War of the Ring Poll Results, and a new poll
While most of you remain optimistic that a great
War of the Ring game could be done, a significant minority shared my opinion
that it can't.
Being a fan of Lord of the Rings and a gamer, a
War of the Ring game that captures the drama of the epic battles of the late
Third Age is something of a holy grail. Of late, though, I've come to believe it
can't be done. I've long been convinced that despite several attempts, the
Pellanor Fields is ungameable at the grand tactical level, except in the sense
that you can make a game that simply follows the events of the book, if you
wanted to - but whether or not that's really a game is arguable. You just can't
game the dramatic arrival of the Rohirrim or the facedown between Eowyn and the
Witch-King.
The entire War of the Ring
has similar problems. The book is a novel, in which things happen for reasons of
story and drama, not probability or logic. So at every level you have huge
problems. How do you get the Sauron player into the right mindset, how do you
put the fear and uncertainty of the Ring into his mind? How do you convey the
task of the Fellowship as being appropriately desperate? How to you impart the
drama of the climactic events without scripting them into the game, and thus
depriving them of the drama you are attempting to capture? How do you
incorporate elements of the book without railroading the game down the course of
the book? Is it even appropriate to talk about game balance - do you think that
when Aragorn, Gandalf, and Elrond embarked on this task, they felt that they had
about a 50-50 chance of success?
I've
seen a number of attempts to do this, from ICE's facinating but grievously
flawed Fellowship of the Ring to SPI's borderline War of the Ring to the new
modestly promising but not groundbreaking War of the Ring from Nexus. None of
them has been great - although obviously the jury is still out on Nexus' effort
from the game perspective, as far as conveying the real drama of War of the Ring
I'm pretty confident in saying that while it'll do better than any previous
effort, it still isn't quite there. But who knows, maybe I'll have to eat my
words on that. We'll find out in a month or
two.
One of my friends has been tempted
by the challenge, and we do agree on one thing - if there is a system that could
possibly serve as the baseline for such a game, Wizard Kings is it. It's got
flexibility, it's got built-in uncertainty, it's quite simple, and it's got the
capacity to deliver great flavor. The above-mentioned fundamental obstacles of
porting the underlying logic of a novel to the logic of a game still have to be
overcome, however. And they aren't
insignificant.
Anyway. As 2004 is
starting to look like a great year for new German-style games, a new poll is
available for your voting pleasure.
Posted: Monday - August 16, 2004 at 05:03 PM