. It solves the problem of players not being able tocommunicate what they want to the game by giving them an over-abundance of options, and it solves the problem of noffering players things to do with those options by using a lot of random content generation, hidden uses for abilities, abeing content to let a few of those commands be usable only in occasional instances.

On that first problem, about communication with the game: Nethackhas dozens of commands. Players can sit down,throw or wield anything they can carry, dip objects into potions, fountains or standing water, write on the floor, playmusical instruments, disarm and reset traps, make offerings to the gods, and many other things. Not all of the commanare needed to play through the game, but Nethack's game universe is complex enough that the best players know themall, and know when they're useful.

On the second problem, that of what to do with the options allowed, it uses a lot of knock-on monster and itemproperties. Every item has a composition; things made of paper could be burnt by fire attacks, those made of metalrusted by water.

Monsters which are orcs automatically take extra damage from the sword Orcrist. Monsters with sight can be blinded byexpensive cameras. These incidental properties provide a fair amount ofNethack's depth. Interestingly, they don't comeas a result of an object-oriented design. Nethackis implemented in straight C, with nary a class statement to be found!
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4013/the_history_of_rogue_have__you_.phphttp://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4013/the_history_of_rogue_have__you_.php


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Nethack

Nethackis a roguelike, and so I'm required to say something about one of those games' most controversial features:permadeath. (Okay, I admit it -- I've been leading up to this.) Since Ultimaand Wizardry, but unlike pen-and-papergames to this day, players are allowed, and even encouraged, to save games and return to them if things go badly, adesign characteristic that makes it almost impossible for anything really bad to happen to the player's characters.

I make no secret the fact that I consider this one of the most pernicious aspects of CRPG gaming, that permanentdisadvantages acquired during the course of play cannot be used by a designer because the player will simply load backto the time before the disadvantage occurred. Admittedly, the prevalence of this attitude comes from some older gamesthat could easily be made unwinnable if the player wasn't careful.

However, it's reached the point where "adventuring" in an RPG rarely feels risky. Gaining experience is supposed to carrythe risk of harm and failure. Without that risk, gaining power becomes a foregone conclusion.

It has reached the point where the mere act of spending time playing the game appears to give players the right to havtheir characters become more powerful. The obstacles that provide experience become simply an arbitrary wall to scalebefore more power is granted; this, in a nutshell, is the type of play that has brought us grind, where the journey issimple and boring and the destination is something to be raced to.

Nethackand many other roguelikes do feature experience gain, but it doesn't feel like grind. It doesn't because much ofthe time the player is gaining experience, he is in danger of sudden, catastrophic failure. When you're frequently a

heartbeat away from death, it's difficult to become bored.

8 . Elder Scro l ls (se r i es )

Designed by : Vijay Lakshman, Julian LeFay, Ted Peterson (Arena), Julian LeFay, Bruce Nesmith, Ted Peterson(Daggerfall), Todd Howard, Ken Rolston (Morrowind), Todd Howard, Ken Rolston (Oblivion)

I n s p ir e d b y : Ultima Underworld, pen-and-paper RPGs

Series: Four main games, with a few expansions thrown in

Legacy: Fallout 3, also created by Bethesda Softworks, follows the open-ended style of the Elder Scrollsgames, amongother influences

The Elder Scrollsgames take the non-linear approach to its height. Each is a full world to explore with many things to dwhich are not strictly necessarily to win. Morrowind, infamously, a multi-CD game, could be won in under eight minutesthe player knows what to do.

Of course, doing that, you don't get to see much along the way. And there is much to see! These games create hugeexpanses of territory to explore, huge caverns and dungeons, and have thousands of people to speak with along the waLead designer ofMorrowind, Ken Rolston, an old hand in pen-and-paper RPGs design, has said this was to try to bringthat kind of the free-form experience to the game.

How successful is this free-form experience? How wide-open is the game? Well, according to the game's Wikipedia pagethe second Elder Scrollsgame, Daggerfall, contains not one, not ten, not a hundred, but 15,000 towns. Italics, indeed! Itakes several hours just to walk across the game's gigantic map.

How did something like this become possible? Wouldn't it take millions of man-hours to create all that space, and logic-


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defying compression techniques to squeeze it onto a CD? Well, no -- not if you create it all through fractal generationtechniques, like the game world in space games Eliteand Starflight. In other words: they used a pseudo-randomgenerator, seeded with set values tied to each sector of game world, to algorithmically create terrain and contents.

The drawback of that approach, however, is that it's really hard to make interesting random content. Roguelikes aregenerally best at it (although those space games mentioned are no slouches). As a result, most people only say dullplaceholder text, dungeons tend to be fairly lackluster and lacking in design, and because of some bugs in the generatothere are a good number of bugs that make playing the game difficult, if not impossible.

The Elder Scro l l s I V : Ob l i v ion

Later Elder Scrollsgames went to using handmade terrain, and as a result have much smaller (but still huge) gameworlds. And yet, the problem with creating thousands of game characters remains; many of the basic man-on-the-streeinhabitants of the games' towns could nearly be clones of each other.

One advantage of the huge-world approach of game design is that there is room for a great number of sub-quests.Players can run assassination missions for important people, join and rise up the ranks in the guilds or military, join cla

and houses, steal from merchants, create spells and potions, and permanently enchant items.

It's not quite as bizarre as Might & Magic, I notice, but there does seem to be considerable non-placeholder contentthere. The depth of the subquests is surprisingly deep considering that many people never see much of the contentdeveloped for the game. Daggerfall, Morrowind, and Oblivionall allow players to become vampires as a side-quest.

The initial state can be acquired as a status ailment in a fight, and then either cured or encouraged. While a vampire,players can drink the blood of sleeping characters and participate in vampire scripted quests, provided they stay indoorsduring the daylight hours.

9 . Baldu r 's Gat e (se r i es )

Designed by : Ray Muzyka (director)

I n s p ir e d b y : D&D, Gold Box and possibly Black Box games, perhaps Wasteland

Series: Two main games and two expansions. A few spiritual sequels using the same engine, the Icewind Daleseries anPlanescape: Torment, were produced by a different company.

Legacy: Neverwinter Nightsand its sequel, but really, the continued relevance of the Dungeons & Dragons brand tocomputer gaming is largely due to Baldur's Gate.

Baldur's Gatewas the game that rescued computer D&D from the wastebasket. SSI's bug-ridden Black Box games hadnearly destroyed the venerable property's reputation. It was rescued by one of the coolest computer games ever to beathe brand. The game is still clear enough in the memory that it seems like it must have used 3rd Edition rules, but itturns out that it doesn't: all the mainline Baldur's Gategames used 2E rules.


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Unlike the Gold Box games, Baldur's Gatedoesn't use a first-person perspective, and it doesn't force the characters tostick together in one unit either. This is one of the more inventive breakthoughs of the game, in fact, and it seems like may have been inspired by Wasteland's party-splitting feature. At any time, the player can switch to combat time, givincharacters actions as if they were in a fight.

Baldur ' s Gate (Sc reensho t cou r t esy h t t p : / / n o s t al g ee k .w o r d p r e ss .c o m / )

During fights the game can either be played in real-time or, since the pause feature allows commands to be queued tocharacters, as a kind of turn-based game. The game can even be switched to multiplayer mode, allowing a different

human player to take the role of each character.

Although there are many NPCs in the game who can join the main character, in multiplayer mode individual characters cbe rolled for each of the six party characters, instead of just the leader, a feature that was expanded upon in the laterBioWare game Neverwinter Nights.

Another particularly awesome thing about it (and the later Neverwinter Nights) is that most of the NPCs in the game, inaddition to having scripted dialogue and often quests and rewards to impart, are also attackable characters with statsshould the need to use them in combat arises.

This helps the game to remain more open-ended and available to multiple solutions to problems than linearly-scripted.Baldur's Gate is possibly the game to best marry the old-school simulation approach of the early CRPGs with the latertendency to provide unalterable, hard-coded stories.

Finally, I don't think I can let this game pass by without noting the extremely well-done characterization of the potentia

party characters. I am not aware of anyone who has played this game who had a certain ranger named Minsc join hisparty who wasn't utterly enthralled by the character.

It is rare that a CRPG can produce a character with the kind of life and wit that you can imagine a tabletop playerinvesting in his charge. He even has a Wikipedia page, which confirms that he had his origin in social pen-and-papersessions. Go for the eyes, Boo!

1 0 . W o r l d o f W a r c r af t

Designed by : Rob Pardo, Jeff Kaplan, Tom Chilton

I n s p ir e d b y : Earlier MMORPGs, Diablo
http://nostalgeek.wordpress.com/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minschttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minschttp://nostalgeek.wordpress.com/


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Series: One game with two expansions

Legacy: Oh, the games that have tried to copy World of Warcraftand have failed.

And so we have finally arrived at this: the 10-million-plus subscriber mumak in the room, the game that mademainstream in a way not seen since the days of D&D, the game a legion of other MMORPGs so desperately wants to beWhat is the attraction here? Why is it that this game broken through the pop cultural barrier and gotten a South Parkmachinima episode?

It is not an easy question to answer, actually. If it were, Age of Conan would be doing better in its fight for survival. Buthere are some things that Blizzard is doing well that are easy enough to point out.

First, the game is unusually accessible to uninitiated players. In the tradeoff between ease-of-play and depth, it seemsthat Blizzard made a conscious decision to go with the former. The previous occupant of the throne of MMORPG King,EverQuest, took slow character growth to an extreme unmatched even by classic D&D. A player could spend weeksbetween levels later in his adventuring career, and getting killed even once was a huge setback in progress towards thenext.

Most other MMORPGs games didn't slow character growth to that extent, but neither made it as quick as World ofWarcraft, in which an avid player can gain a level in a single evening. If the game's systems weren't simple enough for aaverage player to understand then the game couldn't be as popular as it is now.

Second, the game allows for a lot of flexibility in character design. This fits in with the accessibility in that, once acharacter reaches maximum level, he can start over with a different character and have nearly an entirely differentexperience.

Part of this, perhaps, comes from the company's experience in developing the Diablogames, which bear a certainsuperficial similarity with World of Warcraft's equipment game. (Perhaps it should be said that the stock MMORPGequipment game is heavily influenced by Diablo.)

W o r l d o f W a r cr a f t

But do these things really explain World of Warcraft's popularity? By now, WoW's continued ascendancy seems largelyassured just by virtue of its huge subscriber base; social pressures make MMORPGs more addictive when there are morepeople playing them.

WoW grew rapidly from the start due to Blizzard's massive reputation from its Warcraft, StarCraftand Diablogames, anmade no obvious mistakes to drive people off. Just over a year later, the game already had five million subscribers, has
http://www.wowwiki.com/Statisticshttp://www.wowwiki.com/Statistics


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D r ag o n W a r r i or I I I

The result is that the combat, which remains simple, takes up a lesser portion of the game's experience than the stuffaround it, allowing it to slip, a little, into the background. Until Dragon Quest VIII, the game wasn't even 3D. DQ8 did alot to revive the series' moribund fortunes.

Instead of driving further towards photo-realism as did the Final Fantasygames, it aimed instead to replicate Toriyama'character art as much as possible, with startling results. The series' lo-fi presentation has enabled it to target theNintendo DS for installment I X, and plans are underway to produce DQX for the Wii, a decision that surprised someobservers.

As for the games themselves, their use of some of the generally-abandoned features of older games means they havemanaged to retain some of the strategic depth that attended the classic computer RPGs.

Dragon Quest games still use, for instance, cursed items, gauntlet dungeons that players must conserve resources topass, difficult boss monsters, and a generally upbeat atmosphere. The fact that the game can be slowly and steadilyconquered by all players, equipped only with perseverance, seems to be key to the series' popularity in Japan.

1 2 . Drago n Slayer

Designed by : Yoshio Kiya (producer)

I n f l u e n ce d b y : Early CRPGs.

Series: Eight games. To this day, only three games in this series to have made it to the U.S. One is the NES' Legacy ofthe Wizard, in Japan known as Dragon Slayer I V: DraSle Family. The other, Sorcerian, got a limited PC release by SierrOn-Line. Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroeshit the TurboGrafx CD. The NES sleeper action-RPG Faxanadu is a side-game to this series.

Legacy: It's actually hard to point to conclusive evidence of the games Falcom inspired, but the tendency to rework theentire game system for each installment was probably an influence on Final Fantasy.

I'm going to cover these game by game, because they're different enough from each other that describing one doesn't


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begin to explain the others:

Dragon Sl aye r :

In a huge, deviously-constructed, tile-based world, a hero fights monsters and harvests items (by carrying them,laboriously, one at a time to his house) to increase his power so that he can fight more monsters. After hours of this, hbecomes powerful enough to kill the biggest monster, the Dragon, and so proceed to the next level. (Level?!)

The hero can move his house around by pushing it, making the trip to carrying things home less time-consuming. Visitihome replenishes hit points, carrying a sword makes the player able to kill monsters, carrying home a power stone raisehis strength, and so on.

The hero also has spells for some utility purposes, such as tearing down walls. Overall he is extremely fragile, so he muplan carefully in order to succeed.

Dragon Sl aye r (Sc reensho t cou r t esy h t t p : / / h g 1 0 1 . cl a ss ic g am i n g . g am e s p y .c om / )

Dragon Slayer prominently displays a number of stats (using eight-digit numbers with lots of leading zeros) and pitsplayers against lots of strange monsters, but it's more of an action game, really, than an RPG. Still, its loot-basedcharacter advancement system is in line with the older D&D way of doing things.

Xanadu :

Dragon Slayer is an overhead game. Its sequel, Xanadu, is more of a side-view platformer, although, when contact ismade with a monster, the game switches to another screen for the battle sequence.

Battle is real-time and consists of the usual Falcom combat scheme, also used in the better-known Ysgames, of rammininto enemies and hoping your health holds out longer than theirs. Despite the similar combat, Xanadu doesn't have a

whole lot to do with Dragon Slayer, an aspect that became typical of the series.

Romanc ia :

Number three in line. Not a long game, and not a complicted game, but an incredibly difficult game all the same. Thegame is an RPG platformer, and this time doesn't switch to a separate battle screen for combat.

It's got quite a lot of obscure tricks that must be performed to proceed, sort of like Namco's Tower of Druaga. It also haa strict 30 minute time limit! There is a fan-made English translation of this game, which also fixes some minor bugs anrestores some features found disabled in the code.

Dras le Fam i ly , a . k .a . Legacy o f t he W i za rd :

One of only three Dragon Slayer games to make it to the U.S. It's infamous there for its immense difficulty, and excellemusic. I've played all the way through this, and can say that it's incredibly large, extremely hard, and yet strangely fun


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play.

The game makes you work for every little thing, but it's very satisfying when it's all pulled off A Let's Play video report othe NES version of the game is up on YouTube, and demonstrates well the game's many insidious traps.

Sorcer ian :

It's a side-scrolling action RPG with a four-member party and Wizardry-like character creation! Your party membersfollow behind sort of like the options from Gradius. It's especially interesting because, also like Wizardry, there werefurther adventures that could be purchased to take your characters into. The game got a DOS release in the U.S. underthe auspices of Sierra On-Line, although none of the add-on disks made it over.

Dragon Sl aye r : T he Legend o f He roes:

A standard JRPG, nominally in the Dragon Quest mold, with the usual town/dungeon gameplay split, turn-based battlesand strong story elements indicative of the genre. As Xanadu earlier spun off into its own series, so did Legend of Heroeseries; games in this series continue to this day in Japan.

Falcom's greatest hit was Ys, which is a shame as, for its good points, Ysis still painfully straight-forward. The DragonSlayer games, for their weird action elements and platforming, paradoxically kept in closer contact with the spirit of old-school roleplaying. What a strange and wonderful collection of games.

Sources:

- HG101- YouTube demonstration ofRomancia- Translation patch for Romancia(Geocities link)

1 3 . Fi r e Em blem

Designed by : Shouzou Kaga (original), Keisuke Terasaki (director), probably others

I n f l u e n ce d b y : Strategy wargames

Series: There have been many Fire Emblem games, and most of them never made it to the U.S., although this ischanging; the original game finally made it to America recently as a DS title.

Legacy: The Shining Forceline of tactical wargames is obviously directly inspired by this. A more indirect inspiration waprobably Tactics Ogre, which went on to directly affect Final Fantasy Tacticsand, later, the Nippon Ichi (Disgaea) tacticaJRPGs.

Fire Emblem is the first tactical JRPG wargame released, an inspiration for what would become an entire subgenre. It's atile-based man-level wargame set on a grid with role-playing elements. Unique among computer games of the time,characters weren't interchangeable pawns but each of them unique, both in class and in stats. The more a character isused in battle the more experience he earns, making him subtly better in many areas.

Fire Emblem is a game of slow character growth. It's not hard for a unit to gain a level, but the primary advantage fromthis is each of his stats might increase by one. Every unit has its own level advancement percentage chance for each ofits stats, information which is kept secret from the player, but even a character with great growth chances might just fato gain a point in any one, or even any, of its stats, leaving him underpowered.

The Fire Emblem series are notoriously difficult games, so a bit of bad luck like this could make following battles ratherharder. It's not unknown to reach the final battles of the game and reach opponents with defense stats so high that onlyone or two characters are capable of inflicting more than a few points of damage.
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Fi re Em blem (Sc reensho t cou r t esy h t t p : / / h g 1 0 1 . cl a ss ic g am i n g . g am e s p y .c om / )

This is a bad situation for the player to be in, because if an enemy isn't killed in one hit, if it's in range it gets a freecounterattack, and these same high-defense characters tend also to have high attack power. In Fire Emblem games, acharacter who runs out of hit points is usually dead forever. If this happens with a very useful character, the loss could enough to make the game unwinnable in the end.

If you compare Fire Emblem to the third or fourth edition of D&D, the ones that emphasize tactical movement, they don

really look all that different from each other -- right down to the "support" for permanent character death.Fortunately for players, the game does allow free restoring to the state at the beginning of a battle, so a favoritecharacter can be saved... provided the player is willing to abandon all progress yet made in that fight. The ending evensubtly changes based on who remains alive at the end of the game.

In some ways, Fire Emblem is more realistic than D&D. Magic users are relatively rare; most characters would be classein a D&D campaign, as some kind of fighter. Most weapons are non-magical, and even those that are have a limiteddurability. And most opponents aren't monsters but human characters.

D&D got its start in the rules of Chainmail, a not-dissimilar tabletop game which focused on the efforts of whole armies.was Gary Gygax's idea to reduce the scope and add in fantasy characters and an overall "adventure" overgame to wrapthe fighting. In Fire Emblem, the merest hint of that elder pastime can still be seen.

14 . Fina l Fant asy Designed by : Hironobu Sakaguchi (the original and many sequels), others

I n f l u e n ce d b y : Dragon Quest, Falcom RPGs and (superficially) D&D.

Series: Twelve main games and XII I and XI Von their way. There have been a huge number of side games as well; thebest-known are probably Final Fantasy Tactics, Crisis Core, Final Fantasy X - 2, Chocobo's Dungeonand, more prominentrecent years, the Cryst al Chroniclessub-series.

Legacy: A huge swath of JRPG production has been directly influenced, if not trying to outright ape, one or more gameof the Final Fantasy series.

Is there anything to say about this series of games that hasn't already been said? Ah well, I will give it a shot anyway.


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Ahem.

Final Fantasy! Single-handedly saved Square from obscurity! Injected new life into the JRPG genre!

Final Fantasy! Made the fortunes of the Sony PlayStation! At long last brought JRPGs to something approaching culturalrelevance!

Final Fantasy! Aped by countless game companies, stagnant and wallowing in its own cinematic pretensions. Seems not know how profoundly goofy it has become. And yet, FFXIII will almost undoubtedly outsell every other game released thmonth it hits shelves.

Fina l Fant asy (Sc reensho t cou r t esy h t t p : / / s o ck s m a k e p eo p l es ex y . n et / )

These things do not concern us here, but what does is its design, and the Final Fantasygames, since about I Von, havehad excellent design. Like the Falcom RPGs that came before (although not to their extent), Final Fantasygames havealways made it a point to redesign the core systems for each new game.

Usually, each game features some key feature that serves to distinguish it from the others. Sometimes, as with ActiveTime Battle and the Job System, the feature proves to be so engaging in its own right that it's returned to in later gameor even become nearly standard through the industry. The mechanics are well-planned, they make characters powerfulwithout becoming too powerful -- unless the player works hard to gain well-hidden super abilities.

It's good that Final Fantasyhas such strong straight design elements because frankly, as a medium for actual role-playi

and realism, it's sorely lacking. Every game system Final Fantasyhas introduced has been something purposely counterto the traditional values of role-playing games. Active Time Battle: it's cool and all, but menu selections in real-time? Josystem: does it make sense that a high level fighter be able to instantly become a wizard, or a dancer or a chemist, on whim?

Espers and Materia: what now? Did anyone fantasize about these things before they were built into Final Fantasy? Thoseare the more defensible elements; let's not even get into "Dressspheres" and "Sphere Grids" and whatever else they'reputting spheres into today.

Probably the most damaging influence it has wrought upon the JRPG field is Final Fantasy's complete divorcing of playmechanics from reality. Some of those systems award the player's characters a resource called AP, or sometimes JP.(Usually Ability Points or Job Points.) Often the fights that award high AP are completely different from the fights thataward experience points. What AP is supposed to represent has never been adequately explained.

Increasingly in JRPGs, awards and points are bestowed more for the role they play in the fill- in-the-blanks design
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template, where spending time in the game makes characters more powerful, rather than even pretending to be depictinprocesses that could happen, even in a fantasy world. The source of this tendency I trace to Final Fantasy.

Why is it, exactly, that racing Chocobos should grant the player access to a hideously overpowered mega spell? Why dospinning the wheels of a slot machine cause damage to a foe? How could a character change so utterly that he hascompletely different skills and abilities just by picking up a new "job?"

All RPGs traffic in abstractions. To some degree, an RPG can only be as successful as the extent to which he causes theplayer to ignore how arbitrary it all is. One of the signs of the aging of the JRPG genre is how its games have, recently,become less careful about how blatantly made-up their various systems are.

Final Fantasygames are where this tendency originated. Its item screens, character clothing, magic trinkets and board

games have become synonyms for each other, anonymous resources that mean nothing beyond the story events thatprovide them and the various advantages they grant. They may all be balanced (more or less) regarding the place theyhold in the game, but, why? And yet, due to Final Fantasy's massive popularity, the tendency to tack on a strangely-named "system" has spread out to the whole of JRPGs.

In terms of game design, I must reiterate, all these things are perfectly fine. In terms ofRPG design, though, they seemout-of-place. These games have turned into a strange amalgam of things that Gary Gygax would not have recognized.

Take Paper Mario, for instance. I love the Paper Mariogames; they are as well-written as any other game you could poito, but are they really RPGs? Does the person sitting at the controller "play the role" as Mario, any more than he does intypical side-scroller? Paper Marioalso has a charming battle system, but it barely pretends to simulate anything.

The opposite approach, at least in the context of JRPGs, is that of Dragon Quest, which has kept pretty much the samebattle system since the '80s. It's been updated with better graphics, and animations, and the occasional add-on feature(and sometimes those fall prey to the same thing as Final Fantasy), but it's still recognizably the same mechanism by

which the blue-suited warrior went forth and slew the Dragonlord.

It is true that Final Fantasygames have been so influential because of their great popularity, and that popularity didn'tarise randomly. But that popularity has resulted in people uncritically copying the negative aspects of the series inadditional to the positive ones. Just like how everyone's trying to be World of Warcraftnow by duplicating what theynotice about the surface aspects of that game, without considering the strong design foundation the game is built upon.

Am I being too literal-minded, here, in my treatment of "role-playing games?" I may well be. But I have discovered thaattempting to put Gygax and Arneson, OD&D and the era of Lake Geneva into any sort of context with late-era JRPGweirdness is asking for disillusionment. The disconnect between them is unavoidable, and too seldom remarked upon. Itthe reason why I, and many others, feel I must add that "J" to the initials RPG here, instead of sticking with the letter "

1 5 . Moth er , a .k .a . Ea r t hb oun d

Designed by : Shigesato Itoi (director)

I n f l u e n ce d b y : Dragon Quest, popular culture

Series: Three games, but they're incredibly fondly-remembered.

Legacy: Hard to say. As is sometimes the case with works of utter genius, they prove difficult to draw from. The early Dgame Contact seems to draw inspiration from it in both art style and humor.

The game system of the Motherseries is lifted, almost entirely, from Dragon Quest. Even in the days when the seriesbegan back on Nintendo's 8-bit Famicom, this was something of a throwback. While the story of the first game is good,it's not until the second game where the play of the game began to branch out.

Unique among JRPGs, and superior to most CRPGs, the Mothergames are well-written and engaging far beyond the cal

duty. Where many JRPGs are content to throw together a bunch of musical terms, a war between "light" and "darknesselves and catgirls for party members and a whole lotta grinding for experience, the Mothergames provide instead anastonishingly witty and erudite set of references, and yet the game doesn't throw them around haphazardly (as does, saXenogears).

Many articles on the series make it a point to mention that they are games that take place "in the present day" insteadin a fantasy or sci-fi setting. This quality isn't as unique as it used to be, but the game still succeeds because of its neartotal lack of JRPG "quirks."

What do I mean by that? Okay. The series doesn't have any of these things: anime character art, spiky-hairedprotagonists, emo drama binges or moony amnesiaics. Instead of trying to impress players with "dark fantasy" that realike a teenager's poetry journal, the mood of the Mothergames is generally light and silly.

Yet, it can turn on a dime to cosmic horror (end ofMother 2) or genuine anguish (an important event early in Mother 3,


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and its final scenes). Done falsely, the games could have turned out as tone-deaf as JRPGs often are, but instead thejuxtaposition of the humor and the grief makes each somehow more effective.

M o t h e r 3 (Sc reensho t cou r t esy h t t p :/ / m o t h e r 3 .f o bb y .n e t / )

To move to discussion of the game's play mechanics, one of the things that the game does fairly well is in its handling ostatus conditions. Most games are content to offer poisoning and leave it at that, but Mother 2offers such bizarre ailmenas mushroomizing (messes up controls & produces confusion in battle), possession by spirits (an invisible ghost opponenis added to fights who attacks random party members -- but can be harmed and even killed by enemy area attacks,curing the condition) and the dreaded diamondizing (sort of like a super-death; many means of character revival won'twork on a character who's been diamondized).

One of the more gimmicky aspects ofMother 2and 3's battle system is the "rolling HP counter." The party's HP totals arepresented on-screen as numbers on an odometer-like readout. Losing hit points from attacks results in the wheelsspinning and counting down to the new value.

However, a character doesn't feel the effect of running out of hit points until the number reaches its destination. So, a

character who has "taken mortal damage," sending his dials on a trip to zero, can be saved by hitting him with a healinspell before the numbers get there.

The important element here is that the numbers count down in real time, regardless of message speed or pagingfrequency. It's a gimmick, but it does help to bring an aspect of panicky urgency to fights with strong opponents, whichthe Mothergames have plenty of.

Mother 3contains a new combat gimmick of its own, its much-discussed "sound battles." The previous games in theseries would use different background music for different types of enemies. Mother 2had rather a large number of thesebattle themes, and Mother 3has even more, which is all the more impressive because the music affects battle.

Each background track has an unplayed "beat" track. If, after an attack, the player hits a button just in time with thatbeat, he does additional damage, and if he keeps it going he can do damage much in excess of the original hit.

This is innocent enough, except that the battle music in the Motherseries is sometimes a bizarre and stuttering thing thsometimes doesn't agree with your petty hu-man conceptions of music. The website Cruise Elroy did a detailedexamination of some of Mother 3's battle themes and found them to be almost hilariously tricky.

1 6 . Pokmon (se r i es )

Designed by : Satoshi Tajiri (creator)

I n f l u e n ce d b y : Dragon Quest. insect collecting

Series: Many games, organized into "tiers" of similar compatible titles. There have thus far been five tiers and 14 gameplus a few side games like Pokmon Rangerand the series of console add-on games beginning with Stadium.

Legacy: In Japan these days it almost seems like if the RPG wasn't inspired by Final Fantasy, then it must have been
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inspired by Pokmon.

Pokmontakes the party-switching element of the Dragon Quest games and radically expands it, offering players up to151 characters with which to fill out his team. Later games kept those characters (well, most of them) and added in mamore.

At the moment, there are 493 possible monsters from which the player can construct his team, although due to thetrading mechanics and rarity levels of various monsters in different games, most players won't be able to choose from athe monsters in the full set.

Also like Dragon Quest, Pokmon is a game that remains surprisingly unchanged from its original form. The first gamesshould be said, had a uniquely heavy design for an original Game Boy title. Each of the 151 monsters has one or two

types which determine its weaknesses, stats in four (later, five) categories, and up to four moves, each with its own typand each with a number of move uses.

What could have seen as overkill in the Game Boy era looks prescient now that the series is on the much-more-musculDS, for, with a few rule hacks like held items here, and support for occasional two-on-two battles there, the core combaplay works much the same as it did in the old days. "If it ain't broke, then don't tear it to bits in the name of'advancement'," could have been developer Game Freak's motto.

Pokem on F i reRed Vers ion

Another thing that Pokmondoes to further the role-playing aspects of the game, as far as presenting the world as if itwere real and thus causing the player to get pulled in further, is the degree to which it treats the Pokmon as realcreatures. That is, there is flavor text for every Pokmonspecies, and information such as height and weight that doesnplay a large role in the series.

Although an individual Pokmon has about the same number of stats tied to it as a character in a Dragon Quest game,

the game expends more informati

game design essentials

Documents