Pen & Paper RPGs Are Fantastic ... But Not As RPGs

by Zack Fornaca

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Vampire, Champions, Rifts and the whole lot of "pen and paper" games -- all good games in theory. They're social games, and the characters are fully your creation -- you choose exactly what abilities and personality quirks they have. Plus, you get a level of freedom and variety no video game could ever offer.

One of my own personal gripes about computer/console RPGs is that, while they can be very deep and involving for one person, they aren't really good for a group of friends, not even just 2 or 3 (whereas AD&D operates on more of a 4-8 person basis), except for Secret Of Mana. One or two of the Final Fantasy games let you use both controllers, but the first player is still "dominant," operating the menu screen and moving the characters around the map. Dungeons & Dragons, on the other hand, is a necessarily cooperative activity, and even simple survival is dependent on group strategizing, coordination, and friendship. The Combo system that was so "innovative" in Chrono Trigger has long been a necessity in traditional RPGs, where, your characters can form shield walls, enchant each other's weaponry, trip monsters for the party's fighter to stab, distract monsters for the thief to backstab, or whatever. There's a whole world of improvised team tactics to explore in AD&D and its sister games, and video games, even ones like Final Fantasy Tactics, can't even begin to compare.

And never mind problems on a group level -- in video games you have no real control over your characters. Many Final Fantasy 3 fans might feel a great fondness for Locke or other favorite characters, but in pen & paper RPGs, you don't just get attached to characters -- you create them and shape their personality through your actions. You create their dialogue on the spot, decide how ethical, how psychotic, and how artistic they'll be, who they'll hate and love, even what their favorite food will be. The character you have is a part of you, because he or she springs FROM you.

Just as the characters in video games come prepackaged, so do the stories. Many RPG fans lament the excessive linearity in the majority of RPGs, until they are reminded of the no-character-development alternative. Well, guess what. Dungeons & Dragons has the best of both worlds. With the Dungeon Master improvising and therefore "ready" for any decision the players may make, the players need not feel inhibited or trapped by some grand plotline, and the depth of the characters doesn't have to be sacrificed. Perfect!

Except that pen & paper RPGs are far from perfect. They're totally lacking in eye candy and musical gems. The fact that it's all improvised makes the quality erratic at best. And, worst of all, it's all dependent on the players who are, at best, only human.

The fact that the players are only human is the fatal flaw. I have been both Dungeon Master and player in more than a dozen failed campaigns, no exaggeration. My proudest moment was when I was a DM and one of my players' characters actually got to level 5, which took all of three sessions (we got an early start on a "Monty Haul" campaign). The first time I DM'ed, one of my players knocked out a gnome and stole everything he owned, and then the whole group refused to accept the king's mission unless he gave them mules. They wanted 6 mules "to ride ... or maybe eat." Then they firebombed a village of innocent lycanthropes and looted the ruins. It didn't matter that half of the characters were of "good" alignment, and the rest "nautral" -- everyone's evil once the dice start rolling. In another game, where I was a player, one of the other players was using a Tasmanian Devil figure for a figure, another was playing a lizardman so he was using the closest thing we had -- a dragon-man miniature. Well, about 45 minutes into the game, the former player was spinning his character across the board and making strange tongue noises, while the latter kept insisting his character could fly because it clearly had wings. In another game, this one not Dungeons & Dragons but Champions ( a super-hero role playing game), our Game Master threw an alien fish-man mutant mastermind against us, and after the team handily defeated the poorly designed master villian, the shark-man "hero" in the group, um, ate him.

All of this served to teach me a lesson about social activities -- they aren't meant to be serious. When you get six or seven friends together, the first thing on your mind probably shouldn't be a serious and orderly quest. It's all in good fun, and good fun is the whole point of getting together with friends anyhow. Still, as an immersive role-playing adventure, pen and paper failed me miserably, time after time. As a result, while I can't condemn Dungeons & Dragons or Champions as worthless activities (indeed, those games include many of my favorite memories), if you're comparing video game RPGs versus pen-and-paper RPGs by all the criteria that make RPGs what they are -- characters, story, music, and all the rest ... well, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons looks good "on paper" (ha ha), but in my experience, the only RPGs that work in practice are video games.

AD&D was damn fun, though.