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There Are Games Afoot!

© Michael Martinez

I have created a fantasy world. It was even loosely based on Tolkien. And many years later, when it became my turn to run a role-playing game, I adapted that fantasy world to the Rolemaster system. I had maps, lots of them, and yet I found I always needed more. I was still drawing maps as the game progressed. One of the best, in terms of usability for the game, was a fairly crude map of a city where I allowed the players to make some allies, learn about the world, and unravel some ancient mysteries. By this time, the fantasy world bore little resemblance to Tolkien, of course. But that brings us to the question of how much any future game will resemble Tolkien's work. The gaming rage for now is the new LOTR board game which, despite its multi-board layout and dependence upon John Howe's artwork, little resembles Tolkien's masterpiece. Board games can be interesting and have an adventurous feel to them (I remember playing one in college where we picked characters, acquired spells and items for them in the form of cards, and built up alliances with other players). But is there really any point to replaying the adventure in The Lord of the Rings? We know how the story is supposed to turn out Frodo gets the Ring to Mount Doom, Gollum steals it and falls into the fire, and Sauron is vanquished. Then a couple years later Frodo leaves the world forever. The challenge in adapting the Quest of the Ringbearers to a game is to keep it from being predictable. And there you have basically two choices either Sauron wins, or someone other than Frodo gets the Ring to Mount Doom. But that's pretty simplistic. There aren't many possible outcomes to the game, and it's unlikely anyone will devote their life to developing strategies and writing books about it. Or, rather, it's not likely people will be playing the game thirty years from now. A game which provides for a great deal of variety, like Monopoly, stands a better chance of surviving the decades, than one with only a few possible resolutions. How many people are actually playing The Battle of Five Armies any more, for example? Of course, there are games and there are games. For example, a strategy-based game doesn't rely upon characters or individualistic pursuits. The pawns in the game of chess (probably invented by the Chinese more than 2,000 years ago, despite what R. Murray wrote almost 100 years ago) have the same goal as the queen and the knights checkmate the other side's king. A role-playing game can be a multi-player experience or a single-player event. Role-playing games can be run by a human with the players sitting together in a room, using pencil and paper to keep track of character items and statistics. Or the games can be handled by computer, either running alone on a single computer or over a network.