My Life As A Gamer: Glory To The Fighting Man!

Fantasy adventure gaming roots itself in a single core archetype: The Fighting Man.

The Fighting Man is, by necessity, a Man Of Action. His conflicts are going to be external in presentation, regardless of the nature of that conflict.

External presentations and depictions are far easier for an audience to comprehend and enjoy. They are also far easier for gamers to find satisfying experiences regardless of the medium.

The Fighting Man in gaming comes to us via wargaming. While one can push back to the invention of Chess and Go, the evidence points to Kriegspiel as the roots of the entire adventure gaming hobby and business.

It is through this wargaming tradition, originally created to train officers in field command, that what real Men Of Action did became comprehensible to ordinary people in a visceral manner without actually doing it themselves.

From Kriegspiel through Little Wars and down to Chainmail we go to the invention of Dungeons & Dragons, where the first class in the game is the Fighting Man.

The oft-cited path that Alexander Macris made into his game's title (Adventurer, Conqueror, King) has roots in the real and the unreal alike, which is why this archetype resonates with such power across the world and across time.

Adventure gaming cannot break from this root and succeed.

To this day, the entire RPG hobby and business--across all media--cannot escape the fact that success is rooted on the Fighting Man, around which other archetypes (and thus possible playable characters) orbit as if followers in his retinue.

Game design has to address the Fighting Man first and foremost. Adventure games can go without player access to supernatural or superhuman power, but they cannot go without players being able to manuever, fight, and recover.

In the Fighting Man we have the core of wargaming: identification of objectives, assessment of resources, coping with Fog Of War, and making adjustments as situations develop. This is the core of adventure gaming. If your adventure game cannot handle the Fighting Man, then it cannot handle anything else.

The persistent denigration of the Fighting Man has become a tell of Death Cult convergence. Like all such subversion, it comes from a place of envy and resentment, and this is apparent when looking at the people who go out of their way to cook the books to make their Revenge of the Nerds fantasy happen.

Yet, when audiences get the ability to Reveal Preferences, they go with the classic Fighting Man in a landside.

The Fighting Man translates into every setting. The Valkyrie Pilot, the Lord of the Iron Castle, the MechWarrior, the Imperial Admiral, the Warlord of Mars, the King of Ithica, the Captain of Earth's Last Best Hope, the companions of Arthur and Charlemange, the masterless warrior wandering the world, and many more- all Fighting Men.

Focus your mind on this archetype when you design and test your adventure game. Grant a player the means to struggle for glory and you cannot help but to succeed.

Glory to the Fighting Man! Glory to the hero that makes the world turn! From treading the thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet to conquering all of space and making all men proclaim "SIEG MEIN KAISAR!" this is the core--the heart--of all adventure. If your game is about this, it will be worth playing. If not, it won't. Simple as.