[The Fantasy Trip: Wizard] One little booklet = 100,000 words
Ron Edwards:
Hi Morgan,
Sorry it took me this long to get back to you. It's really sinking in how much RPG rhetoric about "balance" can use this little game as a touchpoint for critique.
Another variable that occurred to me, reading your post, concerns commitment to a single Wizard character, which is often linked to some back-story or situational framework for a fight, or perhaps linked to some specific Color. For me, this was a key factor in my early fascination with role-playing. Krait's arrogance and Yzor's frustration and fear ("I'm not ready for this!") were very strong factors in my anticipated enjoyment of playing Wizard, tied as they were as well to the best book then or now about young students at wizard school, The Wizard of Earthsea. So when I made up a 32-point wizard to use in a fight, it was already wrapped up in colorful and emotional resonance. I had a strong idea already whether my character winning or losing a fight would be good or bad, not in the sense of me winning or losing against another player, but thematically.
Arguably, such a priority is misplaced when starting beginning figures in Wizard, just as it's equally misplaced when rolling up a first-level character in Tunnels & Trolls. I bring up the latter game because unlike Wizard it is a capital-R RPG which strongly assumes (and the reader should pay attention) that one rolls up at least three or four characters to play simultaneously, and you should damn well be prepared for their gruesome deaths early on. You're supposed to bring in more of them as they are killed, in a kind of ongoing wave front of character creation in the face of slaughter, and real victory occurs when one or more characters show unusual survival through many adventures.
OK, so therefore, enjoying Wizard might be better in the long term when one thinks not of one character, but of many. In 800 fights, using a dozen characters, have any of them made it through many fights? Luck plays a big role. So does character-building and tactical acumen, at every state, but given some competence in one's opponent player or players, then yeah, luck is huge. Is this the fun? Over the long haul, being determined and savvy enough on the average to tip raw luck's role a few percentage points upwards from 50%? That would certainly be tangibly evident simply through character survival and advancement.
But again, such thinking only applies across many characters, not in the isolated history of one of them, because death = death = no more for that character.
Shifting from many characters at once to a single character is a profound feature of early RPG play. It interests me a lot that apparently, the math of most RPGs is far better suited to the former, whereas the assumption of play and the expected commitment to character-play corresponds with the latter.
Best, Ron
Alfryd:
Quote from: Ron Edwards on August 21, 2010, 09:56:16 AM
Arguably, such a priority is misplaced when starting beginning figures in Wizard, just as it's equally misplaced when rolling up a first-level character in Tunnels & Trolls. I bring up the latter game because unlike Wizard it is a capital-R RPG which strongly assumes (and the reader should pay attention) that one rolls up at least three or four characters to play simultaneously, and you should damn well be prepared for their gruesome deaths early on. You're supposed to bring in more of them as they are killed, in a kind of ongoing wave front of character creation in the face of slaughter, and real victory occurs when one or more characters show unusual survival through many adventures.
Ah... that would explain a few things about the chargen system. You're not married to any single character, so I take it rolling up a single character is more like a temporary gamble than a strategic commitment- I guess another way to look at it could be that 'length of a Go' here is the length of an entire campaign?
Quote
Shifting from many characters at once to a single character is a profound feature of early RPG play. It interests me a lot that apparently, the math of most RPGs is far better suited to the former, whereas the assumption of play and the expected commitment to character-play corresponds with the latter.
Yeah- I remember the Earthsea series with considerable fondness myself, and once tried to draw up a design brief for an RPG in the setting with a couple of other folks. One of the conclusions we reached was that character death shouldn't be the result of accident, given the lack of resurrection mechanics and the general potential to screw up a long-term story-arc. (Nowadays, I'd probably incline toward using some adaptation of Mouse Guard, which has some strong similarities in terms of setting and little-p premise, and, of course, only allows character death with the player's permission.)
Ron Edwards:
Hi Morgan,
I don't think we played T&T long enough, nor did we use the multiple-character approach well enough (i.e. from the beginning), for me to say for sure, but my current take is that "marriage" to a character does occur. It's emergent, however, from which ones survive and under what circumstances. I don't know if you've seen my old posts
Killed me a player-character (spit), [Tunnels & Trolls] Second level characters, and [Tunnels & Trolls] Half-elves are poncy nancy-boys. I'm thinking especially about Maura's unspeakably obnoxious character Henk, but also about Julie's interesting and also funny tactic of making every new character another sibling.
I should also point out, cynically, that Maura's first character was extremely lame in effectiveness but happened to roll quite high for starting money ... which meant after the next bit of delving, that player was able to juice up her next character's money with the legacy from the first. So in some ways, one's resources as a player are best understood as spread across the current characters rather than isolated in each.
But back to TFT: Wizard, the more I think of it, the more the T&T approach seems like a better route to fun: make up four or five characters for each player, then run a bunch of fights, leaving half of them alive, and continue, but make up new characters to fill in the total amount for each person; keep going.
Perhaps over time certain personalities and color would appear and develop, especially if 'younger' characters were created as apprentices or other in-setting relationship terms. Setting and context for fights might become an important part of the experience. One might even imagine, at the risk of playing-before-play, that the two players might ally appropriate characters against an external "NPC" foe at some point.
All of which appears to me as a kind of tragic road-not-taken in my own role-playing history. It sounds like a hell of a lot more fun than how I was learning "to play right" from the people around me in 1978-81.
Best, Ron
Motipha:
in other (barely related) news, it's really disconcerting when you get taken to the archives from one of these links: The pages look exactly the same, so you think you're on the same old forge, but all the "new" tags are wrong and nothings up since May onwards. Weird world.
Larry L.:
Ron,
Very awesome. Thanks for writing this up. I'll try to make some time to post some observations.
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