From: David Ferris <dferris@RESEARCH.ATT.COM>
Subject:      Re: SPI Compendium

Danny Holte starts us off with an SPI rate-o-rama:

> Arena of Death

I was thinking of having a rundown of all the Ares issue games (much
like the S&T and Command issue rundowns) once this one has quieted down,
but I'll throw in on this one while we're here.

Arena of Death (AoD) was the melee combat system taken from the first
edition of SPI's interesting-but-not-extremely-successful attempt at a
fantasy role-playing game, DragonQuest. The combat system was fine as a
stand-alone game on hack-n-slay combat (as long as you didn't take it
too seriously and weren't expecting a detailed simulation of ancient or
medieval combat) but too cumbersome to use in an RPG setting, so the
entire combat system was replaced in the second edition of DragonQuest.

AoD was a good fun diversion. It had a few small fantasy elements and
felt "about right" for portraying melees using sharp things, so it was
good for grabbing the attention of kids and fantasy gamers while not
driving away gamers with more historical tastes. There were a lot of
these "throw some characters into a gladiatorial arena and have them
hack it out" games around the late 1970's and early 1980's (e.g.
Metagaming's Melee, Bearhug's Men-At-Arms series) and AoD does a pretty
good job of balancing playability, simulation, and detail. It was more
detailed than Metagaming's Melee, albeit less suited for use as an RPG's
combat system. It did suffer from the "how many different types of
polearm can we list" syndrome that most of these games had, but it
didn't fall for the "we gotta have 6 pages of charts for each of the 362
different sword types" approach that ICE took with the Arms Law series.

AoD, and its parent RPG DragonQuest, were *definitely* written by
wargamers though. The unmistakable SPI rules writing style permeated the
entire game. That was good in that it made the whole thing easier to
digest for gamers familiar with SPI's historical games, but I always
wondered how many non-wargaming role-players were driven away by, what
must have been for them anyway, SPI's very non-role-playing-game-style
rules format.

DLF
dferris@research.att.com