by ninjadorg
kasca wrote:
1) Lack of any sense of a continuing progression of character between games.
I find I have exactly that problem with most board games, from Monopoly to Settlers of Catan. Perhaps character growth and progression is something we should expect only of role playing games.
You could try totting up your experience points over time, and awarding yourself a new level every 100 pts or so. But I've never quite understood why this levelling up process is quite so appealing, even in RPGs. It is a bit artificial after all, since progression simply means that everything scales up to offer correspondingly bigger threats. Eventually you must reach some limiting case of scaling up, where you are a god and your only threat is another god. When you realise that, ultimately, that is where you are heading, it might make the five years of campaigning required to get there less appealing. So, for this game, I'm happy with 2 levels and a 60 minute game. Tomorrow we wipe our memory banks clean and start afresh.
Okay, I’ll bite.
The reasons why I personally find the levelling up process so appealing are because it establishes a continuing narrative in a game where you play a single hero over time and the fun is in watching your hero grow and develop. As you level up the stakes become higher, the monsters get tougher, your options of powers broaden, the treasures get bigger, and you have more to lose if you die.
I don’t understand your comparisons to Monoply or Settlers which are not narrative driven games about heroes fighting the odds in a classic fantasy setting. A better comparison would be to the RPGs that instil this sense of development in the first place from which many of us get our associations, like the D&D brand on the box suggests. If you ever played a D&D campaign and after defeating a tribe of goblins your DM said “okay guys, you’re all level 2 now, it’s over, let’s start a new campaign,” you’d be disappointed. Similarly if you played Skyrim and after 60 minutes when you're just getting into the swing of it and learning about your hero, the game suddenly ended and you had to start again you would be frustrated. And it's not a stretch to make this association because of the D&D branding, and because the gameplay practically begs for it.
You don’t need to play for five years, or become a god, but there’s nothing wrong with playing for a series of linked adventures and then retiring if you survive. Wrath of Ashardalon introduced this campaign option for this very reason. Even Descent, the tactical miniatures battle game, introduced this option for the same reason.
There’s nothing wrong with just playing this game for a 60 minute burst of monster bashing. But it really comes into its own when your attachment to your hero grows over time. Or fails to (like when we played the Wrath of Ashardalon campaign last night and got our arses beaten in the first couple of adventures).
Forget wiping our memory banks, live or die, my heroes are going in the Hall of Fame!! :D
Thanks for the review, Ed. :cool: