World Wrestling Federation "Basic" Adventure Game

Strange Licensed Role Playing Games Selection #4

This is the fourth entry in a series on “Strange Licensed Role Playing Games.” These are role playing games based on a licensed property that are strange for one reason or another.

A Pro-Wrestling RPG is a Great Idea, but…

This will probably come as no surprise to you, but I really like professional wrestling. When I was an undergraduate host regular viewing parties with roommates and friends to watch both WWE(F) and WCW matches. Since I grew up watching Ric Flair and the Four Horsemen bully Dusty “The American Dream” Rhodes, my leaning was more WCW. I may have been baffled at how Dusty was in any way the American Dream, but the Rock 'n' Roll Express and Harlem Heat had fantastic matches and Ric Flair had enough enthusiasm and charisma for an entire Wrestling Alliance.

We knew that the weekday matches were just a set up for the next big pay per view, but we loved watching the narratives develop over time. We appreciated the hard work that the wrestlers put in to maintain Kayfabe and to provide us fans with living comic books where Faces battled Heels and where Good triumphed over Evil…unless we were in the Attitude Era or the Take Over Era of the nWo (the era that overlapped with my undergraduate years). Though I was a committed WCW fan, I always had a soft spot for Shawn Michaels. While he was no Ric Flair, he was a Heel’s Heel. His hard work and performances elevated his opponents. He’s probably my third favorite Heel, lining up behind Ric Flair and Rowdy Roddy Piper.

I am also a big fan of role playing games of all genres, but you already knew that. I am also not alone in my love of both of these pop culture phenomena. Game designer Tony Lee, who has designed a number of my favorite obscure role playing games, has designed two excellent professional wrestling role playing games with Know Your Role! and Wild World Wrestling. In addition to Tony’s wrestling role playing games there are the Powered by the Apocalypse games World Wide Wrestling and Warlock Pro Wrestling by Nathan D. Paoletta. Where Tony’s two games used D&D mechanics as a foundation, the Paoletta games use a more narrative mechanical base. On the board/card game side, there is the excellent old Avalon Hill game Wrasslin’ which combines ease of play with a card based system that does a good job of recreating the feel of pro-wrestling.

Before any of these were published, Whit Publications released The World Wrestling Federation Basic Adventure Game and it’s this week’s strange licensed game. While I’m not alone among gamers in being a wrestling fan, not many of the RPG fans I’ve met over the years are big pro wrestling fans. More importantly, not many of my pro wrestling fan buddies are interested in playing RPGs.

This provides a challenge that should be familiar to readers of the strange licensed game series by now. We have to ask ourselves what kind of player/fan are was The World Wrestling Federation Basic Adventure Game designed for. Was it intended to bring wrestling fans into the gaming hobby? Was it intended to convert gamers into diehard wrestling fans?

The WWE: Know Your Role! role playing game that came out in 2005 tries to do a little of both of these things. It used the familiar d20 system to simulate pro wrestling, and in the process proved that the reason the grappling rules in d20 are so crazy is that they are in fact a perfect simulation of pro wrestling. Know Your Role! also provided extensive material about the WWE and its talent. It used a ubiquitous game system in an attempt to turn gamers into wrestling fans. It also had enough color pictures and biographic/narrative information to appeal to wrestling fans. Fans who might in turn become gaming fans. Tony Lee and crew knew what they were doing when they released Know Your Role!.

The same cannot be said of the people at Whit Publications. When they published the World Wrestling Federation Basic Adventure Game in 1994, they created a product that had an extremely complex game. The game includes over 150 wrestling maneuvers in over 300 variations. It has everything from Leaping-off-the-Ropes and Irish-Whips to rules for distracting referees and participating in interviews to build fan base. Do you want to play a Face? There are some great rules for how to do that, but why do that when you can be a dastardly Heel and use a Cheap Shot to win the Intercontinental Title? The game has almost everything one could want from a professional wrestling game. It is fun, it has rules that can be extended into campaign play, and it features the most popular wrestlers of its era (Lex Luger, Macho Man, Razor Ramon, and Shawn Michaels to name a few).

But let’s take a look at the statistics for Shawn Michaels. While the list of Attributes makes a kind of sense, and is even intuitive to an experienced gamer, but what do those roman numerals mean and why are there four different values for each attribute? The short answer is that those show how effective a wrestler is at various stages of the fight (measured by remaining Stun) and are the percentage chance the character is successful when using that ability.

This adds tension and drama to play, but it doesn’t quite capture the actual flow of a wrestling match. While one might argue that the wrestlers become “less effective” as they get worn down, these are also the moments when the magic happens and they accomplish amazing things. It simulates the ablative nature of becoming a victim of a finishing move, but doesn’t quite capture how the attacker has the ability to do the finishing move at all.

The WWF game also lacks two other things. While it has stats for Shawn Michaels and crew, it lacks any biographical or storyline information for these characters. It’s one thing to know that Razor Ramon’s signature move is the Razor’s Edge (Crucifix Shoulderslam) and that it is a level 2 maneuver. It is quite another to read about the Shawn Michaels/Razor Ramon ladder match from Wrestlemania X. Let’s just say the wrestling fan in me wishes the WWF RPG had included some good narrative background material. It also lacks an easy-to-learn or familiar rule set that can be used to convince your gamer buddies to give a wrestling game a try.

It’s a good game. It’s playable and after you’ve played it a few times it’s intuitive and fun. If you are a gamer who is a wrestling fan, it’s a perfect match. However, if you want background to help you create the narratives that make the matches matter, that’s lacking. It assumes you know all that stuff.

From the perspective of the wrestling fan, it didn’t do its best to provide what wrestling fans would want from such a product and it did even less for recruiting gamers who weren’t already wrestling fans. The percentage of people who play RPGs is pretty small. The percentage of people who play RPGs and are wrestling fans is even smaller. A wrestling fan probably wants that background information too, in this case for nostalgia’s sake rather than to learn. Additionally, the complexity of the rules set makes it a challenge to learn for the wrestling fan who has little to no experience with role playing games. There is nothing “Basic” about World Wrestling Federation Basic Adventure Game.

That makes for a strange choice for a licensed game, but it’s one you should check out if you can find it.