Features// SPOnG's Top Tips on Not Going Mental in RPGs

Tip #3 - Unless the game demands it, don’t collect things
Oblivion remembers where you put things. It’s a delight. You can steal glass flasks from an alchemy store, put them in your house, shut down the game, and when come back to it your flasks will be precisely where you left them. You could, if you wanted, collect every glass flask in the entire game. You could make your very own fortress of glass flasks. Who wouldn’t want one of those?

Maybe the collection gets too big. Maybe you need to relocate it to a nearby dungeon. Go in, kill the bandits you find there, and move your entire collection one character inventory at a time. Then go out and get more flasks.

Find them. Buy them. Beg, borrow and steal them. Take them all back to your underground lair until you can hardly move for glass flasks. Your dungeon’s the Uncle Scrooge’s Money Bin of glass flasks. Nobody has more glass flasks than you. You are King Glass Flask the First, ruler of the mighty Glass Flask Empire.

You wear glass armour and your transparent subjects regard you with awe. Occasionally they rebel of course, and you’re forced to squash rebellion by picking up insurgent leaders and smashing them against the dungeon walls yelling “I AM the Glass King!” and giggling in an unsettling manner.

Some nights you think you hear something scrabbling at the dungeon door. You worry whatever it is wants to get inside and steal your glass flasks, so you sit up until morning watching it and making sure your glass hoard is safe.

You fall in love with a beautiful glass flask. You get married. Mazeltov! You make a terrible faux-pas during the wedding by accidentally stamping on her distant cousin as part of the ceremony. She forgives you, and nine months later she gives birth to a test tube baby.

They find you naked and smeared in your own blood. As they take you away you yell at a broken beaker that’s lying on the carpet and call it a cheap no-good whore.

They never let you in a room with glass windows again. And all because you wanted to start a collection!

Tip #4 - Follow the story, but run away from the lore.
Nine times out of ten I’ll play RPG for the story. That tenth time I’ll play because certain websites make me do so for a review and OH GOD, WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO MAKE THE FINAL FANTASY XIV NIGHTMARES STOP, MUST I VENTILATE MY HEAD WITH A POWER DRILL BEFORE I CAN BE FREE and, wait, what was I saying? Oh yeah, story.

If an RPG’s story is particularly interesting you might want to learn more about the game’s world, and look it up on an associated wiki site. If you’re playing a lighter RPG - a Mass Effect, say - you might survive this close encounter with gaming lore with your dignity intact.

But if it’s a heavier game, God help you.

Heavy games have heavy lore. It doesn’t impact the story or give you a greater insight into the game because it is flavour, it is colour, it is dangerous fluff that’ll have you sewing leather patches on your elbows before you know it.

Understanding heavy lore is a lifelong mission. You catalogue every ruin you come across, cross reference it with the official guide, cross reference that with the unofficial guide, and learn a useless language so you can read the runes at the Temple of Narrack and smugly translate the lyrics of the opening theme tune.

Bethesda and Blizzard have sub-departments created specifically to keep track of lore. These people are paid money to keep the continuity in their games straight - you’re trying to do it for free, and on your own.

In other words, this is geekiness on a level approaching mental illness. This is even geekier than wearing a homemade badge on your lapel that says ‘Do you Linux?’ and showing it to the girls you see in the Manga section of your local bookshop.

You know the bearded hikers in Pack-a-Macs who wander across the moors in search of Bronze Age stone circles? The ones who like Morris Dancing and collect rose quartz and say things like, “Ooh, what a remarkable piece of shale”?

They’re laughing at you. They’re laughing at you as if you were an anachronism on Time Team.

So, next time you find a book you can read in Morrowind, for dignity’s sake, think about those leather patches and put it back on the shelf.