Video/Tabletop Hybrids: A Historical Perspective

Before explaining my latest grand idea, a little history. The first video game console system, the Magnavox Odyssey, was released in 1972. This was the "pre-Pong" era, characterized by games that were basically a single dot bouncing back and forth across a screen with players using paddles to direct its motion. Before Pong, there were no capabilities for games to track a score, and there were certainly no graphics beyond single large dots! The entire game had to be created around a single mechanic, and customized through non-electronic add-ons -- and the Odyssey had a lot of add-ons. Transparent overlay screens were laid on top of the screen to allow the moving dot to illuminate different parts of the image, creating the illusion of motion. Objective cards defined the operations that players were supposed to perform with their moving dots. Scorekeeping poker chips allowed for players to keep track of who was winning, an operation well beyond the capabilities of the console itself. A primitive light-gun could be used to shoot at the dot in various hunting games. The point is that early video games were necessarily a hybrid of physical and electronic components.

Magnavox maintained this philosophy with its later-generation consoles, culminating with the Odyssey2 in 1978. This was a true programmable console with the capability for swapping different cartridge games, rather than just playing the same "game" (some form of Pong) with varying overlays and control schemes. By the time this system was released, it was already being eclipsed by arcades and the Atari 2600, systems with much better graphics, fluid controls, and faster action. But the strategy it used to compete was by going high-brow and trying to boost the physical inserts provided along with the cartridge. This approach culminated in 1981 with the release of Quest for the Rings, the first video game I ever attempted to play.

QftR, in all its glory.

This is seriously the most overproduced game in pretty much all of history, and that includes a lot of collector's editions released today. You can see that it's a video game that has an entire board game wrapped around it. The board game has about 60 pieces, a gold-embossed game manual, a full-color map board, a keyboard overlay, and lots of Escher-esque concept art showing you the graphics the designers probably wished they could cram into the actual cartridge.

The video game itself consisted of several simple Pacman mazes with four different types of fantasy monsters, including a fire-breathing dragon. The game was designed to be a cooperative stealth game. Each player chose a character from one of four classes, and tried to use what we'd today call "aggro management" to steer at least one character to a ring at the opposite side of the maze. To mix things up, the maze walls would sometimes move and shift, and other times be made of lethal lava. It was unique in that era for being a two-player cooperative game and for having characters with totally unique skill sets: a warrior who could kill enemies, a wizard who could stun them, a phantom who could walk through walls to escape, and a changeling who could become invisible to dump aggro. The monsters were also better differentiated than the ghosts in Pacman, with different sizes, speeds, and movement patterns.

I never really succeeded in playing it, partially because the game was difficult even for two players, partially because the control paddles were hideously clunky, partly because I was six years old (!), and partially because it was at a friend's house and I only got to try it a few times. But the idea in abstract principle, a hybrid supergame with one foot in the physical world and another in the electronic one, has continued to be something I want someone to implement for me in a perfected modern form.

While I'm no programmer, one idea I've been contemplating is to merge two existing types of games: a high-level economic system played using an existing strategy game, and a tactical resolution system using an existing video game. For example, a board game like Civilization could be played out normally, but using the arena mode of a low-level strategy engine (like the SSI's Fantasy General) to resolve the outcome of battles. One of my projects a few years back was to unify the economic system from Starfire with the tactical battle system of Space Empires IV, allowing for a solo Starfire game -- a project that was basically superseded by the discovery of Aurora. (But not until after I had sunk a few dozen hours into modding SE4 to work with Starfire tech!)

Currently my latest idea is to combine a sandbox CRPG with the economic system in ACKS, creating a solo RPG with higher level domain management components. This could work with some of the old Gold Box games (or their FRUA reimplementations), as well as with the d20 indie title Knights of the Chalice. Most modern games have too many plot constraints to allow for integration with an outside system, but maybe there are some player-created Neverwinter Nights modules that might work. A major complication is the need for a character hex editor that can import elements (money, characters, magic items, spells) from the economic system back into the computer game. (The Gold Box Companion works OK for basic functions like creating gold or leveling up, but encounters some game breaking bugs with the item creation functions.)

Like all of my grand schemes, I hardly have enough time to implement this one. But I think I'll at least play with the idea in my mind and see where it goes.

Pool Of Radiance Retrospective

It was just over 25 years ago that the first "real" electronic implementation of a pen and paper RPG arrived. Pool of Radiance was a joint project by a number of legendary TSR developers, including Jim Ward, Steve Winter, Zeb Cook, and Mike Breault. It inspired a lot of sequels, which themselves indirectly inspired next-generation RPGs like Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights.

I recently hauled out the game and played through the opening scenarios. As is often my approach to CRPGs, I added a set of self-assigned "conducts" to play in a pseudo-ironman mode to make the game harder. (There are plenty of ways to cheat and make it easier, too!) After 25 years it's apparent how many of the user interface decisions from the era are painful in ways that I never appreciated at the time. Healing a wounded party sometimes requires dozens of keystrokes, and plenty of important information (like saving throws and buff spells) is hidden from the player without the use of unofficial third-party add-ons. Most of the spells are frankly useless, and thieves are an ignorable class due to having no stealth abilities. But I still regard this as one of the best RPGs ever made, and I figure it helps me understand my own creative process (as a game designer and referee) to think about why I like it so much.

Here's a list of all the things it does well -- in many cases, better than any game created since:

1. Random encounters to give a sense of peril: At every stage of the game, there are always random monsters waiting to jump you on the way back from a successful expedition. This creates a standard dilemma where you have a party struggling with the encumbrance a load of hard-fought loot, but it doesn't matter if you can't bundle it home across the forbidding wilderness or treacherous mazes. There's something deeply iconic about greedy adventurers clinging to their prizes even as they beat off pursuing foes. It makes the world feel more organic than being able to just walk back into town unmolested and then return to pick up where you left off, as if clearing dungeons were the same thing as picking fruit from an orchard.
   
   Better yet, encounters can hit you even when resting, in proportion to the time you spend in camp. So there's a constant tension between trying to re-memorize all your spells, or just the handful of essential ones you need to survive.
   


2. A robust morale system: All the Gold Box games had this, but many later games have mostly ignored morale. Morale is essential for allowing a game to have huge epic battles without becoming tedious. One the one hand, there's something awe-inspiring about walking into a room and finding not 5 orcs, but 50! On the other hand, who actually wants to hunt down and kill them all? In this game as in the original D&D rules every battle has a natural break point where the monsters start running (often triggering a cheer, or at least a sigh of relief).





Good news: We have the archers flanked! Bad news: That's a lot of archers...

Side note: The "morale" rules are a logical counterpart to the "turning" rules for undead (which themselves have no morale). The "surrender" effect mirrors the "destroyed" result for turning, and the "flee" effect mirrors the "turned" result. It's a peculiarity that, in later editions of D&D and its ilk, the undead-turning mechanic remains even as morale has been lost. This makes clerics feel weirdly overpowered against undead. In historical context, though, the undead themselves were originally weirdly overpowered due to their lack of morale checks. Clerics were just restoring them back to parity with other monsters.

Alas, due to poor pathfinding in these early games, morale sometimes just resulted in enemies cowering in corners while you had to slowly pick them off with arrows. So the system didn't always work as advertised. But when it did, and 12 kobolds unexpected surrendered to your sole surviving priest, it was a glorious thing.


3. A detailed adventurer's journal with an emphasis on tactile elements: Back in the 64K days, games couldn't squeeze much text into the game engine itself, so they resorted to including any long text-blocks in a separate booklet. This was often a blessing rather than a curse, since it allowed for materials that wouldn't be compatible with the primitive interface. That could include fragments of handdrawn maps, notes from some anonymous sage, and the ubiquitous "code wheel", a primitive copy-protection method that PoR actually appropriated as a way to translate various dwarven and elven rune languages in the game. Oh, and a lengthy history of the geography and politics of the region, which lots of players probably would skip today, but which I read extensively. All of this on faux-aged paper with custom script fonts. Unlike other computer games of the era (and too many games today) this one was made out of wood.





A map within a map within a map...

4. Legacy features from the early golden age of RPGs: In Pool of Radiance, you can wander around a random map and discover procedurally generated lairs full of the classic "Type X" minor treasure troves with gems, minor magic items, scrolls, and potions. If the encounters felt too hard you could hire a nameless mook or two as your henchman -- if you didn't mind them swiping some of your hard-earned gold after every fight. Time was strictly regulated as a game resource, and searching a room put you in danger of more of those random encounters. Party members could be swapped in and out of your party to create a motley group of level 7, 5, and 2 characters of any flavor you wanted, making it a matter of dumb luck whether the next encounter would be at all "balanced". (I'm facing skeletons... and all my mages have sleep spells, gah!)
   
   For that matter, large chunks of the game were horribly unbalanced, starting with the notorious room full of trolls the designers tossed at any new party wandering into the game's "newbie zone", the slums. (I guess you were just supposed to run away, and praise the valor of the fallen companions who perished as they were pursued...) Lethal poison, level draining undead, and instant-death traps were constantly lurking around every corner. None of this "poison slows you down a little for ten seconds and then wears off automatically" nonsense; a 500 pound spider sinks its fangs into you, and you're going down, kid. That's what spiders actually do. We're simulating reality here, not giving you the illusion of being a hero with some fun park ride.

All of this is in contrast to modern games which often feel too carefully designed to be part of an organic world. Monsters are neatly segregated by level into zones flagged with huge neon challenge-level signs, where they are just barely sufficient to cause you to break a light sweat but no more. Those brutally unfair trolls? I remember them well, 25 years later.


5. A turn-based tactical engine: I'm sorry, but turn-based combat is just better for RPGs. No amount of trying to cram the square peg of D&D into the round hole of real-time combat will convince me otherwise. There's nothing more depressing than realizing that the only necessary tactic in a modern RPG is to put one dude in optimally enchanted plate armor and have him run in circles while the rest of the party snipes away from range at the monsters stupidly chasing him. (Yes, I'm looking at you, Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights.) Tension doesn't come from how fast the game forces you to play, but how slowly it makes you want to play as you agonize over each decision during a nasty ambush.

This isn't to say that PoR is actually a playable game today, at least by most consumer standards. The graphics are antiquated Atari-era stuff. The interface is all paging through block menus. And there are huge gaps in the documentation that make it unclear what aspects of the PnP rules were actually ported over. (Does Wisdom actually grant any saving throw bonuses? I have no idea how to even tell...)

But a modern game that tried to emulate some of these attributes would be greatly appreciated, at least by me.

A Cleric Spell Glitch And Textual Criticism

The character creation rules in ACKS seem to be organized around using the four classic classes (fighter/cleric/mage/thief), in their original incarnations. Most of the sub-type classes are implemented in rather novel ways, with the Gnomish Illusionist (for example) looking very little like the original 80s-era version of the illusionist class. But the Basic Four are almost exactly copied from their primitive form. To be precise, they resemble the Greyhawk/Holmes/Moldvay implementation of each, aside from some clean-ups like using d20 for thief skills instead of d100.

One of the places this is most obvious is in the cleric spell progression. The original 1974 release of Men and Magic includes this table:

You can see that the cleric is differentiated from the mage in two general ways: Slower initial spell progression (the text description suggests that the clerics need to "earn" their spells by service), but rapid progression after level 4.

But even stranger is the irregular at level 5 (or actually "4+1", in these pre-Grehawk booklets designed to mate perfectly onto the Chainmail rules). At the following level, suddenly the cleric gets two spell levels at once! The line that reads "2 2 -" should probably have read "2 1 1" for the sake of a smooth "one spell level per player level" progression. The removal of this discontinuity in both 1e and the Rules Cyclopedia suggests that it was a mistake.

This glitch is reproduced faithfully in the ACKS core rules. This has the effect of artificially weakening level 5 clerics, who are missing the 3rd level spell that they "should" already have in place of that additional 2nd level spell. I'm debating whether to put it back in, or leave it in the currently quirky form as a nod to tradition. There's something charming about it being a permanent monument to the amateur proofreading of TSR during the early garage-publishing era.

There's a fascinating parallel here in Biblical scholarship, where early scribal transcription errors that result from skipped lines (called "haplographic" errors) show up in many older texts that are used as the basis for modern translations. This creates a situation in which a modern translator is forced to make a choice between fidelity to the flawed text, or inserting a reconstructed version of the missing line that might not perfectly replicate the original material.

No more pink Vaseline!

In some ways, the RPG-writing community (or at least, the retro-RPG community) shows many of the same passionately conservative exegetical tendencies as a Hebrew or Christian religious community. Errors are first a source of confusion, then grow to become viewed affectionately, in the same way that some Star Wars fans would rather watch the original theatrical version of Star Wars with Vader's uncolored lightsaber and the smear of Vaseline that hides the wheels on Luke's speeder.