To the ideal RPG.

And no, I don’t mean rocket propelled grenade, although that would be an interesting option. Hmmmmmm. Grenades. Anyway. Back to the rant.

Oh, if ideality were only where things would go. Annoyingly to everyone out there I do mean my personal ideality. This is unlikely to be yours, but hey, no-ones paying you to read this. So let us start with the root of all evil:

XP

I should like to point out that this, obviously, is the standard roleplaying abbreviation for “experience point” and nothing at all to do with anything else.

No, really.

Sadly, the games industry is obsessed with the concept of the experience point, and frequently as a direct consequence, with the concept of psychotically killing everything in visual range. Good if you’re a violent 12 year-old or need to cathartically burn off aggression after work. Not good for a true RPG experience or for stretching the mind, come to think of it.

It has not escaped my notice that in pencil and paper games, the less that experience points play an active role (excuse pun) in game progression, the less things tend to get killed (or to put another way the less killing tends to dominate the gameplay) and the more intense the roleplaying game experience is. In fact the Amber diceless game even eschews pencil and paper as too evil and that was pretty darn intense (cheers, guys).

There have been welcome breaks in computer game design in this way. Ignoring the old and frightfully obscure text-based excesses of “The Adventure Game” for Acorn Electron and IBM 380Z, I will start with Myst. Sadly this game had roughly the longevity of the coffee break in which it could be completed (OK, OK, it took me 4 whole hours, I admit, but it was Christmas and I was drunk). Myst did do pretty well for a game that effectively contained 9 puzzles, and it was visually and sound-wise really nice. However it’s pretty darn expensive considering how long it lasts.

So the games on the market broadly fall into two categories. On one side we have the exceedingly pretty but monotonously combat-based and inescapably linearly plotlined Final Fantasy series, the detailed yet squinty Baldur’s Gate series, Planescape Torment, Fallout and so forth. Universally: Assemble your group, go forth, slay things and save up those XP’s for slaying bigger things. And don’t forget not to try slaying the bigger things until you’ve killed lots of the not so big things first.

Joy!

Does anyone else find this at all boring in concept? I mean, I like to blow things up after work as much as the next guy (or gal) but there comes a time when I’d like my brain stretched, and I don’t mean by squeezing my skull. I’m not saying that I haven’t bought all of these, 'coz I have, and they have their place in my heart. As Vitenka says, sometimes it can be fun to just watch the games. Like the promenade in BGII, for instance, or the cows playing poker in Fallout Tactics which I watched for 10 minutes solid as I lay on the floor laughing at the sheer silliness.

On the other side of the RPG coin, we have the often intricately-constructed but oft-times very random puzzle games such as Myst, the Discworld RPGS, Simon-the-sorcerer, Monkey Island, and that Douglas Adams one set on an interstellar cruise liner. Problems include just hiding things in the most annoying way possible ("Ah yes, the robot’s heart is in fact the bog-standard looking light fitting on deck 37 near the lift." Well, obviously. You mean you didn’t think of that?), or the lack of freedom to try doing certain things (why can’t I try and block THAT door? Why can’t I burn down the soldier’s barracks?). Obviously there is a fundamental limit here in that you cannot put in place contingencies for every consequence that a particular item might cause. Can you?

Well with one item, and n objects that you can possibly use that on in 1 way that’s n possibilities that you’ve added. This'll add up quickly, especially if all of these things can be done, and keeping track of it all would be a pain, but not impossible. Some things would be nicely reversible. Like maybe you find a screwdriver. Yay! You can take things apart (but only if they’re held together with screws). You might find out later that you need to put that thing back together again. You can do that. Funky. You took something apart for no real reason and then rebuilt it. Nobody forced you to do it. But nobody stopped you either.

Wow. Wouldn’t that be great? Total freedom.

[If it was some kind of persistent world multiplayer thingy you could maybe set up shop as "screwdriver blokey" and ignore the game. People could come from miles around to have you assemble rare items like the undervalued "Flatpackwardrobe of Ikea" or the mighty "Swivelchair of Argos". Maybe you get bored and go on a quest for a spanner or socket set to improve your business. But I digress.]

To pander to standard industry requirements, I suppose you could try hitting people with the screwdriver too, but hey, you could try hitting people with anything, really, from sharpened blancmange to unsold copies of odium [*shudder*], and it shouldn’t make too much difference except in terms of how much mess you’ll make, unless it was an enchanted blancmange +5, of course, which wounds anything (and yet tastes quite good too).

Well I dunno. I’m tempted to give it a whirl. Maybe when I get some spare time and a decent computer at home. It's something to aim towards. Probably something myst-esque using HTML to create an interface and Flash to manage sounds and occasional animation. Or something. Possibly featuring blancmange.

Maybe you’ll wish me luck, and maybe you won’t, and think I'm some kind of strange blancmange-and-screwdriver-obsessed nutter (psychoanalysis on a postcard to...), which is probably closer to the truth than you realise >:-) . But hey. If it ever does get started, do pop along and have a look. (I'll have to actually do it and then find somewhere to put it first, though).

Sorry, but I feel so much better for that unco-ordinated rant.