The Agent and the Narrator

According to an old joke about Talisman, the first prototype of the game was actually a single six-sided die. The players would sit down staring at it for four hours, and then roll off to see who won the game.

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Obviously, the joke is still being told by the people who do not enjoy the overall experience offered by the cult classic. They seem uninterested in the heroic stories created by hours of rolling dice, moving around the board and then either drawing a card, or... rolling more dice. And it does not necessarily mean that they hate wizards, dragons and magical swords (although some of them actually do). What it does mean is that they are unsatisfied with the level of agency offered by the game.

Last week I said that a certain level of randomness seems to be a required element of any adventure game. I think we can agree now that if everything can be weighed and measured before the game, there will be no adventure – only an exercise in optimization or, in other words, a German style game. Randomness is, obviously, not only an element of an adventure game. Even Agricola randomizes some of its elements, but only up to a certain extent. The players are first treated to a random distribution of cards, and during the game they have to take into account the fact that the appearance of some action spaces is random – although this randomness is also very limited.

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It is actually quite easy to get randomness right in a Eurogame. Just remember a simple rule: randomness first, decisions later. Shipyard introduces this element by giving players scoring tiles before the game, just like Lords ofWaterdeep which – although plagued with the quest cards random draw which felled many a strategy – supplies each player with a lord card that tells them what they will score points for.

Adventure games are, however, slightly more difficult to calibrate. In optimization games agency is king – but it is narrating a story that adventure games are all about. And here, it seems, erring on the side of caution means that it is better to make a game more random, than one that can be fully planned from the first turn and then flawlessly executed. Does that mean that all adventure games will inevitably boil down to, more or less, Talisman clones?

Certainly not, as some designers have already proven – with Mage Knight being the most recent example of an adventure game that really puts the player in the driver’s seat, while sometimes heavily taxing their little grey cells. What is important to take note of here: randomness is not gone, but it still precedes all decisions made by a player on their turn – just like in many Eurogames.

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As a fan of games with a clear narrative arc, I enjoyed my time with Mage Knight, just as much as I enjoyed a few dozen games of Lord of the Rings: The Card Game, where a random card draw created challenges for players to deal with using their custom made decks and (on a more turn-by-turn basis) their hands of cards. I was, however, surprised that many adventure game fans had a completely different view of those two games, finding them dull, too complicated or simply “not really adventure games”.

All in all, getting an adventure game design right is not only about creating a set of working mechanisms, but about (and perhaps even more so) balancing the player agency and the game’s narrative aspect. It is obvious a single design will not satisfy every gamer, which makes this balancing act, ever interesting from a design standpoint - and exciting for gamers open to experiencing new ideas within their favoured genre.

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A Road to Adventure

When asked about adventure games, it’s quite easy to give a long list of examples: from the grandfatherly figure of classic Talisman, through its almost carbon copies like Prophecy or the more recent Relic, to progressively more complicated designs like Runebound or A Touch of Evil, the now out of print World of Warcraft: The Board Game and the legendary rules behemoth known as Magic Realm. But what is it exactly that makes them adventure games?

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According to Robert Harris, the designer of the original Talisman, the game was created as a substitute for Dungeons & Dragons. What might be hard to believe to modern gamers, accustomed to slim designs which take an hour to set up, play and break down to neatly put back into the box, Harris wanted to make a game that would create an RPG-like experience in a shorter time and a more manageable form (one of the key points of this simplification being ejecting the time consuming role of the Dungeon Master).

With that in mind, it's rather obvious why the tropes and decorations for Talisman were ported directly from classic fantasy: it was, after all, a cornerstone of the game that started the whole role-playing genre, in turn spawning numerous board games and then MMOs, the majority of which still favour visiting worlds inhabited by warriors, wizards and dragons over any other. 

Consequently, it comes as no surprise that games are often categorized using their settings, with ones featuring characters, enemies and events known from fantasy literature and movies often falling into the Adventure genre (unless very blatantly being something else).There are admittedly some small deviations, but even some of those science-fiction worlds (like the universes of Star Wars or Warhammer 40.000 used as a setting for Relic) have in fact little to do with science, with their defining stories being much closer to heroic epics than the writings of sir Arthur C. Clarke.

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A fantasy theme, however, does not an adventure game make. The dwarves, axes and quests do not obscure the fact that Caverna is a Eurogame through and through. The theme of travelling around mythical ancient Greece in Venture Forth is nothing more than a theme, with the player able to best optimize their movement being the winner every time. The most important experience of playing Magic: The Gathering is not that of coming into contact with mythical heroes and creatures the decks are so ripe with – it’s about coming into contact with your opponent and crushing them. Playing any of those games is rarely an adventure - it's an optimization task or a duel.

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Now, the actual experience of having an adventure is sometimes a difficult one to create. Tabletop role-playing games do the best job here, using the best tool available: the human mind. The imagination of a Dungeon Master creates worlds, characters and surprising twists, exciting the players, and allowing the game world to react unexpetedly to their actions. But how can a board game ever substitute the unpredictability and creativity of a live dungeon master? That is and was simple since 1983 - just use a die or a stack of cards.

After looking at all the games I played, if I were to point to one feature that is prevalent to any game that “feels like an adventure”, I’d probably go with randomness. It is the randomness that allows the game to be different every time. It is the roll of a die that in the end decides of success or failure. It's the flipped card that puts a peril, a stranger or a fantastical event on the road that makes or breaks a hero. Now, am I saying that it is enough to just make your game random, to make it feel like sharing an adventure with a bunch of friends? 

No. But that is something I will have to leave for next week.

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KISS Your Design

I’ve seen a fair share of prototypes presented by first time designers. Usually, I’ve seen them while attending gaming conventions and since I will undoubtedly see a few more within the next few days, as Avangarda - one of the biggest conventions in Poland - starts on the day this article goes live, I felt prompted to share a few thoughts about one of the fairly aspects some people may find important when designing your own game.

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If I were to point out a few tendencies among the prototypes I’ve seen on conventions, one of them would definitely be a high level of complexity. It’s actually only natural – most first time designers are gamers, some of them inspired by a thought of rebuilding a game they've played into a more interesting, more realistic and – consequently – more complex design.

Let me stop here for a second to say that there is nothing wrong with complexity. Legendary games such as Twilight Imperium or Here I Stand are notoriously complex (and long) and there is nothing inherently wrong with that (well, maybe apart from the length). However, before using them as a simple justification, you should really first examine if your design also needs a high complexity level because, frankly, quite often it does not.

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Imagine, if you will, that you want to make a game of your own. A turn-based, “nothing fancy” resource collection and engine optimization design that would allow players to perform a limited number of actions per turn out of a selection of nine. For ease let’s just number them and proceed to some of the rules governing their use.

Let’s say that every player performs one action per turn (until they use their allotment of three) and that actions can only be performed a limited number of times per round: with actions 1-3 being available once, actions 4-6 twice, and actions 7-9 available up to three times during a single round. Let’s also assume that there is a specific order to the actions: that action 1 must be always performed before 2, then 2 before 3 etc., unless, of course, some of them are skipped, because the players are not interested in them during a given round. To finish off, let’s add another system: unused actions become more valuable with every new round.

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The above system in its rough form is complicated. It would require a detailed explanation, a good player aid and a bunch of people willing to learn its intricacies to actually work. However, if you’re not new to designer games, you’ve already probably figured out that the best way to actually put it in a game would be to use the worker placement mechanism – much like the one used in Carson City or (slightly more recently) in Snowdonia. Just give each player a number of pawns signifying their available number of actions and place the action spaces themselves on a track that would govern the order of their execution.

In truth, I have no idea if worker placement as a mechanism came to be via a process similar to the one above. I would actually wager money that it did not. I However, I hope it served as a simple illustration of how some things in games can easily be made simpler. As I said, complexity in itself is not a bad thing, but before you decide to make your design very complex, and before you say that your game will lose something if you try to streamline it, be reasonably sure that there isn’t a way that will make it easier on your future players and virtually the same when it comes to the feel of the game and the number of options it provides. I assure you that in most cases it’s not a difficult thing to just keep it simple.

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