Thursday 6 June 2019

CRPGs and the Silver Age

Very little to my (admittedly rudimentary) knowledge has been written about the synergies between computer-game RPGs and RPGs-proper during what has been called the hobby's Silver Age and the Bronze one which followed.

This is somewhat surprising, because the period in question, roughly 1984 to 1999 or thereabouts, was one in which both fields might have been said to have entered "maturity". It's also one in which there was presumably considerable overlap between people involved in the RPG hobby during its development into an industry and people who played CRPGs.

It would have been odd if the two fields had not influenced each other. And we are all familiar with how the RPG hobby lead the way for CRPGs. Many of the early successful RPG games were actually D&D based (Pools of Radiance) and the others borrowed many of its tropes such as classes, levels, hit points, equipment list management etc. A lot less is said about the cross pollinisation going on in reverse, though, and I think this may have been even more significant for all that it was often hidden.

The thing about CRPGs is that, until recently, it was impossible to realistically use them for proper sandbox play except in very limited "kind" environments like early roguelike games (more on "kind" versus "wicked" play in a future blog post). There simply wasn't the processing power or data storage. This meant that one simply couldn't use them for genuinely open-ended exploration. Instead, there had to be constrained environments with a "story" to follow. These games - the Final Fantasy series being maybe the paradigm examples - had to take on the nature of interactive fiction almost by default. There was a bit of freedom to move around and a bit of chance in terms of encounters. But by and large play was a matter of going from cut-scene to cut-scene.

It is surely no accident that this kind of play rose to such prominence in the RPG hobby as well during the era of CRPGs prominence. Any such discussion will of course rapidly devolve into an argument over chickens and eggs. But one that is nonetheless perhaps worth having.

20 comments:

  1. A number of game designers moved from table top RPG to CRPG, designing levels and challenges and such for the software folks to code.

    For example.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennell_Jaquays
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_A._Stackpole

    So there is probably a massive influence.

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    1. Some of the RuneQuest people went over to work on the Elder Scrolls series, and Call of Cthulhu's Sandy Petersen joined id Software and helped design Doom and Quake.

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    2. I wonder if there's been any movement the other way? Presumably not given the pay disparities which must exist.

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    3. Mike Pondsmith of Cyberpunk/Mekton fame did some video game design in the 2000s before coming back to tabletop.

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    4. I think he may have gone back the other direction with Cyberpunk 2077?

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  2. You could also have the influence going the other way. The rise of more explicitly improvisational styles of gaming (both OSR and Storygames) as those are the hardest kinds to turn into CRPGs while some of the players who played in ways that are easier for a computer to simulate got drained away from RPGs to CRPGs. I've certainly played sessions that felt exactly like a bit of CRPG play except much slower and with no graphics and where there wasn't any real value added in terms of having a human GM except for being able to spend time with friends. If all my sessions were like that I'd have quit RPGs and just stuck to CRPGs which wasn't an option when CRPGs were still really primitive.

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    1. On the other side of that: It's really quite sad when you see CRPGs try so hard to adapt the mechanics of TTRPGs that they miss the spirit. I feel more like I'm playing a "fantasy adventure" with something like Dragon's Dogma that gives you a lot of freedom in mobility and action than a lot of the tighter, more tactical games, where it's just a TTRPG with less choice and no other players to interact with.

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    2. Yeah which is why I''ve always gotten more of a RPG feeling from TBS games as at their best Paradox etc. games function as a sandbox simulator and allow for a lot more RPing than CRPGs.

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    3. Absolutely Bosh - there's an idea for a blog post...!

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  3. It was discussed to death at the time already, but the focus on "balance" in post-2E D&D was likely an attitude carried over from MMORPGs where you could be kicked out of a group if you weren't contributing enough.

    Regarding video games based on D&D specifically, I always though it was funny how every edition of D&D had it's own CRPG adaptation EXCEPT 4th, which would have been the easiest to adapt.

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    1. Interesting. Yeah, true about 4th edition. It's almost as though in every respect that edition is now treated like it never happened.

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    2. Well part of the reason for balance obsession was that 3ed had very serious balance problems that 3.5ed didn't really fix. You don't have to be a pedantic nerd to realize there is a problem if a druid's animal companion is sometimes as powerful as another PC.

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    3. It's a bit off of your point, but I read this, and remembered Gygax going on about "balance" and Monty Haul campaigns, and decided to go through my Dragon magazines to see how far I got before I found a reference to game balance.

      I got to issue #3, from October 1976, in a letter from a reader who said, in reference to a LotR game, "Finally, the 1.5 range and effects advantage of Noldorin magic-users in Smith’s system is much too large and unbalances the game, with no justification from the source. The system below follows Tolkien more closely and fits better with a balanced campaign."

      There were plenty of discussions of balance back in the day. Any suggestion that 4e had the market cornered on obsessing over it is pure revisionism.

      Sorry if that is a bit of a rant, but it's a sore spot with me, along with the idea that optimization began with 3e. (How is your 1e paladin liking his girdle of storm giant strength, gauntlets of ogre power and hammer of thunderbolts?)

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    4. It's just that in early games optimization didn't matter too much unless you went out and looked for it. In 3.*ed it was a lot more likely to pop up and slap you in the face in terms of people accidentally making characters much weaker or stronger than the party average.

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    5. I realize that balance was always a topic of discussion, it's human nature to constantly feel shortchanged by our circumstances and desire reform.

      The route the designers take to accomplish balance is important though. There's a difference between adjusting magic effects/treasure amounts and changing the whole structure of a class's abilities. Giving the fighter a list of limited-use "powers" to expend isn't really something that shows up until 3.5's Tome of Battle.

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tome_of_Battle:_The_Book_of_Nine_Swords

      They mention Final Fantasy as a specific inspiration, and martial/magical balance as a specific design goal.

      Also, regarding 4E, this isn't information straight from the designers themselves, but it's from Mike Mearls which is pretty dang close. Skip to "On the subject of exact rules":

      https://rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=8309:

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  4. If I recall correctly with respect to some of the Ultimas, they may have had a plot, but it was pretty much a hex crawl to find it.

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    1. Yes, I wanted to post this - the Ultima games (and knockoffs like The Magic Candle) were essentially non-linear squarecrawls, and some blobbers (Wizardry VII, the Might and Magic series, and the immense, now barely known Fate: The Gates of Dawn) were comparable in scope and freedom of play. These games had choke points in the sense that completing them required solving key puzzles (Ultima V even had unlockable movement modes which let you explore previously inaccessible parts of the world), but if you just wanted to be an adventurer exploring Britannia, it was possible. JRPGs are a very particular experience, and not really representative of what western CRPGs were attempting. Some of them weren't particularly deep games, but the early 1990s ideal was certainly an immense, fairly open world.

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    2. It has been so long since I played them. When I have time I will take a quick look on youtube.

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    3. Thou art greater! Ultimas 4 thru 6 were way ahead of their time, imo.

      They had multiple parallel plot strands and very elegantly combined the mechanical aspects of leveling up (and finding reagents, special equipment, etc) with moving around to explore the world and advancing the plot.

      To this day, very few games even attempt this, let alone succeed at it.

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    4. I have another post in mind about sandboxes in old PC games.

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