06.01
Lately there has been a great deal of attention to the card game Dominion. However, I feel that I must set the record straight by exposing some things that have been bothering me.
Basically: “Dominion” is not a RPG. This is obvious, but what is not obvious is, it is even less of a RPG than most other borderline RPG-esque card games & board games. -_- Since it is not a Role Playing Game, and does not engage the player in forming a ROLE, I do not give it my support. There are two core elements in tabletop RPGs which Dominion lacks:
* A Setting for the Game to Take Place In
* A Persona or Identity for the Player
Dominion lacks a board. Now, most RPGs aside from D&D and other tactical games lack a board as well, so this is not necessarily a problem. **BUT!!** In the absence of any other RPG-esque features, a board still helps facilitate identification with the game, because a board — if it is a board on which a single player is identified by a single piece, like, say, “Candy Land” but unlike “Chess” — forces the player to exist within the world of the game. Gaming is about boundless opportunity, but the human mind can only cope with so much at once, so it is often helpful to limit the world to the scope of a board. “The map is not the territory,” they say, but games with a map or board of some kind are an imaginative aid which can, at times, produce even more fruitful roleplaying than purely mental RPGs. By locating ourselves on a map, we create the world around us. For the same reason, “Magic: The Gathering” is superior to other CCGs because it has Lands (despite Richard Garfield’s later vacillating on the idea), which situate each game of Magic as taking place within a world, not just an empty, barren battlemap defined only by the opponents. So, games without maps (such as Dominion and most other card games) are generallyy less imaginative than board-based games.
Secondly, Dominion lacks any kind of ‘player character’ or player role. In board games like “Shadows over Camelot” or “Cosmic Encounter” or “Talisman,” the player chooses a character at the start of the game, and their powers are different depending on that choice. This simple element of choice distinguishes one player from another and aids with individualization. In deck-building CCGs, a player constructs their identity *before* the game begins, by choosing (and buying) their cards. But in “Dominion,” every player starts with the same basic powers as everyone else. As the gimmick goes, they “build their deck during gameplay,” but since they are drawing from the same pool as all the other characters, there is little room to stand out, and every character begins the game as a sort of generic feudal-medieval abstraction.
The lack of these elements makes “Dominion” substantially less suitable for roleplaying and imagination and, thus, substantially less interesting. -_- Even “Monopoly” is more exciting. In “Monopoly,” we have a board representing the physical space of the city, and not only that, it’s a board which changes and develops based on the economic investment (i.e. the will) of the player-characters. A very advanced concept for the time! Also, in “Monopoly,” although there are no character powers in the standard rules, at least you have the option to pick between a thimble, a steam iron, a top hat and a little dog, which summons up imagery of a millionaire with a background in the sewing, housewares, millinery or petwares industry! A true roleplayer needs nothing more than such simple cues to construct an epic drama of capitalism in the rough, a la Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” or Martin Scorcese’s “Gangs of New York.” Thus, “Monopoly” is a better game than “Dominion.” I plan to print this blog post out onto a small business card which I can hand to people when asked to play “Dominion” in the future ^^
