The Fantasy Item Shop Trope

Two games I have recently been enjoying are Bargain Quest and Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth (JiME). Juxtaposing these in a semester when I'm teaching game design got me thinking about the role of tropes in game design. In particular, I've been thinking about the ubiquity of the item shop.

Bargain Quest goes all in on the trope of the fantasy item shop. In this game, you are the proprietor of such a shop. You cleverly play your item cards to lure fantasy heroes into your shop so that you can sell them gear. Then, the heroes go off on their adventure.You earn victory points if they are successful, which raises the reputation of the shop that outfitted them. On the other hand, you also earn victory points by making them spend as much money as they can—even if you're selling them overpriced garbage. Once you've lured them to your shop, you can make them buy as much as you like. This clever spin on the item shop is infused throughout the design: Bargain Quest is entirely about the idea that you run a fantasy item shop, and this idea is executed superbly.

JiME follows in the design steps of Descent and Star Wars: Imperial Assault, all being tabletop adventure games that have app-supported cooperative campaigns. I have played both Descent and Imperial Assault, and they have a familiar rhythm: play a scenario, gain treasure, spend treasure at an item shop, repeat until victorious. This pattern is ubiquitous in CRPGs and has a strong presence in popular tabletop RPGs. The system is implied by the oldest Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks that I have seen: given that killing monsters gets you gold and items in the shop have a gold cost associated with them, then the feedback loop practically designs itself. The item shop is merely the narrative mechanism by which gold becomes power.

Bilbo, Legolas, and Gimli fighting off a hungry warg

Last night, two of my sons and I finished the fourth scenario in JiME. One of them, being familiar with both Descent and Imperial Assault, said, "I wonder when will we get to buy new items." I was the one who had read the rules, set up the game, and been responsible for understanding the basics, so I had passively noticed before that items did not have gold costs, but I had not pointed this out to my boys. When he mentioned his expectation of an item shop, I pointed out to him that there must not be one because there was no currency or costs. This got me thinking about it more critically. Why isn't there an item shop?

It is worth returning to the source material—the inspiration for the game, Lord of the Rings. Tolkien's stories of Middle Earth don't mention item shops. There must certainly have been places where Bilbo could buy a new waistcoat, but that's hardly the stuff of legend. When a character in the novels does gain an item, it's crucial to the story, whether its cram or lembas, Sting or the One Ring itself. Gaining items is an interesting part of the story; one is never so crude as to try to purchase an elven cloak. While Dungeons & Dragons drew clear inspiration from Tolkien's world, in some ways it threw away his storytelling in favor of maintaining the quantified spirit of tabletop wargaming: a mithril coat could not be part of the game without having a weight, an armor class, and a cost. That's practical and simulationist, but it's not particularly Tolkienian.

Kudos to the designers of JiME then, for eschewing the trope in favor of designing within the source material. They were not only fighting the trope but also inertia, given that the same company produced the Descent and Imperial Assault systems. I would have liked to be in the design meetings when these decisions were made. Was it more a desire to be true to the source material or a dissatisfaction with their existing systems that led to this interesting design decision?

(By the way, here are links to my painting posts for games mentioned above, in case you want to check them out: Descent 1, 2, 3, 4; Imperial Assault 1, 2, 3; JiME 1.)