Adventuring is Hard

[Thorin]

From the blog on Wayfarer's Moon:

So, while I was playing WoW the other night with my 5-man instance group, I was sneaking along with my Rogue through scores of MOBs (the end boss in BRD, if you happen to know where I mean) and I thought to myself, as a patrol passed by, ?Man, it would suck if I sneezed right now.?

This random thought made me reflect on what life would be like to be an adventurer, not just in WoW, but in any of the scores of MMORPGs and pen-and-paper based games

Being an adventurer would be hard. Think about it. You constantly travel, routinely fight horrible things with fangs that want to eat you, basically camp-out 90% of the time, and would probably know which leaves made the best toilet paper. Actually, you would eventually learn which leaves made the best toilet paper. There would have to be a certain amount of trial and error involved, which would probably lead to some really interesting (read painful) rashes. Just hope you have a cleric with you, otherwise life would be hell for quite a while.

And just when you came to know which leaves worked best and which leaves needed to be avoided, what would happen? That?s right, you?d wind up on another continent, planet, or plane of existence and you?d have to start all over again.

Imagine a camp of stalwart adventurers, hardened by years of combat and eating things that tried to eat them first, at camp on a new continent.

?Hey, why is Garin standing in the bushes crying??

?He can?t decide whether to use the blue leaf that smells funny or the green one that looks like a top hat.?

?You?re kidding? That?s Garin the Destroyer! He once bit an eyestalk off a Beholder on a bet and called the Minotaur King a pansy to his face!?

?Well, last time he tried the soft purple leaf and discovered it was actually alive.?

?And??

?It bit him in the . . . err, little Garin and wouldn?t let go. Let?s just say I had to cast Cure Critical Wounds. Twice.?

?Oh.?

[Mr. Analog]

Not a topic that comes up often. I wonder, even in literature like Lord of the Rings how some practical necessities were, ahem, resolved.

[Thorin]

Hah, there's a part two.  Makes me feel bad for playing a Cleric in the current campaign...

So, I have established that going to the bathroom can be a horrible experience. Yet, there is one worse than that: fighting.

Fighting is the bread and butter of the adventurer and is typically undertaken by the warrior, paladin, barbarian, or whatever. Fighting, though, hurts. No matter how good you are or how well armored you may be, eventually, someone is going to stab you with something sharp.

To counter this problem (namely bleeding), there are healers. Those who faithfully bind wounds, cast healing spells, and generally see to the health of the party.

These people are great for the party, but horrible for the fighters.

I can hear the hue and cry now. "But healers keep the melees alive!" "But without healers, melees would never fight!"

Both are true, but consider this: A warrior fights, gets injured (if not dead), has to heal up and then fights again. It is a slow process, but one wherein the warrior does not spend the majority of his time being stabbed.

Now, put a healer into the mix. A melee fights, gets injured, gets healed, fights again, gets injured again, gets healed, etcetera. Basically, what the healer does is ensure that the melee is in nigh constant pain.

Have you ever been punched in the face? It was probably unpleasant. Now, imagine that you knew you were going to get punched. It was inevitable. Bad, yes? Now imagine that you were going to get punched 100 times, only someone would make you feel better in between punches. Welcome to the life of the warrior.

Even worse is considering that the majority of healing is done through spells and that to maximize the healing spells, you had to be injured a certain amount. It might go something like this.

"So, who?s that Garin?s fighting?"

"Not sure. Looks like there?s about twenty of them though."

"Yeah. I won- oooh, that looked painful."

"Meh. Nothing a Cure Critical won?t fix."

"Huh. Wow, Garin?s really taking a beating. Shouldn?t you be healing him or something?"

"Nah, I?ve got a Cure Massive ready. He needs to be really injured though; otherwise it?s overkill."

"I think his arm just came off."

"Not yet."

"Ummm, he?s screaming and I think I can actually see his lungs."

"That?s about right."

Healing happens and the battle ends.

"Garin seems a touch upset."

"He?ll get over it. Besides, there?s another group coming over the rise. Don?t worry, I?ve got another Cure Massive."

That's sorta the difference between D&D and D20 Modern - no healing magic in D20 Modern.  So the warriors take longer to heal back up.

[Thorin]

And a part three!

You almost never do proper quests in RPGs. Quests, as defined by an online dictionary are ?an adventurous expedition undertaken by a knight or knights to secure or achieve something: the quest of the Holy Grail.?

Killing 12 Vapid Rats is not a quest. Neither is escorting some brain-dead moron who attacks everything in sight out of a dungeon (that?s more of a trial aka ?pain-in-the-butt?). These are really just Tasks, which are appetizers to the feast that is a real quest.

Tasks tend to be weirdly number intensive. Somebody lost an eye to a Frosted Bat and now he wants you to kill twenty of them. Is that the going rate for an eye? What would a hand be worth? Fifty? It just all seems rather arbitrary.

Real quests are things like taking the One Ring to Mount Doom, defeating the Evil that has Enveloped the World, or even Cleaning my Bathroom. Hint: you can tell ?real? quests by the number of words being capitalized.

Understandably, RPGs are limited in their scope. The Baldur?s Gate series has an actual quest as the overarching plot. The old Betrayal at Krondor game also had one (fun game, hard though). I?m sure that many others also have them. MMORPGS are a bit different, as not everybody can throw the One Ring into the fires from whence it was forged. They?d have to queue up on Mount Doom to throw the rings in. Orcs would set up souvenir stands and sell 9-fingered gloves. "I destroyed the One Ring and all I got was this lousy t-shirt."

It?s all rather silly, once you stand back and take a look at it. This doesn?t keep me from playing though

And here?s one last look at Garin and Co. before we go.

"So, what?s Garin doing now?"

"Killing Murderous Mud Mammals."

"Okay. Why?"

"Oh, some guy will give him three gold if he brings him twenty Murderous Mud Mammal Molars."

"You?re kidding."

"Nope. Oh, and some other guy thinks that a Murderous Mud Mammal may have mauled his mother?s magic maple margarine minder. He?ll give him 8 gold and a sword if Garin finds all the pieces."

"That?s silly."

"Nope, that?s 11 gold and a new sword."

"Can I do it too?"

Man, I *so* agree with the sentiments in this guy's blog entries.  And having actual Quests instead of Tasks, that's one of the major differences between pen-n-paper RPGs and MMORPGs.