You Find Yourself in a Room
I didn’t play this game. I watched my wife play it over her shoulder.
This isn’t so much about the game but a tangent that arose from thinking about watching someone else play the game. Inspiration is complicated.
This really isn’t about the game at all.
It’s about the words: “you find yourself in a room.”
I’ve been mulling them over and trying to apply them to a variety of different situations. Really, it’s more about those words than anything else. I’ve been picturing everything in the context of, “you find yourself in a room.”
My journey through the world of D&D has been backward.
After reaching a point where I realized that the “narrative” style of play just wasn’t working for me, I’ve been going back and discovering all the interesting facets about OSR play that I never really understood.
Stuff that I don’t think makes sense unless a group initiates you. I’ve never actually played with a group that could be described as “OSR.” I’ve played with cutthroat, backstabbing jerks before, but that’s totally missing the point.
And a lot of it leads back to the words, “you find yourself in a room.”
I think understand now how a dungeon of 80 rooms can have 60 empty rooms and not be considered a complete waste of time. I think I understand why mapping is important and shouldn’t be taken for granted.
I think I understand why tactical maps and miniatures are “nice things” but are pretty much separate from the whole dungeon-crawling experience and it really has nothing to do with “visualizing” the dungeon.
From one perspective, it’s a much more efficient way of doing things.
It solves many, many, many of the problems experienced by GMs who want that “narrative” feel in their games. Props like maps and miniatures are crutches, too many times. That’s what I’m getting.
Ability scores so often get hand-waved with the bonuses that are tacked-on and the rerolls granted, but should define the character. Hand-rolled ability scores are as important to a PC as player-drawn maps are to a dungeon.
That’s what I’m getting.
And that level of abstraction is freeing.
It helps me to realize for example, that dungeon-crawling is about “checking rooms.” Every scene revolves around walking into a room and asking “what do we see?” It distills the game down to that point.
When the game is about saving lives in a hospital, the statement “you find yourself in a room” becomes, “there’s a patient in front of you.”
I’m tempted to call this the game’s “thesis.”
The game is about the contents of the room. (Or the patient’s condition.)
But it’s more than that — it’s also about the context you’ve created with the last room you checked — and the rooms you know are ahead of you remaining to be checked. That’s what I’m getting.
And that’s why some things like “logic” don’t technically matter.
Sure they do, but if you can’t make a room description interesting you’re going to find trouble engaging your players in anything else found in your dungeon.
Hey, that may even be the problem with the game Vampire.
The game should be, “so you need to go out and drink someone’s blood.”
And then you go from there.
Hmmm, I may have to check it out after I exhaust Defender’s Quest.
But yeah, there’s a reason why “You are standing in an open field” is one of the most iconic phrases in gaming.
(pardon if I address and comment haphazardly)
The two OSR groups I’m in both use miniatures, but we take different approaches. My own game uses minis for encounters that would be either difficult to play out in the theatre of the mind or against foes where tactics and environment would come into play. Even a dozen rats, I wouldn’t bother with a map, but against humanoids where there are things which might be hidden behind, jumped on or over, I’ll go ahead and use a map.
The game I’m playing as J’Rhazha in uses minis for all encounters. We’re running in a very densely packed megadungeon, so mapping is done cautiously and meticulously (we’re talking hundreds of rooms crammed into an 11 x 14 sheet of graph paper. Despite this, the DM has made a great use of negative space and empty rooms, really making the most of the area. But unlike what I do for my own game, you can’t really ‘flow chart’ the map. It has made for some interesting and rather meticulous exploration. Our approach is find a spot on the map where there are doors we haven’t opened, fight our way there, explore and fight for as long as we can, go back and hope that we’ve at least made some meaningful relationships with dungeon factions (yay, we’re pretending to be thralls of the half-orc who’s offered his service to the goblin king we can visit the kobold village without being attacked on sight!) and added a few rooms to our list of “places where the last key to level to is not”.
Playing Phantasy Star 2 has had me thinking about what RPGs are and are not and how RPGs are more than just the mechanics that comprise them. PS2 has leveling, encounters, and dungeons with mapping (oh, god, does it have mapping! I spent 3 days and 4 sheets of graph paper mapping the Climatrol dungeon and all 35 teleporter/elevators of the complex), but it certainly doesn’t FEEL like a Role Playing Game, in part because there’s nothing to the mazes but the maze/mapping aspect. Sure, you may find a treasure chest that has a minor healing item or something, but there’s certainly no rewarding feeling of having found some spectacular or important.
On the other hand, you have games like Zork or other parser games that do not have a visible map, lack stats or sometimes even a combat engine, that FEEL like a Role Playing Game, because it’s about exploration of the environment. I’m sure I’ve mentioned that once i had Zork so down in my mind that I was able to pencil-paper it for a friend in my math class, passing notes back and forth. It also had the advantage of my not being an idiot parser that couldn’t figure out what the “player” was trying to do. There were no “Ye cannot take ye flask” moments.
Which brings me to a conclusion: an unexplored aspect the tabletop RPG genre is creating content that more resembles parser games than rogue-like games. I need to look into running Zork, or something like it, as a tabletop again one of these days.
Many of the earliest video games captured different aspects of roleplaying games — interactive fiction or graphical adventure games like Zork or Quest for Glory, respectively, which focused on exploration and puzzle-solving — and CRPGs like Ultima, Wizardry, The Bard’s Tale and whatnot, which focused on combat and party-building.
Some video games have really nailed the survival and treasure-seeking aspects too, notably Roguelikes — while others have advanced the dungeon-crawling aspect like The Elder Scrolls series and Dark Souls. There are so many *fragments* of the larger experience in video games, it’s enough to drive a gamer insane.
I mean, it seems like it should be feasible to combine those elements into something more grandiose, but it just hasn’t been done. Hmmm…. let’s see…
Each room displays and can be observed in a Myst like fashion, but is accompanied by a text description of the room and an optional parser which allows you to make inquiries about various objects in the room which you can look at and manipulate. Combat interactions are optional per the player’s choice: parser-based (total abstraction), tactical (semi-abstract), or real time (concrete, with an option between Zelda style or FPS interpretation of said encounter). A low-to-no detail insert map, which the player can toggle to from the 1st person view and would be contain the same visual detail as the tactical or zelda style combat, would cover the roguelike aspect.
The world remains the same, though it gives the player a full range of options in regards to how to interact with it. Or, for a more complex experience, certain objects and puzzles could only be solved or interacted with or certain foes defeated by certain means. Can’t beat the cyclops in FPS, tactical or ARPG modes? Go into the parser and shout that Odysseus is coming.
It COULD be amazing, but almost certainly the first attempt at it would be terrible (and impractically expensive to develop and test) and no one would ever try again.
Yeah, I got nothin’. It makes sense why most games go in one direction or another — if they’re first-person or top-down, 2D or 3D. I know what I like — that’s what I stick to most of the time. Sometimes though, I get a hankering for something more, or something different.
It’s a combination of the limitations of any given game engine, jarring gameplay and the fact that lots of folks are upset and confused by mixed genre titles.
Personally, I love games that are a weird mishmash of mechanics and genres, like Sword of Aragon, Sword of Vermilion or even War in Middle Earth (that weird PC Lord of the Rings RTS from the late 80s).
Played this over the weekend. It was an interesting metagaming experience. The “guess the number I’m thinking” part really made me think about grind in video games. I think it’s part of why I took a break from trying to get 100% completion on Defender’s Quest and started playing Incursion for awhile instead.
YOU FIND YOURSELF IN A ROOM