Innovation Overrated? Notes From the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness
I finished the new Penny Arcade Adventures RPG, "On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode 1." While nothing has really changed from my "quick take" last week, I thought I might yap on a little bit about it for a while. Because that's just what I do....

The game was simultaneously unlike any RPG I'd ever played, and an awful lot like many RPGs I have played.
From a mechanics perspective, the game has nothing really innovative to recommend it. It's a conglomeration of tried and true game mechanics lifted from a dozen other games, it is linear to an extreme, and there's really not much there that hasn't been seen countless times before. We were talking about a minimalist RPG recently, and while On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness isn't it, from a mechanics perspective it doesn't go too far. The special abilities have been termed "limit breaks" among other things in certain game series before.

Even the exact timing of a defend button (or spacebar press, in my version) isn't particularly new. Though it does give twitch gamers quite an advantage over their more turn-preferring brethren. Too much so, I felt... the difference between an easy battle and a wipeout often came down to whether or not you could time your blocks well enough to take no damage and launch a free counterattack, rather than any kind of tactical decision making.

All that being said - I did play the episode to its end, and I enjoyed myself while playing it. Most of the time. Maybe it's because I'm an RPG junkie, or maybe it's because I'm just not quite jaded enough. But the unusual setting, the humor, the very bizarre puzzles that came off a little bit like a much courser and anti-kid-friendly version of Monkey Island, all somehow worked through what was otherwise kind of a paint-by-numbers RPG. I had a blast battling killer mimes, hobos, clowns, robots, and barbershop quartets.

And I'm a sucker for Lovecraft parody.

While the subject matter was dramatically different, the end result was similar to my play-throughs of Aveyond and Aveyond II. I was delighted by those games. And yet, mechanically, they offered little by way of innovation. Even the setting was - on the surface at least - pretty vanilla (something that On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness is decidedly NOT). But the style, humor, and personality of the game was what hooked me. It had a distinctive flavor.

A few years ago, after walking out of yet another summer blockbuster movie, my wife and I were commenting on how much we enjoyed the film in spite of its adhering almost religiously to formula. And we came to the conclusion that there's a formula for a reason. It works. It's the story people in our culture like to hear, in all its myriad variations. It's the variations - and the execution - that counts.

So maybe RPGs don't necessarily need to reinvent the wheel with every game. On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness pushes the genre in terms of content, eschewing the traditional orcs, swords, and wizards for mimes, soul-imbued rakes, and a gadgeteering adolescent. It doesn't need to make people re-learn how to play RPGs, because it doesn't need to. The mechanics were entertaining and challenged me, but didn't attempt to redefine the genre. The story was extremely weird, but also entertaining and engaging enough to keep me playing to find out what happened next. It was like watching a movie, when you rip it to pieces, is clearly an adherent to formula, but is just different enough to keep you engaged and wondering if what happens next is what you expect.

Maybe I'm just getting old and stuck in my ways, but I find I'm okay with that.

Is innovation overrated? Yeah, sometimes. I'm not calling for a flood of paint-by-numbers RPGs, but I think being innovative is often less important than just being interesting.

Labels: Game Design, Roleplaying Games

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