I’ve always had a soft spot for paper role playing games. In high school, my friends and I all traded books around for various Palladium games, and spent hours generating Rifts characters. We tried Dungeons & Dragons a few times, and experimented with the Star Wars RPG, and even read a few GURPS books.

But we never played. We heard some of our friends describe wildly creative (if crude) D&D games, and we tried to run our own. The problem was that we were a bunch of players with no Game Master. None of us really had the imagination and dedication to create a scenario, and using pre-built scenarios always felt like cheating (not to mention costing money).

The other challenge was that it was nearly impossible to round up the right people. It takes a particular blend of personalities to make a role-playing group work. You’ve got to have a highly creative and detail-oriented game master, and several players who want to actually role-play, not just play fight scenes. Somehow, we always found ourselves a few people short of this ideal group. We had two or three good players at any given time, but never a dedicated game master. And if one of us took over the GM role, we found we didn’t have enough players.

This is one reason why I was so thrilled towards the end of high school and the first years at college when decent role playing games finally started to get made for the computer. There had been RPGs on computer before, but they were like Zork or Wizardry, with little or no graphics, and an incredibly limited playing field. Endless stone corridors with no story to speak of didn’t exactly fire the imagination.

This all changed in the mid-90s, when games like Baldur’s Gate and Diablo started coming out, I realized that I could finally play RPGs, because the computer was going to take care of the difficult task of managing the rules and dice and storyline. I could finally play RPGs without having to depend on assembling that elusive group of like-minded gamers.

The problem with computer RPGs is that they have to craft a fine balance between the detail-oriented rules and keeping a streamlined user interface. Baldur’s Gate was the first of the D&D games to come even close to striking this balance, but there was still a lot of terminology and arcane information to master, and the entire fighting system was based on pausing the action, which retained the accuracy to the rules, but lost the flavor of the combat.

Diablo went to the opposite extreme. Any elements of the RPG that were left in were so brutally streamlined that it lost the flavor of the RPG entirely, and turned into a click-fest action game. It was fun, and the combat went nice and fast, but you felt little or no connection to your character, and the only real growth you experiences was getting better armor and weapons.

This balance is a tricky thing, and games that are coming out today are still struggling with it. Each new RPG incorporates the best elements of all its predecessors, while trying to add some new tricks to enhance the experience. You can still find games that opt for more streamlining and less accuracy in games like Fable, or the opposite end of the spectrum with great accuracy to the paper RPG world, but more cumbersome interfaces like Morrowind.

I’ve been playing a lot of these old-school RPGs lately, and when I compare them to what I feel is the ultimate balance in computer RPGs, Knights of the Old Republic, I think it’s incredible how far these games have come, and I get excited for the future. So, to continue my game review project, over the next few weeks I’ll be posting more reviews of computer RPG games.