Now that we’ve added some political muscle (in the form of Mayor Pedros) to our legal muscle, it’s time to finish the job of cleaning up Quartz. Thanks to the clues we discovered in the courthouse, we know the top secret bad-guy HQ is across the street.  Again, we are presented with an opportunity to choose our plan of attack: go guns blazing through the front door, try to find out the password from someone in town, or check out this conveniently located alley next to the building. Fan of exploration that I am, I lead my Rangers down the alley. But, before we do that, we stop to give Mayor Pedros some protection before heading into what could be a big fight.

Guest party members in Wasteland function a little differently from your normal PCs. Though they gain levels like regular characters, and you can have them learn new skills just as you would one of your Rangers, when it comes to orders, they are a bit more independent. Out of combat, while you can access a guest’s inventory and skills as normal, they will occasionally simply refuse to follow your orders. If I have Mayor Pedros hold on to some of the extra ammo we pick up, he might be unwilling to trade it later on to one of my regular characters. This isn’t such a big deal, as you can simply try again and again until he does it. With skill usage, the same issues arise – the guest won’t pick that door unless they damn well feel like it. Again, this usually isn’t a big problem when it comes to something like trying to pick a lock, but if it’s a critical skill like Medic, those refusals can prove deadly. There is no way to get your guests to obey you any more or less that I’ve ever discovered, so it really seem to come down to simple randomness.

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There is a certain art to playing the role of Dungeon Master in a tabletop role playing game. Sure, you can spend hours picking out the perfect creatures to man the gatehouse of the evil overlord’s castle, and you can design the most devious of traps and puzzles to thwart invading parties of adventurers, but there is one variable you have little control over: the players. All that beautiful work can be completely for naught if they decide that instead of busting through the front gates, they want to use that teleport spell they found to warp up to the roof and sneak in the back door.

Now, the less artful DM solves this problem by forcing the players to stick only to the path that they have laid out. This often involves an awful lot of heavy-handed hints and orders from NPC, and occasionally falls back to the DM simply saying “you can’t do that.” The more skilled DM, on the other hand, rolls with the punches. Sure, now the players won’t get to appreciate the brilliant battle planned out for the front gate, but now the players are possibly having even more fun using their stealth and skills to make their way through the twisting corridors of the palace, trying to stay out of trouble. By giving the players more flexibility to solve problems the way they want to, the DM is most likely letting everyone have a lot more fun than if he doggedly kept them on his single-minded path.

CRPGs, obviously, don’t have the flexibility of an actual DM to deal with whatever the player throws at them. Still, like a skilled DM, the best games offer the player a variety of options to make their way through certain portions of the game. This gives the player a chance to try their hand at a little creativity beyond fighting their way through everything, as well as a chance to play with all those skills they’ve so lovingly selected.

Wasteland, while still limited by the technology at the time, still manages to offer the player that sense of flexibility in many situations. While many of its contemporaries were still in the mindset of the Bad DM, the designers of Wasteland created a series of unique situations in the game in which the player could think a little outside of the box to deal with obstacles.

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Putting the unpleasantness of the Guardian Citadel behind us for now, my Rangers push on towards the town beyond the mountain range. Before we pop in, now seems a good a time as any to see if our experiences so far are worth anything in the eyes of our commanding officers. Leveling up in Wasteland is quite easy; at any time the player wishes from the world map, they simply use the Radio command to check back in with headquarters. If a character has gained enough experience, they gain a rank (ranging from Private to General Argent), and two points to distribute to their stats however they like. The only real caveat to using the Radio is that it also saves your game, so you might not want to do it if you are in a questionable situation.

It turns out that Drogo has racked up enough experience to qualify him for a promotion, so with a musical flair, our Rangers salute their new Private First Class. Now, as we’ve discussed before, Drogo is not on a path of higher education; he’s just here to hit people. Hit people hard. With that in mind, we put his two points entirely into Strength, giving him some extra oomph behind his blows. The rest of the team isn’t quite there yet, so for the moment they will have to make do with a superior officer whose hobbies include rock punching and grunting.

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If you asked someone to come up with a list of features as to what defines a role-playing game, you’d be liable to get a drastically different set of answers depending on what RPGs they had played. Some might answer turn-based combat, party-based character building, and a robust crafting system. Then again, the person right next to them might answer with real-time combat, moral choices, and the opportunity to sleep with your party members.

Of course, neither person is wrong; there are such a wide variety of RPGs out there that such a sprawling list of responses is inevitable. Of course, if you dig down past a lot of the aesthetic and mechanical choices designers make, there are still some core tenets of role-playing games that hold true across the board. In my experiences, one of those core ideas is that of growth. It could be growth in the sense of characters gaining levels and abilities, growing stronger in a very mathematical gameplay sense. Or, it could be a more metaphysical growth of character, with the snot-nosed punk from the small village blossoming into the kind-hearted hero of the land. In either the case, the idea of becoming something greater than what you were before in order to overcome the obstacles before you remains the same.

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“You have come upon the rail-nomads’ camp. Ornery looking longhorn cattle wander among dusty tents, from which sullen faces peer. In the background, a ramshackle collection of railroad cars, patched with wood, hide, and an odd piece of corrugated aluminum, sits on a rail siding. Two of the cars, the locomotive at the front and the caboose at the rear, appear to be in better condition than the others. As you approach, a strained silence fails over the camp and you grow uncomfortable under the collective gaze of the assembled nomads. Finally, one of the nomads steps forward. “Welcome, Rangers. I am the Brakeman of this train. I would be honored if you would visit with me in the caboose before leaving our camp. In the meantime, please accept our hospitality.” The Brakeman turns and strides back into the camp.”

Snippets from a text adventure? A passage from some forgotten paperback? Neither one, actually; and yet still possessing qualities of both. What it is, actually, is entry #2 from the Wasteland paragraph book.

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There is a certain expectation we have in society that if someone is on the side of law, they are doing the work of Good. Sure, stories of crooked cops and corrupt agents populate both our entertainment and our reality, but for the most part people tend to believe that law is a good thing.

Wasteland puts the player in the role of the law – in this case, the Desert Rangers – but doesn’t give us a lot of background as to what kind of law they enforce. From the manual, we know they were founded by men from the Army, but once society fell, what parts of the old did they decide to carry on with? In truth, the game never tells you directly. For the player who is paying attention, though, there are are some subtle (and not so subtle) indications as to how the Rangers go about their business.

That brings us to our first stop on our tour of the wastes: Highpool.

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For pretty much anyone who grew up during the Cold War, the idea that the world could be wiped out on any given afternoon was not such a foreign one. Two superpowers – each armed to the teeth with enough nukes to turn the planet into a smoldering pile of radioactive slag – kept the world teetering on the edge of destruction. With this dark cloud hanging over society’s head, it’s no wonder post-apocalyptic imagery became so prevalent in popular culture at the time. From novels like On The Beach in the late 50s to movies like Mad Max in the late 70s and 80s, different views of the world after the bomb could be found everywhere.

Growing up as I did in the 80s, the immediate threat of sudden annihilation felt more distant than it did for those in the times of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it was there nonetheless. For me, seeing these tales of the post-apocalypse always held a strange fascination; what would things really be like? Would society fall apart completely? Would the survivors come together to rebuild a newer, better world? Would giant mutant spiders rise up and destroy us all? Part of it was fatalistic curiosity, but another part of it was the hope that maybe the end of the world would turn out to be an adventure after all. 

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In the year 1991, I was twelve years old and fancied myself quite the gamer. I didn’t call myself a gamer, because that phrase didn’t exist yet. I was just a kid who played a lot of video games, and I was pretty proud of that. I had my NES, with plenty of hours sunk into Mario and Zelda. I had my dad’s PC, where I was playing things like Space Quest and Sim City. I even still had the old Intellevision, where I could bust out Shark! Shark! and Burger Time if I was so inclined.

I knew platformers. I knew adventure games. I knew whatever you would classify Marble Madness as.

The one thing I didn’t know was the CRPG.

I had played some Dungeons & Dragons titles on the Intellevision, and while they captured some of the aspects of exploration and treasure finding, they didn’t have much in the way of story or theme.  I had also dabbled with Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior on the NES, but something about that had just failed to grab my imagination (not to mention my attention, which waned steadily with my early confrontation with level grinding).  For the most part, the idea of role-playing in video games was completely foreign to me.

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As I’ve mentioned before, when I am not writing about games or stopping crimes, I have an alter-ego as part of the game design duo known as Twofold Secret. It is in that guise that I am pleased to announce that our latest game has debuted on Newgrounds today, and is ready for your gaming pleasure. So please, take some time and give Alight (in dreams) a try, and I hope you enjoy!