Article: Games as More than Rules

Ever since The Spoony One began his Counter Monkey series, I've become fascinated with Pen & Paper RPGs.  As I watch his Dethklok Campaign, I realize I've been missing quite a lot of tabletop gaming goodness.

I've never been into D&D or other tabletop RPGs, mostly just because I haven't had much opportunity to get into it.  The entry threshold for such games is quite high, what with needing so many players, understanding all the number crunching, and having the time to play.

So the closest I ever got pre-college was a Milton Bradley boardgame called HeroQuest, which I've heard as described as "D&D 101".  In college I played Descent: Journeys in the Dark, which is a D&D 102, if HeroQuest is the first.

However, both of these are completely inaccurate nicknames and are practically insults to D&D.  Not quite as bad as the movie, but still.

The problem is more of what is defined as D&D.  The rules, while complex, can be mimicked by a computer, and there are many, many videogames that are simply that.  But there is something completely different between playing Neverwinter Nights on a computer and playing D&D with five friends around a table.

The part about using your imagination is taken care of, for instance.

And I'm not simply referencing the social aspect, although that is undoubtedly a major portion of it, but one could argue (and I do) that analog games will always have that advantage over digital.

But the real point of D&D is that it's a storytelling engine that relies on ingenuity and improv using a dice-based system to add some chaos to the mix.

The videogame versions have the numbers down pat, but a digital system, no matter how well designed, cannot allow for the decisions players want to make.

In any videogame, there are only a certain number of discrete actions the player can make.  If the animation or physics don't allow an action, or if the designer did not expect such a decision to be made, it simply can't be carried out.

While every bit of dialogue in a D&D session comes out on the fly, little can be done to replicate that on a computer.  Dialog trees do not account for every option, and it will be a few more years before algorithms and programs are designed to accept and analyze human speech to create appropriate responses.

"I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave.  Use one or two word phrases only."

Yet even beyond the dialogue, physical actions have the same limitations.  In the Dethlok campaign, the heroes had to perform a spell to create a portal to a throne room, and perform a second spell to break a King out of an amber prison.  The players decided to make the portal, and have the second spell caster stay on the other side and cast the un-imprisonment spell through the portal.

This was something the DM didn't expect, but he allowed it.  In a videogame version, if the designers didn't expect the players to cast a spell through a portal, the programming simply might not allow it (perhaps claiming lack of line of sight, or the distance being too great, or whathaveyou).

In the same encounter, another player set fire to his bedroll to create a distraction, and the DM allowed that as well, on the fly rolling dice to determine how the fire spread.  The fire was effective in blocking some enemies, and might have helped turn the tide of the battle.

During an earlier boss battle, the final blow was a critical hit with an axe.  The DM improvised that the blow cut off the boss's head just as a casual fluff to make the kill seem appropriate and entertaining.  The players then took the head and kept it with them for ten days to prove that they were trustworthy (after previously being framed for the death of the King).  The DM described how it had rotted and smelled over that time, and one player who carried it had to improv an excuse for the smell.

"The barkeep will never suspect a thing."

In the course of the Dethklok campaign, there were at least a few of these instances each session.

Without a human to extend the limitations of the system on the fly, computer games simply cannot mimic the real purpose of D&D and other Pen & Paper RPGs.  The stories of videogames, no matter how interactive they may get, can't get quite that interactive without human intervention (or at least a premonition).

I'm not knocking on videogames, of course.  HeroQuest, the board game, tried to create a dungeon-crawler.  But battles and encounters in D&D, while taking up a huge chunk of the gameplay (and the majority of the rules), are not exactly the core of the system.  HeroQuest doesn't allow for more than the most generic of dungeon crawls and no room for improvisation, because the rules are too tight.  You attack, cast spells, search for traps, etc.  You can't carry the head of your fallen enemy.  There is hardly a storyline.

I don't have any major problems with dungeon-crawlers, and I've enjoyed my fair share.  But, even if it technically has identical rules, it isn't the same game.  By their nature, just about every videogame is more like Clue or Battleship than D&D, simply because there is no room to make up stuff on the spot.

I wonder if this is allowed simply because they forgot to say "No punching each other while on the ice" in the rules.

Pen & Paper RPGs are a new breed of games (well, relatively new, given the history of games, let's suppose), which challenges the idea of what rules are for in a game.

In most games, rules restrict what you can do.  In Clue, you can only suggest the murder occurred in the room you are in, unless you are making an accusation.  That is a rule.  You cannot break the rule.

In D&D, the rules simply provide a framework for skills and chance, and instead of limiting players, it encourages smart thinking and rewards ingenuity.  Just because the rules don't explain what to do when you light a bedroll on fire and throw it through a portal to the surprise of six guards, that doesn't mean it's not allowed.  There are enough variables in play that a careful DM can take what is given and roll with it.

So to speak.

Perhaps the most impressive piece of improvisation in the Dethklok Campaign came in an early battle when the character Garret was killed by the sting of a Scorpion Queen.

But instead of killing Garret outright, the DM allowed him to survive, and gave him a curse from the Scorpion Queen's sting that possessed him and not only gave him a character quirk, but significantly altered the campaign.  Every major event in the campaign was effected by Garret's curse, even allowing Garret and two other heroes to escape hideous torture.  At seemingly random times, the DM would ask Garret to roll dice to see if his heightened spidey-senses notice something he otherwise wouldn't.

D&D is part game, part novel that five or so players make up as they go.  If the sessions were written down and cleaned up, the stories created would easily rival the biggest blockbuster movies or ancient epic poems.

This article, however, is not just vehement praise of D&D, or even of all Pen & Paper RPGs.  Rather, it is more a discussion to help think about how we define games.  SimCity changed videogames just as D&D changed boardgames, and perhaps MMOs did the same.

I end with two topics of questions:

Are there more ways we can expand our ideas of games?  D&D turned games into a true storytelling medium.  What else can games do?

And secondly, how to we get videogames to do what humans can do?  How do we allow players to perform actions that the designers didn't think of?  How do we create a framework in the digital world that rewards improvisation and ingenuity?

The designer of this thing did not expect it to be used as a wig.