As we’ve discussed before, it probably goes without saying that one of the most satisfying parts of playing an RPG is watching your character grow and develop over the course of the game. In a party-based RPG, of course, you get to spread that joy across your entire party, watching each of them flourish into the doctor/safecracker/killing machine you know them to truly be. I bring this up again because it is in this that I believe Wasteland takes its biggest stumble.

Experience, lifeblood of the RPG character, is handed out in Wasteland for one thing and one thing only: killing enemies. And here I mean that very specifically: characters ONLY get experience if they deal the killing blow. In practice, what this means is that even if Eddard deals 99 damage to an enemy, if Tyrion hits it for that final 1 point, Tyrion gets all of the experience and Eddard is left with nothing.

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After wrapping up in Needles, we take a quick detour back to the Rail Nomad’s camp to pick up another engine. Bringing it back to the garage, the mechanic fixes up the jeep for us and Ace gets us back on the road to Vegas. A short jaunt to the northwest, we arrive just in time to get jumped by a gang of thugs who steal our car. While I understand that the jeep was merely being used as a way to (quite literally) drive us along the plot, I have never much appreciated that it is taken away without so much as a fight. We are the the Rangers – we enforce justice, we stop blood cults, we hit on barmaids. We do not like “thugs” making off with our car without us even getting a chance to shoot back.

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Despite Ace’s insistence that we get our butts up to Vegas to help out, it seems that leaving a shadowy, murderous cult unattended to in Needles would fly sharply in the face of our devotion to carrying out justice at any cost. A detective at the local police station tells us that the cultists have been grabbing people for months and draining them of their blood. He believes they have been using something called the Bloodstaff, but he doesn’t know much more about it. This story is confirmed by a bishop at the Temple of the Mushroom Cloud, who tells us that one of his priests was kidnapped and the Bloodstaff stolen from him. He promises us a great reward if we can get it back. While we Rangers are not driven by materialistic aims, we will certainly not refuse a little sweetening of the pot now and again.

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Computer role-playing games can have a lot of things going for them. Some of them may have amazing character building options, letting you decide everything from how skilled your character is with a glaive-guisarme to what zodiac sign they are. Others may have incredible crafting systems that let you fashion items of amazing power from the various bits of scrap metal and bat guano you’ve gathered on your journey. Some have dialog options that let you play anything from a silver-tongued devil to a bone-headed lug barely capable of stringing a few words together.

Really, though, when you get right down to it, what most of us are really looking for in a CRPG is some rock-solid combat.

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With Ugly eliminated, the Mayor free, and Felicia rescued, it looks like we’ve wrapped up our business in Quartz. Thanks to Ace’s tip about trouble in Vegas, that seems to be our next most likely destination. Mayor Pedros – obviously an expert politician – sticks with us when we leave town. I assume Felicia will be running things in his absence, but we Rangers aren’t here to muck around with local politics.

Just north of Quartz is an abandoned, broken down jeep that we passed earlier. At the time, we couldn’t do anything for it. Ace, however, seems to be quite the hand at fixing cars, and gets it up and running again. Taking us for a quick drive, Ace heads north to the town of Needles where the jeep promptly breaks down again. Fortunately, we manage to get it to what I can only assume is the only functioning garage left in the wasteland. The mechanic tells us he can fix it, but he needs an engine. Not having one on hand at the moment, we set about exploring this new city instead.

Needles is laid out quite a bit differently from Quartz, with several spread out buildings forming the “suburbs,” and a dense cluster of buildings around a large main street that forms the downtown area. Downtown seems like the place to be, so that’s where we head to start things off.

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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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