The Temple of Elemental Evil
This is an editorial piece. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of, and should not be attributed to, Niche Gamer as an organization.
Though I lost respect for PC Gamer a long time ago and no longer read them, I couldn’t help but notice the editorial they wrote about combat and the ensuing dispute over its necessity in RPGs.
While this topic isn’t new, the “current climate” within the industry has made this a frequently embraced talking point that outsiders bring up when trying to discredit the genre, or even gaming as a whole. To them, deeply statistical systems are a barrier to the “common people’s” enjoyment of the modern RPG genre. They prevent the so-called everyman from partaking in them and should be either lessened or removed completely. They have even, in their impassioned pleas for inclusivity, asked that a fast-forward button be added to the combat in much the same way that feature is often attached to a game’s dialog.
As preposterous as that sounds (and as unlikely as it is to be implemented within a AAA game), there is already a small group of games that follow this new style of “play” and still have the audacity to call themselves RPGs. The most notable of the group being a highly celebrated piece of software that goes by the name To the Moon.
When I first saw To the Moon, it was revealed to me by an old friend who remarked on how deep the story was and how the 16-bit retro look made him feel like a kid again.
While I agreed, I needed to see actual gameplay before committing to a purchase of the game. As is always the case with a new title, I ran to Youtube and searched for a trailer or a Let’s Play video to see if the gameplay matched the narrative that my friend assured me was beyond anything he had ever experienced. What I saw not only guaranteed I wouldn’t buy the game, but it also pissed me off.
The video opens with a combat scenario much like Chrono Trigger, but instead of being real, the entire event is one big joke meant to make fun of combat in RPGs. Furthermore, after the ridiculous opening, the narrator talks proudly about how his game is an RPG without any combat.
Yes, an RPG without combat. Like a pizza without dough. Like sex without ejaculation. Like a vehicle without a steering mechanism.
Now don’t get me wrong, the game itself doesn’t bother me. What bothers me is that this game not only calls itself an RPG, but is often brought up by others as one of the giants of the indie RPG scene and is considered “high art”. When a game that lacks such a crucial part of the RPG experience earns praise within the genre, it infuriates me. Especially when so many of the industry’s casual dabblers hold this game up as proof that combat in RPGs is something that needs to be axed.
I know what fans of To the Moon, or games like it, would say to me. “But what is an RPG anyway, isn’t it just any game where you play a role?” Good point. I’ve heard this argument bandied about on forums for over a decade. Everyone thinks they know what constitutes an RPG. Some say it’s the story, others say it’s the choice and consequence. Both of these theories are wrong. Want to know what really makes a game an RPG?
Dice rolls.
I was seven years old when I first got into Dungeons & Dragons. Since the big kids at my summer camp wouldn’t let me join their tabletop games, I bought all of the rulebooks and constructed my own games which I then played by myself. For a good two years I mistakenly believed the “R” in the intialism RPG stood for roll, as in rolling of dice. It wasn’t until I bought the core D&D rulebook and saw it spelled “role” that I corrected myself.
Yet for me, it made sense. Anyone can build a story around something, but it’s the act of random number generation that adds the strategy and tactical aspect to it that makes it an RPG. Merely choosing dialog options in a game or picking which hair color you want your avatar to wear doesn’t make a game an RPG. The use of dice rolls and the adaption you make to their results is what makes it an RPG. Take out the dice and you have no need for strategy or planning. Take out the random number generation and you have no variance. Take out that unknown factor and you have no reason to fear the game. You are merely reading a story and choosing your reply from a list. That’s called a (Editor’s note: kinetic) visual novel, not an RPG. Including them alongside of games like Ultima or Baldur’s Gate does the genre a disservice.
This is also why I consider many RPG hybrids to be RPGs, so long as they have some form of variance in the form of dice rolls. Even the first Deus Ex computes hit chance when firing a gun and uses your skill with each type of firearm to determine the rate at which your aiming reticule wobbles. Though you’d think my statement about games requiring dice rolls means the pool of titles that I consider to be RPGs is smaller than most, it actually means the opposite. To me, any game whose combat is heavily (And this, admittedly, is something I’d have to clarify in a separate editorial) influenced by dice rolls or statistics is an RPG.
Of course, if you don’t even have any combat…this is all wasted breath.
A typical battle in Pillars of Eternity
So we now know an RPG is about dice rolls and combat is how you best use those dice rolls, really simple stuff here. With that out of the way, let’s use that knowledge to answer the original question here…and that’s whether or not combat is something that needs to be toned down for the RPG genre to evolve into a beautiful butterfly and attain its holy birthright and place amongst the stars. So does it? Is combat a problem? Is Pillars of Eternity, like the PC Gamer article said, a game with too many battles?
First of all, what I’d like to know is what the deal is with people using Pillars of Eternity as a case study for their whacked-out anti-combat RPG theories. Not only did PC Gamer do it, but the Guardian has as well. Granted, their article was more focused on people not completing the game, but it not-so-subtly insinuates that the reason why people didn’t finish the game is due to the combat, difficulty, and length.
Secondly, and more importantly, I’d like to know if the people writing these articles understand the roots of the RPG. Do they realize that the genre was birthed from the Wargaming scene of the early 20th century? Dungeons & Dragons isn’t something that fell out of the sky one day and knocked Gary Gygax on the head. It was a natural progression from classic tabletop wargames that simply added a story, world lore, and some motivation behind the fights beyond simply wanting to kill your opponents.
Throw in some Tolkien-esque nonsense (which was gaining in popularity in the 70s when D&D came out) and you have the beginnings of the modern RPG genre. It was these tabletop wargames that acted as the basis for pen and paper RPGs, which in turn acted as the inspiration for early digital RPGs like Rogue and Wizardry. Simply put, combat is at the very core of an RPG and to remove it means to take the engine out of a car and yet continue calling it an automobile.
Combat is where you form relationships with your characters. It’s where their personalities emerge and that player-character bond is forged. While your in-game party may strengthen their friendships between each other in dialog boxes during cut scenes, the bonding between the one holding the joystick and the character behind the monitor is done almost exclusively in combat. Whether it was Minsc’s hilarious battle cries in Baldur’s Gate, Mistral’s cute emoticon-laced utterances in Dot Hack, or Sulik’s crazy taunts in Fallout 2, there’s a lot of personality that can be inserted into a character through their behavior in combat.
It isn’t the only way to give them flavor, but it is the easiest and most profound…at least in my opinion.
But I get it, there are some slightly more rational folk who just want to lessen the combat. They don’t subscribe to Jennifer Hepler’s mantra of “Can we please just skip ahead to the awkward sex scenes” and they do, in fact, still enjoy a good tactical battle here and there. That’s great. Really, it is. I just have one very teensy little problem with that train of thought.
If you think that way, then don’t demand all RPGs change to accommodate your taste.
As I said, combat is the crux of any RPG. You can swim around in dialog trees for hours if you want, but you aren’t truly “role playing” until you get your ass out of the text box and into a suitably deep action menu whose proper navigation is the only way to prevent a game over screen from appearing. The combat is the “check” to see if you have what it takes to continue. If you don’t, well, then there’s always plenty of walking simulators on Steam that can give you the dialog choices you want, without the hassle of having to obsess over builds or learning to exploit the game’s rules.
This whole debate is just a symptom of the larger issue of non-fans coming into the gaming hobby and trying to weasel their way in without properly paying the dues needed for entry. Most of these non-games you see popping up are coming from these folks, and sadly, a lot of your gaming websites are now being staffed by pretenders who subscribe to that destructive “non-fan” design philosophy. Make the game easier! Make the game shorter! Please make an RPG for me that has no combat, is only 5 minutes long, doesn’t punish me for failing to use any strategy and lets me copulate with large non-human races that resemble something out of my Deviantart account!
Some dialog in Mass Effect
It’s funny, but it’s not very far from the truth either. There is a real growing sentiment amongst newly arriving “RPG fans” that our games are not only too hard, but too long as well. For them, the drudgery of combat extends the game far beyond what they feel comfortable investing their time into, and they believe that the only way for the RPG genre to improve is to remove said drudgery and severely shorten the game’s length.
Granted, there are RPGs out there that even real fans point to as being too combat-heavy and obtuse in their design. Two that come to mind are Drakensang and Temple of Elemental Evil. The one thing to remember about them is that for every person who thinks they are too combat heavy or difficult, there is another RPG’er who values the challenge those games provide. There’s nothing wrong with not liking these combat-heavy RPGs, but at the same time, you shouldn’t berate their designers for simply focusing on that one defining aspect of the genre. Don’t like such an intense focus on combat? Try Planescape: Torment, which doesn’t even have much combat until the last 1/3rd of the story. Don’t appreciate a hardcore ruleset? Install one of the many simplistic RPG Maker games that sit on Steam.
I understand people have lives, families, and jobs. No one is more sympathetic to that than me, since I balance all three and yet still make enough time to game and write every day for this website. Yet to hear some of these folks talk, it’s as if they barely have enough time to wipe after going to the bathroom. If presented with an epic RPG that is more than 20 hours in length, they whine that they don’t have the time for it.
A battle in Wasteland 2
If confronted with a really long game, like Pillars of Eternity or Wasteland 2, they roll their eyes and make a comment about how such titles are proof that the genre needs to change. If you have so little free time, why did you pick a genre of game that is universally known for being extraordinarily time consuming? Why enter into a notoriously demanding sub-genre that even the most devoted of geeks have trouble following?
My theory? The RPG hobby is the golden jewel in the crown of gaming and is the most prestigious – at least in terms of generating and proving geek cred – amongst all of the hobby’s genres. People who want to be a part of the cool crowd come here first, and that’s why the first bout of “mainstreaming” you saw in gaming this last decade occurred within the RPG genre before anything else. As RPG Codex frequently put it, that period was “the decline”. Thanks to Kickstarter, you’re seeing a huge “incline”, but it was a long time coming. Also, it was this decline in RPG depth and complexity that was the canary dying in the coal mine – the warning that this same problem would crop up in the gaming hobby at large. Unfortunately, we didn’t listen.
It reminds me of a quote by Paul Mooney, who when on Dave Chapelle’s Comedy Central show one time, remarked, “Everybody wants to be a [N-word], but nobody wants to be a [N-word].” What he was referring to is how everyone wants to have the swagger and the hip-ness of being black, but nobody wants to deal with the adversities they face in society (an argument I’m not going to get into here). It’s the same with geek culture and RPGs as well. Everyone wants to be a geek, but nobody wants to actually be a geek. They’ll call themselves a geek, or an RPG’er even, but they are only those things in name, and not by nature. If you dare point this out to someone who is such a poser, they play the tired old “Who left you in charge?” card, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
Everyone wants to be counter-culture and seem “unique”, but nobody wants to actually live the proper life of a geek. Ask any of these pretenders if they know what a hikikomori is, and when explained, see if they would wear it as a badge of honor. Ask them if they know what “cat-assing” is and if they frequently do it (preferably with an RPG) and I’ll bet you they have no idea what you’re talking about. Granted, there are different levels of geek devotion, but it has been my experience that the same people crying for the genre to adapt to their mainstream preferences are often just RPG’ers in name only. Like it or not, geek cred matters.
A still from the 2008 movie, Tokyo!
It’s like that television show The Big Bang Theory. It is essentially blackface for geeks.
The geek equivalent of what minstrel shows were for African Americans. A show that, at least in my opinion, is somewhat to blame for the sudden rash of wannabes trying to pull off the geek look and pretend as if they care about geek hobbies. Getting back to the editorial’s subject, it’s these folks who are writing those “RPGs are too hard/long/too full of combat” complaints. Either that or they are just using the sudden and disappointingly large influx of these people for web page clicks by echoing their concerns.
It all boils down to paying your dues. Which is to say, if you want into a hobby, you need to “come correct”, as they say. You need to understand its history, its rules, what made it strong and what keeps it healthy. You need to accept what it is that attracts people to it and what makes it unique and adapt to those things, not try to force the overwhelming majority to instead adapt to you, the new entrant. Doing so muddies the waters, divides the community, and creates general chaos.
The RPG genre is the one genre where you need to sacrifice a little bit of your life to better enjoy it. No one is saying you need to cloister yourself in a basement and shut all the windows, but I’m not going to tell you that doesn’t help, either (spoiler: it does).
Combat is what separates the gold from the dross and the wheat from the chaff. If your “RPG” lacks it, then it’s not an RPG. This is a hobby for the person who memorizes 500 pages of rules and spends years learning how to exploit them. This is a genre for gamers that play in 18 hour spurts and wake up to go to work without having slept and get sent to drug tests because their boss thinks they’re on amphetamines. This is the genre for folks that love to shut the doors, bar the windows, close the shades and sink into a chair all week to play the latest open world masterpiece. This isn’t a genre for half-hearted bandwagon jumpers that want to be seen as one of the cool kids.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance, an upcoming RPG that focuses on realistic combat
Granted, as we age we can’t be the proud cave-dwelling geeks we once were. But you know what? That’s ok. You play what you can and enjoy it. Just don’t demand the genre change to placate the minority’s needs. RPGs aren’t meant to be short, easy, or simplistic. If you want that, you chose the wrong hobby.
