Shrapnel Games Blog

One of my favorite ways to clean house is to gather the anarchy that is currently bothering me and then pack it away in a box. Then, sometime in the future, I’ll get the bug to sort through said box and toss about half of it. Mostly though the boxes just collect in a spare room. Needless to say, a fire marshal would not like my abode.

The great thing about the procedure is that I often forget what I put into the boxes, and so when I do get around to delving into their mysterious world I sometimes experience the joy of reacquainting myself with things I’ve forgotten I owned. Basically, like the saying goes, what’s old is new again.

A recent venture into the deepest, darkest boxes of the Krol household brought forth the PC version of Temple of Elemental Evil. I remembered playing it when it first came out, and knew I never finished it, but I couldn’t recall what prompted the removal of the game from my hard drive. Maybe there were too many other titles competing for my attention, maybe I was just too busy, I don’t know.

Thirty minutes after reinstalling it I remembered why I gave up on it. The damn thing was an exercise in save/reload/save/reload. My first-level party would die from being sneezed upon, tripping on their bootlaces, and once by a killer butterfly. At one point in the game I even had a Girl Scout chop the head off my paladin party leader and wear his skull as a hat across three kingdoms. It was brutal.

Off the game went once more from my computer. Egad, what a frustrating experience. But then again, so are most computer RPGs. Thankfully I was a pen and paper RPGer first, computer RPGer second.

When I first started playing RPGs the idea of playing one on a computer wasn’t even in the picture. This was 1979 and a computer wouldn’t enter my life until two years later.

The early years of role-playing were, in retrospect, pretty awful. One of the very first game sessions was at elementary school with my gifted class. The teachers, Mr. Walker and Mr. Eubanks, were both huge gamers and our classes were primarily occupied with board games, or the puzzles out of GAMES magazine. When Dungeons & Dragons started to hit big we organized a session after school. With everyone being a relative noob one of the teachers spoke to a fellow teacher at the high school and recruited a high school kid for DMing that was supposedly already familiar with the system.

We rolled up characters using the method at the time: roll 3d6 for each stat, and simply go down the line. I think my highest stat was a whopping 9 and somehow I became an illusionist. The module was the Keep on the Borderlands, and while I don’t remember how far we got I do remember the party being butchered rather frequently, often by in-party fighting. Our thief had a habit of stealing from fellow party members, which led to quite a bit of frontier justice.

From a gaming perspective it sucked, but from a playing perspective it was great. Though we had no idea of what we were doing (and really, were there any experts in role-playing in those days?), I still understood the potential. Here was a game that anything was possible in. Only the imagination provided a barrier. A world of stories, characters, and memorable deeds.

Later, when I got a computer, I discovered the early computer RPGs like Temple of Apshai and Ultima II. While enjoyable, I quickly realized that while they borrowed from pen and paper RPGs, they were merely pale shades of the real thing. Sure, you could level up and collect phat lewt, but there was little in the way of imagination. You were stuck following exactly what the programmers wanted you to do.

The visuals may have changed over the years, but the core of CRPGs have not. Hack. Slash. Monty Haul. Unleash your inner munchkin. Even games like Oblivion, which do a damn good job with smoke and mirrors to provide an illusion that there’s more to their gameworld than another killer dungeon, still end up being a FedEx simulator with combat.

Now, that’s not a problem if you acknowledge the fact that a CRPG is not the same as a PnP RPG, and probably never will be, and you don’t expect it to live up to its tabletop counterpart. And if like me, your first exposure was PnP, then this is easily realized.

Unfortunately, many folks who never gamed the real deal assume that’s what tabletop gaming is like. If I had never played D&D in my life and booted up Temple of Elemental Evil, which has the official D&D license and boasts mechanics straight out of 3E, I would assume this must be what it’s like to play the PnP game. And thirty minutes into it, after being slaughtered for the dozenth time by the billion hit-point zombies in the basement, I would give up on the game and never, ever, want to pick up a polyhedron in my life.

I would miss out on the social aspect of the game. I would miss out on all the different game systems, and the places they can take you. I would miss out on gaming without limits. Instead, I would think that role-playing is about level treadmills, dungeon raids, and hocking my wedding ring for a shiny new sword. Heck, even the official D&D online RPG is more World of Warcraft than tabletop play.

Now let’s apply that to wargaming, and why the gamer base has been steadily shrinking…

When you think of wargames, you think of hexes and CRTs. You talk about ZOCs and BRPs, and sling around names like Berg, Dunnigan, Hermann, and Zucker. Now do a Google search using “Starcraft wargame” and see what comes back.

Ever since Command and Conquer, RTS games have often been referred to as wargames. Not only from players, but from the gaming media, and in stores. You and I know they’re not wargames, not even close, but what about the folks who have never picked up a bookshelf game in their life?

Imagine little Jimmy walking into his local game store for the very first time. He’s looking around when he hears that they need another player for the wargame going on in the back of the store. Wargame? Why, he’s a master of wargames! He’s played them all: all the Command and Conquer titles, Warcraft, Starcraft, Dawn of War, the $60 Dawn of War mod Company of Heroes, and many more.

So Jimmy goes in back. There, a bunch of middle-aged men are huddled around a world map playing ADG’s Wallet in Flames—I mean, World in Flames (Really, Truly, Ultimate, Super Duper Final, No Really, We Really Mean It, This Is The Last One, Edition). Jimmy looks shocked.

“What are you playing?” he asks in bewilderment.

“A wargame,” comes the response.

“WWWHHHAAAATTTT?”

Poor Jimmy.

But it’s not only Jimmy. Let’s say Jimmy’s father, an upstanding citizen with a keen interest in history and world events is also in the store. But his exposure has been filtered through his son.

“So, Jimmy, what exactly are you playing on the computer?”

“Starcraft.”

“Starcraft? What’s that?”

“Oh, it’s a wargame!”

Jimmy’s dad looks over his son’s shoulder, witnesses all the clicking and hotkeying and zerg rushing, and decides he’s better off watching golf on his big screen HDTV.

So now Jimmy’s father hears that someone is looking for another wargamer and decides that he has no interest in some sort of dexterity driven game. He goes back to looking at the golfing miniatures for BloodBirdie: Slaughter On The Green.

Another potential wargamer lost.

How many wargamers have been lost in the past decade because their first introduction to wargaming was with a game that called itself a wargame, but resembles no wargame you and I grew up with? And who is to blame for that? Did it start with the clueless gaming media or the people who play RTS games? And can the term be reclaimed, or is it forever lost?

A CRPG, while a shallow experience, at least attempts to imitate its PnP version at a basic level. Computer RTS games that call themselves wargames though don’t even come close, except for the fact that both deal in conflict.

Perhaps the first step in growing the hobby is to make people aware of the hobby, and what the hobby truly is…

-Scott