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Mountains on the Left, Ruins on the Right - Page 3

© Michael Martinez

Havas wanted a game which could truly appeal to the masses. The game designers said, "But...we have 100,000 players waiting to pay $10-20 a month to play in this system!" 100,000 players were not masses. They were trifles not to be messed with. And most of them would not qualify as Tolkien purists. Many of these players-in-waiting just liked the idea of getting to play an Orc or an Elf in a world which called itself Middle-earth. Of course, that was 1999. Now, in 2002, we have all seen "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring", which zooms about the landscape, allowing us to look over the shoulders of Ringbearers, Elves, Uruk-hai, and anything else which gets in the way of the camera. The audience is rushed through a whirlwind series of adventures with very little indication that time is passing. Gandalf's "It will take us four days to pass through Moria" seems insignificant compared to the rapidity with which he gets the Fellowship from the ruinous west-gate to the hall where the Balrog takes him down. I remember looking at the rule for encumbrances in the I.C.E. system and asking if we really had to figure out exhaustion factors and stuff. Fortunately for me, my college gaming group said they didn't worry about that stuff. Their characters usually didn't live long enough to unpack their supplies anyway. But we did spend a lot of evenings trying to get from town A to town B. There were many die rolls for perception, safe use of spells, random encounters, and -- oh yes -- the interminable battles. We so badly wanted to put those Rolemaster weapon tables on a computer. I started writing programs to do this several times, but the data entry task was just immense. It was depressing. Would today's gamers put up with that? Have they been conditioned to do so? I know that, when I finally took a turn at running the game, I did everything I could to speed things up. I spent a week planning a single battle where twelve master adepts (very, very powerful wizards) attacked a group of high level player characters who had a small army of men-at-arms with them. I did as many rolls in advance as I could. I wrote up twelve sheets of bad-guy actions and rolls and had one of the players draw them at random. The players loved it. They couldn't keep up with me. Most of the time, the game ref had to sit there and roll for each bad guy while the players at most might have had to roll for 2 or 3 characters. Today's computerized gaming systems remove that burden from the player. But they remove something else, too.

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