Fantasy Heartbreaker, by Russell Bailey

Good morning, MMO designers. Nice day, isn’t it? Well, I hope it is where you are. I’m in Atlanta, where we have “southern charm,” a concept best summed up as “the curse the swamp-witch put on us for choosing to build here.” Or, perhaps, these summers are the ghosts of Sherman’s fires.

Anyhow, it’s great to have you all here and I’d like to talk to you about something important, vital, beautiful even.

The story your player experiences when they play your game.

I realize you’ve got an opening cutscene, and a heavily-scripted tutorial sequence that’s almost like a real game. But in a couple of minutes, you’re going to let those players out into your world¹ and they’re going to be experiencing a very different story.

Ah, but you’ve got quests to handle that, right? And voice acting, and instances, and…

…no. No, I’m afraid that’s not going to be the story the player experiences.² From here on in, they’re experiencing their own story, and it’s going to flit in and out of contact with the ones you’ve prepared.

A minimal quest narrative might go like this:

1. “Those hobos are creating a nuisance outside of city hall. Kill 10 of them and bring me their bindles.”
2. “You did a good job killing those hobos, son. But now the hobo king is angry, and you must travel to his instance in the Poor District to defeat him.”
3. “Those hobos won’t be much trouble without their king. But my friend over in Frostysmooth is having trouble with veterans demanding their benefits. Can you head over and help him?”

However, the typical player won’t experience that narrative directly. He’ll come into the zone to help a guildie get his bindles, get plot point #1, run into a Drunken Fratass spawn and spend a while grinding Alpha Betas, gain a level, alt-tab away to check the message boards, go to the auction house for a better Beat Stick, go farm the hobos, hang out in local chat for a while looking for a group to take down the king for #2.

In most single player games, an individual quest^{I’ve said before.}

What I didn’t treat back then is that players don’t experience those units in order. They zigzag through content chunks and through other gameplay systems (trading, open PvE, PvP, etc).

The ramifications for content writing are significant. Each segment of a quest must be self-contained not only on as an objective, but also as a narrative. The player must be able to come back to part 2 days or weeks after completing part 1. Even within parts, they need to be able to quickly get back up to speed on mechanical expectations and narrative context.

The impact on narrative design is even wider. The game’s story cannot be carried entirely by elements that players will walk away from and will only probably come back to. The real story they experience is a product of many systems and many content chunks.

That means that not only does your content have to be able to get players in and out and up to speed effectively, but your other gameplay systems have to carry your game’s story.

If players have to spend hours in the auction house, then a big part of your game’s story is the auction house. That means the auction system should have some narrative gloss, and that other narrative elements should acknowledge and leverage it.

Some elements of EVE are really good at this. The centrality of the player market, for example, is tied in to the setting fiction. If I remember right, we actually put the market window in a storyline trailer.

There’s a lot of room to do better, though. And the first step is to admit that traditional narrative structures don’t quite fit the MMO space. The second is to find narrative structures that do.

I’ll be looking at that soon. But first, we’re going to have to consider what “multiplayer” really means.

Next: Solo doesn’t mean single player

Cortana, Intercom Girlfriend

You’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. The enemy’s right behind you. Looks bad. But then you hear her.

“I’m reading a weak wall up ahead. If you can hit it with a rocket, you might be able to get through to the generator room.”

Say hi. You’ve just met our generation of videogames’ most important stock character: the intercom girlfriend.

Her voice is pleasant, light, feminine. Occasionally she’ll have an accent, and if she does it’s probably British. One part the operator from The Matrix, one part Majel Barrett’s computer voice from Star Trek. She’s there to guide you through every convoluted mission objective, relay plot we don’t have a cutscene budget for, and in general make sense of your crazy life of demons and shotguns.

There are dozens of her by now, if not hundreds. Cortana from Halo, Anya from Gears of War, Tannenbaum from BioShock, Juno from The Force Unleashed.

But who is she, and why do we need her?

She’s often a scientist or military type, but, then again, in a lot of games everybody is a military type. Generally geeky, or just a touch sarcastic. Every once in a while she’ll laugh with you at your shared predicament, before she goes back to crystal clear guidance. She might even flirt… but for the most part, your love must remain not only chaste, but unstated.

If you’re betrayed, then some way or another she’ll go rogue with you, hacking security systems and forwarding intel. She’s clarity and purity in a world of gritty browns, blinding bloom and flying bullets. She’s part character, part UI function, a voice you can always trust.

Almost always. One of the earliest intercom girlfriends actually subverts the trope. System Shock 2 paired you with Dr. Janice Polito. At first, she does everything right: saves you from a hull rupture, runs you through the tutorial, tells you what checkpoints to hit. But partway through, she turns out to be a mask for the villain, SHODAN.

This is such a classic twist that it’s reused almost beat for beat in BioShock, which takes the unusual step of giving you an intercom boyfriend: Atlas, later revealed as Fontaine.

Most of the time, though, your girl’s faithful through thick and thin. Sure, she’ll static out a couple times, and in some games her advice is more annoying than helpful, but her heart’s in the right place and her voice is in your ear.

Truth is, we need her. As game set pieces become faster paced and more visually complex, we need that voice from the heavens to help us find the next switch to flip, the next wall to blow up.  I said it before: she’s half character, half interface, and that’s a necessary role.

In the process, though, she’s become the most common female character in video games, more ubiquitous than the battle babe or the damsel in distress. She’s not a “strong” female character, really, but she gets excused from most of the bullshit strong or weak characters get subjected to.

So tonight, wherever you are, raise your glass and set a drink aside. Let’s celebrate the intercom girlfriend in all our lives.

Last time, in Quests: Splitting the Atom, I proposed that we start thinking of MMO gameplay and story in smaller chunks. These “scenes” would be triggered based on player resources, and players could manipulate them (deliberately or inadvertantly) by spending, trading, and gaining resources.

Effectively, I suggested that we should deal out content based on the player economy. There’s a problem with this, though: a lot of players hate having to think about the player economy. They don’t want to sit around playing eBay, they want to hack up monsters.

So how to we separate the player economy from the auction house or the market window?

Well, virtually every MMO I’ve seen embeds resource management into core gameplay. When you go into a fight, you’re trading renewables (hit points, mana) and consumables (potions, ammunition) for other resources (XP and money). It’s a transaction, albeit one with a lot of variables and some random elements.

We can embed similar transactional models into other parts of the game. At the most basic level, consider letting players “like” actions taken by other players, but at the same time, give them a point that says that they “like” certain types of actions a lot. Build the UI around this so that instead of a Facebook-type like button, there’s a character action attached to it, like applause.

We  can go beyond the reputation economy, though. Sneak past an enemy player in PvP. Your Sneaky score increases, while they get a Thickheaded point. Neither of these is actually a bad thing: every transaction aims at opening up more content. Your decisions, successes, and failures determine what kind of content you’re given.

So now, what we have is a situation where player actions determine character traits that control what content is offered. Assume we’re still working the other angle from my previous article: that content aims to draft players to help and hinder each other, rather than move more towards fully-scripted devs-tell-you-a-story gameplay.

Quests serve four important purposes in MMO design:

1. To direct players towards core gameplay.
2. To place core gameplay within the context of the fictional world the game represents.
3. To provide a definable duration for small-group play.
4. To wallpaper over aspects of the world or system that don’t exist.

I support the first three goals, and give grudging respect to the fourth.

We’ve become used to thinking of quests as atomic units of gameplay. As an MMO designer, I might sit down to design a zone, and do the following:

1. Create a feel and backstory for the zone.
2. Imagine some denizens of the zone, both friend and foe.
3. Create chains of quests that tell a story for the zone, roughly from the time the player begins inhabiting it to the time they’re ready to leave.

But the scope of a quest is necessarily zoomed out. I propose, instead, that we consider the atomic unit of an MMO-with-a-story to be the scene, rather than the quest, the NPC, or the zone.

The scene comprises a few minutes of gameplay, and includes the following components:

1. The Context (“Why and Where”): The story of this scene. Example: an angry man accosts the player in a bar.
2. The Encounter (“What”): A mechanical interaction between player and game that defines the duration of the scene. Example: A player character fights an enemy.
3. The Reward: The mechanical or informational advantage the player receives for completing the scene. Example: A pair of boots.

A “starter quest” in most games has one scene. For example, a farmer’s basement is infested with rats. He asks you to go fight the rats.

1. Context: Rats are eating the supplies.
2. Encounter: Fight 10 rats using the combat system.
3. Reward: Some boots, and a pointer that the farmer’s neighbor also needs a ratcatcher.

A later quest in the same zone might have several scenes, perhaps arranged in a dungeon space.

Alright, so I’ve succeeded in splitting a quest into smaller units. What good is that?

Well, what if the primary unit of collaboration in an MMO weren’t an entire quest or dungeon, but a single scene? And what if the way these scenes piece together into larger narrative threads wasn’t dictated by a linear or overtly branching progression, but by an abstract economy?

Sound too weird to follow? It isn’t, and a couple folks in England have already done it.

Allow me to introduce you, delicious friends, to Echo Bazaar. Echo Bazaar is made up of individual scenes, which in turn trigger more scenes via an abstract resource system. The Reward component of a scene modifies the resources attached to your character, which in turn tell you which semi-random content you’re eligible for next.

The magic, though, comes not from any one resource triggering the distribution of new content, but from what they unlock in combination. Suppose, for instance, that my reward for one scene is “Boots” and my reward for a second is “Scandal.” A content chunk — an individual scene — can be tied to that combination of resources.

The world now knows to allocate for me the scene “These Boots Are Made For Walking,” in which NPCs attempt to roust me out of town for unfashionable footwear.

Mm, except… why NPCs? Didn’t we agree just an article ago that NPCs are badwrongfun? What if, instead, the combination of Boots and Scandal alerted other players that I was a pariah and should be driven from the zone?¹

With even a small handful of variables and prepared scenes, the order and events of play become more dynamic without dramatically increasing the amount of content prepared by developers… and most of those scenes can be turned into multiplayer (whether collaborative, PvP, or both) experiences.

And then… take it one step further. It’s an established MMO tradition that I can trade Boots. What if the player market, or the social interaction system, allowed me to trade Scandal as well? Suppose a friend wants Scandal so he can use it to buy Scandalous Underwear, and he trades me a little of his Friendship: Goblins in exchange.

To recap:

• Scenes are components of the player‘s narrative in game, as well as the player character’s.
• Scenes are potential points of player interaction.
• Relationships between scenes can be defined using player resources.
• These resources can be traded in a player economy.

What do you think, folks?

____

I’m going to raise a bunch of issues here. Fair warning, I won’t be providing the solutions by the end of the article… or all at once. But there are a number of intertwined problems in basing next-generation MMOs on current-generation MMOs, and I need to dump those all on the table before I get around to figuring out where we need to go next.

First, the angry bit

It hasn’t been a good week for quests. First, Justin Achilli proposed we get rid of NPCs and questing. Then, Guild Wars 2 announced that they’re going to get rid of quests entirely.

As a professional content designer, whose livelihood at times depends on MMOs having quests, I have to say… I agree.

If you allow for the fact that a lot of people want to play World of Warcraft, and that I don’t want to take World of Warcraft away from them, then I’m 100% on board with getting rid of quest-giving NPCs.

Quests are a useful game mechanic that most games use to add a little bit of context to standard play activities. When you log in to kill things and take their stuff, the quest suggests which things you should kill, and offers you a little bit of extra stuff for taking the suggestion.

Since, for some reason, it’s not okay for our genocidal medieval combat squads to get their orders directly from God, we have quest-givers. These handily-marked¹ NPCs provide a front end for the quest system, and attempt to put a friendly face on it.

Way back when, with EverQuest (and to a lesser extent, Ultima Online), quests were there mainly to help you find your way at the start of the game. Then you made friends and started doing your grinding with them, exploring new regions and killing new things and taking new stuff.

I have no real objection to quest-givers as the video game equivalents of the guy at a Ren Fest who tells you that you should really try the Drench-a-Wench. Where they fall down is when they become the custodians of Story.

Story

Now, all of a sudden, it isn’t just a guy telling you he wishes you’d roust the underserved minorities off his farm and offering you a pair of boots in exchange. It’s about Heroism and Lore and the story the developers want to tell you.

And the story the developers want to tell you is about a bunch of NPCs and their Epic Conflict (which, even though the NPCs never do anything about it, is Epic, trust us). Usually, this involves WAR! and 15,000 years of backstory. And probably some shit about gods. Especially dark gods. MMO devs really fucking love Zoroastrianism.

You know what this story isn’t about? You. It’s not about your little guy, the one you spent so much time finding a name that wasn’t already taken for. If you’re playing the nicer sort of MMO, he might get called a hero from time to time, but nobody’s going to throw a party for him or do anything to make his life easier.

No, instead they’re going to cram more Story at you and tell you it’s vitally important to the fate of These War-Sundered Lands that he march up a hill and ride Pirates of the Carribean.

I mean, can you imagine if actual theme parks were like that? If you walked into Disney and every costumed character was jumping up and down waving a glowstick telling you how vitally important it was that you preserve DisneyWorld’s Forty Years of Magic by going on their particular ride right now?

Sure, the rides are fun. They’re great. I like the really old ones about the future, especially. But at Disney, they give you a little brochure and let you wander around the park yourself.

Funny thing is, though, they don’t abandon you. Walk around Epcot. The design of the space tells you where you should and shouldn’t go, suggests possible activities, and so on. And you absorb a lot of narrative as you navigate the space. Discrete plaques and displays tell you little factoids about the history of the park and the various countries it alleges to represent.

The Story, in other words, is embedded in the navigational experience. Seems to me we had a word for that the other day… oh, yeah, environmental narrative.

If there’s a war on (and it’s an MMO, so of course there’s a war on), you should be able to see it. And if you can see it, it shouldn’t be necessary to present fake reasons to get involved.

What if they gave a war, and nobody came?

Mm, yes, that’s a problem. Because for all the talk of Epic War and A World on the Edge of Total Darkness that MMO developers are so very, very precious about, most of the actual warfare comes down to watered-down PvP systems which largely don’t affect the rest of the game. I can at least say in EVE Online, players send their characters to war for reasons that matter to them, and that have a defining effect on the game’s landscape.

Which is great except that very few people actually like Epic War and grand strategy and military logistics, and most of them already play EVE Online. We’re not going to redefine the genre by cloning EVE anymore than anybody’s doing it by cloning WoW.

And that’s when the war is a real conflict, fought over definable resources, with long-term effects on gameplay. In most games, it’s just a couple of catapults and some instanced capture the flag.

Where next?

The thing about an environmental narrative designed for a couple thousand people is that it has very little to say about your individual choices. Even when the landscape’s a dynamic place of exploding spaceships and scarce resources, the little guy tends to get lost. And the rule of MMOs is that, statistically speaking, you will be the little guy. Or rather, your little guy will be the little guy. Or something.

But that’s okay. Because when I next visit this topic, we’re going to talk about an important component of  MMO narrative… and surprise, surprise, it’s not about quests at all. It’s about something… smaller.

_____

Matthew J. Finch’s A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming has been around a while, and, in certain Dungeons & Dragons circles, is held as a sort of Leviticus on how the game is supposed to be played. I, however, did not start gaming in 1974.¹

I’ve gamed in a lot of different circles, and in a lot of different ways. With luck, I’ll continue to do so. I play the old games, I play the new games, I’ve obviously played a lot of the nineties games. Any way you want to play is cool with me.

That said, here’s some of what I’ve learned so far.

We’re all friends here

River Song is the hottest Carmen Sandiego.

We wouldn’t be sitting here in a spare room full of Apple IIs arguing about which Carmen Sandiego poster is the hottest if we weren’t friends. And it’s certainly because we’re friends that we stopped naming Oregon Trail characters after each other.

Now, being friends isn’t some magical thing where you never argue or always do everything together or whatever. And just like you don’t always get along, your characters don’t get always get along. They also don’t always work together. For the most part, an adventuring party is a social group, not a sports team.

If the rules break your game, break the rules

The core mechanic behind middle school gaming is “stat + skill = whatever the GM says.” Rules are important, because they lend structure to play and provide a common vocabulary for the game, but the main adjudication remains in the hands of the human beings at the table.

The GM shouldn’t be a tyrant. Forcing people around to obey your will is for Debbie and Ms. Frost. Which brings us to:

The GM’s supposed to provide action

No aspect of the game is so important that things should stop happening. Forget puzzles and “player skill” and all of that… if the characters are stuck for ten minutes at a dead end, something should happen and it’s usually GM’s job is to provide that.

The GM should also keep the world moving. I don’t mean you need to map out the troop movements of every city state or envision every insult a vampire makes to another. But there needs to be a sense that the world isn’t sitting, paused, waiting for the characters to wander into the appropriate hex.

Do what seems like a good idea at the time

If a cool idea strikes you, run with it. Player or GM, doesn’t matter. What you planned earlier isn’t as much fun as what you’re doing now and you’ll all have better memories of the session if you broke it.

Middle school gaming is not about the strategically or tactically optimal path. Leave that to the old school with its ten-foot poles and the graceful death ballet of D&D 4. Middle school gaming is also not about maintaining perfectly the mechanics of a great novel.

Crib Shamelessly

Come on, this guy deserves to be in the Monster Manual.

If White Wolf asks you to turn your game into a novel, you may have some problems here, but otherwise? Go nuts. Like the Octorok from The Legend of Zelda? Give him some hit dice and you’ve got the Roktopus. Think Frank Frazetta’s Death Dealer would be more awesome as a Nazgul? Time to make that noise.

_____

Splinter Cell: Conviction

So, my housemate, Orrin, played through the demo of Rich Dansky‘s Tom Clancy‘s Splinter Cell: Conviction. For the moment, her observations hold more water than mine, but just watching her, I could see the writing on the wall. For her, it was all stuff like “INFILTRATE THE MANSION,” but for me, it was “POST MORE ON ENVIRONMENTAL NARRATIVE.”

Because this is something that’s worth talking about. You’ve got all this crap that’s going on inside the head of the character, and all this crap going on inside the UI (or on the character sheet) of the player. Generally, though, the environment doesn’t reflect any of this. If you’re lucky, you get some post-processing shaders to put everything in stoner blur (or the GM narration equivalent) when you’re dazed.

If you’re really lucky, you get one of those entire maps where you’re crazy, like in BioShock 2 or Velvet Assassin.¹

Heads, HUDs, and types of action

Video games have been trying to push character and game state information into the 3d environment for a while. Dead Space and Ghostbusters both replace classic interface elements with animations on your character.[3. Arguably, World of Warcraft does this with its various floating punctuation marks. I think that's an in-between case, myself. I'd love to see an MMO push character-mind stuff into the environment, though.] The reduced screen clutter is supposed to immerse you more in our friend the environment.

Does it? I think it worked a little in Dead Space, but thought it was almost irrelevant in Ghostbusters. Seeing the character state on the character looked great, but it didn’t make me feel like there was any kind of focus on him or his world. It wasn’t his story, it belonged to the actual Ghostbusters, and that was okay. The game also did a good job of conjuring the environments from the first film, but didn’t share that film’s gift for evoking 1980s New York.²

And the environment in Dead Space was an impressively rendered rehash of other games, kinda like every half-decent remake of Aliens. Focusing on it more didn’t really do anything for me.

Splinter Cell, though, is taking one of my own personal demons (quest text) and marrying it to one of my personal fascinations (the dungeon, or, if you must, the level). Your environment doesn’t just tell you what you have to do… the tooltips for climbing and sneaking and peaking and all are projected into the environment, too.

In other words, the game takes a somewhat new approach to two things:

• Required action (Infiltrate the Mansion)
• Potential action (Jump on this crate)

You find yourself looking into the environment for your goals and opportunities. Will Hindmarch says:

Conviction is all about putting you into the head of Sam Fisher, more so than his body. The game projects his thoughts onto the walls and surfaces of the game world, turning literal space into a figurative, psychological terrain at the same time.

That’s particularly interesting to me, because I think that the dungeon (electronic or imagined) is a landscape of psychological terrain.

The Dungeon as Psychological Projection

Conan beneath the Scarlet Citadel

Sometimes, that terrain is the designer’s headspace.³

Sometimes, it’s the hero’s. If you look at Quarmall, ⁴ or the Scarlet Citadel,⁵ you see environments that reveal the essential qualities of the characters therein.

The Scarlet Citadel reveals almost only what Conan brings in: old grudges, bold action, murderous ferocity, and a canny mind ready to exploit any weakness. And, yes, he fights a giant snake. Says it all, really.

Quarmall is more your “ecosystem” dungeon, with its giant slaves bred to pump the ventillation system, its halves controlled by warring princes, and ruling over all, its withered wizard-king. Here the Gray Mouser encounters charlatan wizards, and Fafhrd muscle-brained fools — both things they’ve been accused of being themselves.

Each also finds opportunities to showcase his most conspicuous qualities. The Mouser abducts a girl and attempts a spell, Fafhrd finds his romantic inclinations overwhelming his better judgment.⁶ And, of course, traversing the dungeons levels leads the two to reunite and perpetrate one of their own greatest scams.

So, if the dungeon is, in part, a projection of the hero who enters it⁷, is that something to consciously model in roleplaying games? It’s not hard to envision a mechanism for doing so, something like 3:16‘s flashbacks, only projecting into the environment, rather than exclusively the hero’s own past.

If I’m a little suspicious of the idea in a roleplaying game, I’m even more suspicious when it comes to MMOs. Do designers even have the right to tell a player what’s going on in their character’s heads? I’ve been told that an exclamation point is already a bridge too far. Should the character even be acknowledged as someone psychologically separate from the player, or is that just a legacy inherited from other sorts of games?

And if we’re facing the death of the character⁸, then is it acceptable to make psychological assumptions at all?

______

“Vatican II led to many changes in the Catholic Church, notable ones being the use of mother-tongues – instead of Latin – for parts of the mass, the empowerment of the laity, and allowing priests to use bladed weapons in combat.”

– Critical Miss #8

I suppose I’d know who the cleric was, if I’d started with her. I understand girls you can’t save, no matter what god they work for.

You couldn't save her. Just like all the others, a million little boys who couldn't. Forgive yourself.

As it happens, though, I didn’t. I started here.

Ultima 3: Exodus Character Creation

Actually, let’s zoom in a bit…

Ultima 3: Exodus Cleric

There. See. Now, what I knew in… 1988… sounds right… was that a cleric was another word for priest, and a priest was someone who worked for God.

Just one problem. Fantasy didn’t have God. Oh, sure, there was a cross on Link’s shield, but there’d been one on He-Man’s armor, too, hadn’t there? Just a device, a heraldic symbol.

Now, in 1989, someone conveniently introduced me to the pagan gods¹, and they found their way right into my world of magic and elves². My carefully envisioned narrative-driven side-scroller had elves and Greek gods.

But those gods didn’t have priests, did they? I mean, you read the Bible, there are priests all over the place, and usually mucking things up. Got Jesus hanged, I’d been told, and that’s why we couldn’t let the Church have undue influence on the state.³ But the Greek myths, nooo… people prayed, maybe there were some burnt offerings, but pagan gods didn’t need priests. They did things themselves.⁴

Yet, Ultima had priests. Briefly. I was very glad when the next Ultima came around and got that fixed. Shrines, virtues, no gods. Very sensible, and I could continue being a bold maverick having Zeus meet the elves. I’d played Hero’s Quest by now, too, and read Lloyd Alexander, and while there were certainly hints of greater supernatural forces⁵, there was hardly a celestial hierarchy.

Even King Arthur, well, God occasionally popped up in his life, but no priests. I’m not sure what they were all doing at the time, but he had a proper wizard to cast his spells for him, just like Pharoah had had.⁶ Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser had gods, and Lankhmar had a whole street devoted to them, but both the priests and the gods were more than a little silly.

The holes filled, gradually — I was a weird kid, but hardly a dumb one, but my fantasy worlds never really had need of magic priests, even as they developed pantheons of their own. Even reading Moorcock and Lewis, the gods all took care of their own business.

The idea that a whole class of adventurer might need to be priestly never really occurred to me until I got my hands on the Rules Cyclopedia. Even since then, I’ve never been sure why clerics weren’t just a sort of mage, and seeing fantasy through the eyes of D&D hasn’t really helped that at all. In gaming, I came to understand, clerics were somewhere between fighters and wizards… but so were elves, and for that matter, there were paladins. And some paladins had gods, too.⁷

But in the better sort of fantasy video games, there never were priests. The Ultimas were neatly atheistic, and when they got around to coping with gods, in Pagan, it was in a very Star Trek way. Gods, fantasy said to me, better off without ‘em, and their priests are all liars and idiots and just occasionally Theleb Kaarna.

Badasses, like this guy.

Yet, for some reason, there was always someone who wanted to play one in my games. Sometimes, they weren’t very serious — I’d heard of Bob, the God of Donkeys out there in another campaign. But all too often, they were devout worshipers of gods who never seemed good for anything except a daily spell allotment. Sometimes they were badasses.

And he hung out with this hottie. Just saying.

And there seemed to be roleplaying games that shared my indifference. Tunnels & Trolls had no clerics, and Stormbringer certainly didn’t go out of its way to suggest the idea.⁸

The first time I ever encountered a proper cleric adventurer was in college, as it turned out. Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish officer who got lost in Florida, made his way to Mexico casting out demons and disease in the name of God, gaining and losing fellow soldiers and native adventurers along the way. And around that point, through that lens, the cleric started making sense to me.

The cleric? He’s Moses. He’s Samuel⁹. He’s Martin de Porres. She’s Joan of Arc.

And don’t worry. Someday Aleena will come back.¹⁰

_____

More people than care to admit to, and Queen goddamn knew it. I think that’s called irony.¹ But there really is a thing that fills our dreams then slips away from us. We call it “the past,” but at one time we were very invested in it as the present and the near-future.²

Nostalgia gets thrown around a lot as an accusation in the gaming community, and there’s no wonder some people are very defensive about it. If someone consistently called me an “employee” as a pejorative, I’d no doubt get defensive about it, regardless of how cheerfully employed I am.

The conventional view, I guess, is that if you’re nostalgic about things, then they really weren’t that good and you’re only fooling yourself now. Shame on you for thinking you were happy.

I think that view’s stupid. There’s a limit to how far nostalgia can go, of course, and the problem with trying to go back is that you’ll find you want to bring people with you and they never remember it quite the same way.

Affection for the past is nevertheless a wonderful and important thing. Our past experiences make us who we are, and if we only ever remembered the shitty ones, we’d only ever be the sum of our unpleasant past.

I don’t think that acknowledging nostalgia for things like old video games or old roleplaying games means that those games weren’t any good. I was surprised, recently, at how good the environmental narrative in Maniac Mansion actually is.³ And I’ll take a stand for the lowly mongbat as one of gaming’s funniest monsters any day you care to name.

Yet, I’m also nostalgic for these things. It’s important not only that they were good, but that I remember them as good. I think, as a gaming community, we should really embrace that.

To quote John Higgins, from the introduction to Elegia: “…nostalgia is a potent and powerful force within the Retro Revival of pencil-and-paper role-playing games.” Yes, it is. We should acknowledge that, and we should harness it. Imagine the hell out of it, sure, but remember what you used to imagine, too.

Playing with old toys isn’t just about remembering the past, but we shouldn’t pretend that remembering the past does, itself, have value. I’m never going to hear “Maria” for the first time again, either. Still a great song, and still precious for its link to the past.

And I’m going to blast the shit out of it until my roommate wakes up.

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The Legend of Zelda

I think I’ve mentioned before that I consider the original The Legend of Zelda an almost perfect example of a game design. The game flows beautifully, challenges the player, and provides lots of rewards for exploration.

It’s also one of the finest dungeon crawlers of all time, despite a surprisingly small number of clones to its name.¹ Despite clearly adapting the wilderness/underworld model of tabletop roleplaying, Zelda doesn’t adapt the experience/level model.

The original Dungeons & Dragons leveling scheme has four elements:

1. Increased hit points.
2. More spells/skills.
3. Magic items.
4. Money.

In D&D, these are presumed to be gained by trekking across a dangerous wilderness and completing more and more challenging dungeon levels. Just so in Zelda.

Zelda takes the brilliant step of combining the effects of leveling with the completion of dungeons. In the middle of each dungeon, you gain a magic item which is (usually) key to your progress. At the end of each dungeon, you’re rewarded with additional “heart containers,” or hit points.²

But what about wandering the wilderness to gain a few levels and gain an edge on the monsters? Zelda‘s got you covered there, too. Additional heart containers can be found in out of the way places on the overworld map. And some magic treasures (like the equivalents of +1 swords) can be obtained only by exploring the wilderness.

I admire the elegance: one reward halfway through each dungeon that you can put into play immediately, with an increase in power provided at the end of the level. Plenty of cherries for players intent on scouring the map. There’s both an economy and completeness of design that only a few games have, even those from the early eras of video gaming.

I’ve often thought of incorporating a variation of Zelda‘s leveling scheme into one of my games. Much as 3:16 requires a successful mission to advance, I’ve considered making a full exploration of a dungeon the key to leveling in one of my own fantasy heartbreakers. Here’s an excerpt from something I’ve been playing with:

An experience box may be checked by:

• Rolling the same number on every die on a core roll.
• Finding a cache of treasure unguarded by monsters. (Doesn’t count if you killed them.)
• Killing a monster.

An experience line is a special accomplishment, such as:

• Defeating a special monster.
• Completing a small dungeon.
• Completing a level of a large dungeon.
• Performing a deed of legend.
• Being recognized by a non-player character authority figure in some significant fashion, such as knighthood.

Thoughts?

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