A couple of weekends ago I took a road trip down to the Twin Cities with several friends for a short getaway. Physically traveling in cars for long periods of time was something that I didn’t enjoy all that much, but over the past year, I noticed that as my body got stronger (see my Weight Room series) I was able to better handle long distances in vehicles.
And what better way is there to pass the time in the car when you’re not driving? Mobile games! A dear friend of mine recently got me into the Star Wars licensed Galaxy of Heroes by Capital Games. And after playing that for a while I ended up re-downloading Netmarble’s Marvel Future Fight. Both games have a heavy focus on collecting the various heroes and villains to assemble the most powerful team you can. PvE and PvP are both elements of the game, as are micro-transactions, no matter your feeling on them. You accomplish your goals by spending energy – your in-game currency that slowly replenishes over time.
This got me thinking about a few items that are common in tabletop roleplaying games – namely travel time and action economy.
Travel time is something that you either love or you hate, and games handle it in a variety of fashions. Games like Star Wars revel in the cinematic aspect of travel time. When it’s not important to the plot traveling from one end of the galaxy to the other is as quick as it takes to transition to the next scene and say “one week later.” If it is important to see what the PCs are doing in that downtime it’s also just as easy to pop in a quick scene or two in the middle of the traveling to let the players do their roleplaying with each other.
Then there are games where travel time is such a central conceit that it’s built into the mechanics of the game. Of course I’m talking about games that take their biggest influences from literary giants like Tolkein. Cubicle 7’s The One Ring RPG is one of the newest ones that pops into my mind in this regard.
Most games however fall right into the middle, letting individual play groups decide for themselves how important they want it to be for them – they have the tools to drill it down if they want to experience it, but they also have the freedom to simply decide that it’s not for them and screen wipe to the next city instead of spending a game session tracking through the wilderness (with maybe just a roll of the dice or two to see if there are any random encounters along the way).
Action economy is another thing that is central to how most tabletop roleplaying games function, but it isn’t always something that is on the tip of a lot of gamers’ tongues. Action economy is, quite simply how you are able to manage your (often times wide) array of actions that are available to you during the game. How often can you do the things you want to do? How many attacks do you get in a combat round? How far can you move? Can you run across the room and kick in the door while drawing your sword at the same time or are you going to have to choose between some things.
The two mobile games that I was playing seem to have a very feast or famine approach to action economy. With Galaxy of Heroes it often times seems that there isn’t enough energy at a given time to accomplish much of anything. And with Marvel Future Fight, they threw so much bonus energy at you that I was never in danger of running out and could literally play the game for hours at a time (at least that’s how it was before they redesigned the game – I don’t know how if it works exactly the same now).
It’s possible to go both ways in your games as well. Sometimes it seems like you’ve got way too much that you can do and not enough actions in a given encounter to even scratch the surface. Sometimes you have more actions than you could ever need. Sometimes, as odd as it seems, you have both going on at the same time. Fourth Edition Dungeons and Dragons comes to my mind immediately. They seem to be the biggest offenders in recent memory – they wanted so badly to balance the game across the board that they put such a tight rein on the action economy while maintaining the dizzying array of powers and abilities available to everyone that there was so much you could do but you had to be careful not to waste your big powers too early on and so what you were actually willing to do at the table was really small and contained.
Another game that seems to fall into that trap a little bit was Fantasy Flight Games’ Fireborn published in 2004. In your turn you could perform two actions – one physical and one mental. But physical actions were further broken down into “moves” that could be strung together to create sequences of flashy moves. The number of moves you had to spend on your physical action was determined by your stats, and because the game utilized stats that could be shifted, that could change numerous times over the course of a single battle. It seems at first that you only had a few things that you could do, but when you got down to it, you had way more that you could do than you could ever hope to accomplish.
That’s fun for some groups – tactical planning and getting the most effective move you can with your action allotment really works for some groups. Others hate it and want a few options they can reliably use over and over again. Most groups are going to be happy right in the middle with games like Pathfinder that include a number of action types that players can use to do a variety of different things with each round.
With both of these concepts there is no right or wrong answer here – it really comes down to individual tastes. But they are both things that are so intrinsic to a game that they really need to be considered and thought about before starting a game or joining an existing one.They are concepts that are going to directly impact your enjoyment of the game, and that means they need to be concepts that are discussed and talked about more than I think they are.
Ben Erickson
