RPG’s and Me Part 2: The Recent Past

As I mentioned in my last blog I had determined that what I wanted from an RPG game was a more visual presentation with hard and fast rules that were not so much left up to the interpretation or neglect of a DM or Game Master. What I wanted in essence was more of a Boardgame and less of a storytelling session. I will list four games that came very close to fulfilling my dream but failed in some way or another.

First off, Mage Knight Dungeons .

This was not the first game I found in my search for an RPG Boardgame, but I will talk about it first because it was the farthest from the mark. The game had lots of cool miniatures for monsters and heroes and there were all kinds of cool paraphernalia like little plastic treasure chests with spin dials that would randomize the treasure that was hidden inside, plastic pieces for chairs and tables, altars, fountains, stone columns and magical pools. All of these actually had effects on the game, they weren’t just decorative. They came out with a builders set that had cut up board sections that enabled you to build the dungeon in a multitude of ways, even randomly. One of the last things to be release for Mage Knight Dungeons was the “3-D dungeons” set which had plastic tiles for floors, walls and doors. There was also at 3-D traps set released with miniatures for cages, spikes, and flame jets!

It all sounded very cool and it is fun to play, but it had two problems that made it not what I was looking for. First it was a “collectable” miniatures game, and anyone that has read my blog on Magic knows how I feel about “collectable” games. For the game I was hoping for it does not bode well that you can’t buy a monster that you really need without spending tons of money. I have to admit that needing a specific monster was less important in this game because of the randomly generated monster pool, but still to have a good selection you needed to be able to populate that pool with the right selection of monsters. Second, at its heart Mage Knight Dungeons was just a skirmish game with a few RPG elements thrown in. It was just about fighting and getting treasure, there was no quest storyline. The characters you played as were just a collection of stats, yes you could “level them up” but they had no flavor. They also lacked customizable skills that could give the player the chance to distinguish his character and make it their own. As an RPG boardgame Mage Knight Dungeons fell way short.

The second game which came much later but was very similar in concept to Mage Knight Dungeons was the new Dungeons & Dragons Miniatures game .

Just like Mage Knight it had collectable miniatures, but this was D&D! I figured that it would have all the RPG elements that normal D&D would have but slimlined into a more boardgame approach. I found out the hard way that it was even more slimlined then I wanted. It was simplified down into just a skirmish game, it was just the combat no dungeon crawling. There was a new “Basic Game” released that had a pre-made dungeon adventure and included miniatures, but there was only enough there to give you a taste, and no subsequent products to expand on this basic set. I guess you would have to make your own dungeon crawls past the basic set and of coarse buy more miniatures which, did I mention, are“collectable” which means good like trying to find that “rare” piece for the adventure you just created. No Thank-You!

The third game has quite a different approach to dungeon crawling, it’s called Dungeoneer .

This game makes Dungeon Crawling cheaper and quicker to setup by being entirely card based. It has RPG elements in the sense that your characters can level up and become more powerful and you have a wide assortment of quests to embark on from slaying an evil creature to escorting a helpless princess to safety. This is all represented by cards. You have cards that represent dungeon rooms and cards that represent monsters and magic items. You even have cards that will allow you to give your character new skills or pump up the monsters that you play against your opponents. I just have two complaints about this game. First there is a major runaway factor. Every adventure has a major bad guy in the deck of monster cards and if you draw this guy early in the game you can totally destroy your opponents because they are potentially to low of a level to fight off such a powerful foe. Secondly and the biggest deal breaker is the fact that this game looses the RPG feel that I’m looking for based simply on the fact that you play out your character in one sitting. In one game you go from a wimpy first level character to a more powerful character by the end of the game. The next time you play you are taking on a new character. There is a great joy and addictive quality to building your character up over several game sessions, that is something else that I am looking for in my search.

The fourth game I’ll mention has come so close to fulfilling my needs that is almost painful to talk about. That game is Warhammer Quest .

This game has everything I ever wanted in an RPG Boardgame. It has “on the fly” random dungeon generation that is so easy to do that you don’t even need a DM, you can play the game solo. It also has random quests that once again don’t require a DM, everyone gets to play the heroes. There are lots of different characters to play as and they all have so many options that you will sometimes have difficulty deciding what you want to do with your guy. Also, the game will require you to build your character over several game sessions, but it is so much fun it can become addictive. I discovered how addictive it can be when there were several incidents of my friends begging to keep playing well into the early morning hours, “Just one more dungeon” or “I just need to get my guy up to level 4” were pleas that I heard many times.

So with such praise you might wonder how this game could disappoint me. Well the only problem with this game is a very large one. The game only includes just enough to get you started. There are only enough monsters for low level characters, and only the four basic character types are included. This game was put out by Games Workshop back in 1995 and while they did support it pretty well by putting out a lot of great character expansions, of which I was able to buy all but one, they never addressed the problem of not enough monsters. Sure the rules booklet has stats for high level monsters but without miniatures for them what could you do. Games Workshop did make the miniatures, but they were expensive and had to be bought individually, and now in 2007 these miniatures are not being made and are hard to find. Also the miniatures are marketed to the Wargamers that play the Warhammer Fantasy Battles game and they are very hardcore and have no qualms about paying high prices for minis. They also have no problem having to paint and assemble all those miniatures. But that kind of mentality is contrary to most boardgammers attitudes. We buy a game and expect it to be all in the box and ready to go. Sure expansions that add more monsters and characters would have been fine too, it didn’t have to all be included in the base set but having to hunt down hundreds of figures is just too much, and is now almost impossible.

Despite this set back I was not going to give up. Even though the game was out of print and not supported by Games Workshop I was going to try and enhance the game myself. I was originally just going to find a way to add more monsters on my own. I looked around on the web for suggestions. I looked at casting my own plastic pieces, or finding images of the now out of print pieces and printing them off and making them in paper miniatures. In the coarse of my searching I found a lot of fan made supplemental material. My favorite of which were cards and counters made by a guy calling himself Mystified Michael. He made cards that could be printed out to represent the skills and equipment of the different player characters. I liked these so much I took on the monumental task of printing them all out, and trying to make them look like real professional cards and cardboard tokens. Here are some pictures to show you just how determined I was to make this game better.

First I made up some of the new Dungeon Rooms and treasure cards that people had posted online;

These turned out OK.

Then I started making the cards that’s Mystified Michael designed, I even created the backs of the cards to match the equipment cards the came with the game.

I was very happy with these as the matched the original game’s equipment tokens very well, front and back. I even affixed them to thick posterboard which I cut into small rectangles to give them that cardboard token feel. I even bought special pre-perforated card stock from plaincards.com with a special laminating spray to do all the spell, treasure, and dungeon cards. It was a pain to do but most of them turned out OK.

I even made boxes for the basic characters by scanning in the original character pack’s box art and using photoshop to make new box art for all the characters that I was going to add into the game.

The bottom two rows are the character boxes that Games Workshop made, the three in the top row are the ones I made. I think they match pretty well. Unfortunately I never made more than these, but I still have my photoshop templates to make more.

You can see here why these boxes are useful. With all the cards that I made for all the characters skills and equipment, the boxes helped organize it all.

You can see here all the characters out of their boxes with all their cards. Whew, it’s a lot!

Well after I did all this work for the characters I inevitably had to start focusing on the monsters. No matter what I did I just was not happy. Making 2-D paper miniatures just does not stand up well against 3-D plastic miniatures. Also I could not find images online for all the Warhammer monsters. I also had put in so much time and work into the character cards that when I thought of all the work required to do the remaining Dungeon Rooms, Treasure Cards, and the other fan made Characters, which Mystified Michael designed cards for, I just had to cringe. So I gave up! Maybe if I could have been satisfied with the monsters I would have kept going but it just wasn’t worth it if that one crucial aspect of the game was going to be such a letdown.

I thought that if just some game company could make a game like Warhammer Quest, but with higher production values and full support for the game, and give you everything you need to really play the game to the fullest. If they would give you all of this with the base game and subsequent expansions I would be very happy. Well in the last part of my series I will talk about the game that could possibly deliver on this idea, I hope……..