I personally like be represented by a single character in a boardgame, enjoying the "roleplaying" aspects. Games like talisman or blackbeard for example, allow u to become emersed more in the character. Your thoughts?
Characters - love em or hate em?
Wed, 03/15/2006 - 07:08
Wed, 03/15/2006 - 10:10
#1
Characters - love em or hate em?
Characters have advantages and disadvantages, of course.
On the good side, having a character in the game focusses your mental picture of events, and gives a far better sense of a story. This is particularly useful for horror and detective/suspense style games, where what your character doesn't know or see is just as important as what they do see. Having the player able to "know" more about the larger situation can give the limited viewpoint of the single character a sense of gathering menace. Good stuff!
The only downside to characters is when used in a genre that doesn't go well with such a focussed storyline. Then they become useless chrome, a hinderance to the degree that you have to edit them out to play the game.
For me, a lot has to do with presentation. Poor art or stupid names will kill the effect as easily as poor integration into the game itself. So I think characters should be carefully used by game designers, who, unless they write fiction, may have a difficult time making characters that are more than one-shot jokes or edit-fodder for the player's brains.
Thu, 03/16/2006 - 18:49
#2
Characters - love em or hate em?
I'm a character person too,
abstract games do not do it for me.
And I prefer a game with characters rather than one that
uses units to represent a large number of troops or things.
Tue, 03/21/2006 - 11:42
#3
Characters - love em or hate em?
It all depends on the type of game, but generally I don't like having "named" characters. Maybe it's just a hang-up that translated over from my wargame roots. But I HATED (and still do) players who used the named characters in their armies. From a mechanical standpoint, I felt that those characters were way too powerful, and unbalanced the game. Whether that is actually true or not I don't honestly know, but that is the way I felt. From a setting point of view, I didn't like the fact that two players could show up for a game and BOTH have the same character in their army. It didn't make sense. I'm an imaginative person, and I liked creating my own background for my characters and armies.
This probably doesn't translate well to board games, but I still would only have "characters" if it were absolutely necessary. The characters in Clue, for example, is about as far as I'd go. Names only (colors really), and they are only used to tell one player from another. An example of useless characters (in my opinion) is the AH game Starship Troopers (the newer one based on the movie, not the older one based on the book). Naming pawns after characters in the movie made no sense to me. Why not just call them "Infantry #1, Infantry #2, Seargeant, etc." It made no sense at all to have "Johny" die in one mission, only to have him pop right back up again, alive and well, for the next one.
Maybe that was just poor implimentation, but in general "characters" tend to leave a sour tast in my mouth....
