Day 1.

Step 1 — What a collection RPG is, and what it asks of you

DEPTH 01 of 05  ·  HAUL 7 checks  ·  CREW you, alone

Step 1 of 5

A collection role-playing game is a game in which you gradually assemble a group of characters and send that group into a long series of fights. The characters are the collection. Acquiring them, improving them and choosing which to use is most of what you do. Everything else in the genre hangs off that one idea.

If that sounds thin, it is because the idea is simple and the decoration around it is not. The artwork, the voice acting, the story chapters and the names of things are what advertising shows you, and they tell you least about what playing is like. This step strips them back.

The vocabulary, defined once

Writing about these games assumes you already speak the language. Here are the terms you will meet in the first ten minutes of any of them, used consistently for the rest of this course.

Roster

The full set of characters your account owns, whether or not you currently use them. Sometimes called a collection or a barracks.

Team or party

The small selection from your roster — often four or five characters — that you take into a particular fight.

Campaign

The main sequence of fights, usually arranged into chapters with a story attached. It is the part designed to be played first and it is where new players learn the systems.

Energy or stamina

A counter that is spent to start a fight and refills slowly over real-world hours. It is the mechanism that limits how long a single sitting can usefully last.

Levelling and upgrading

Spending in-game resources to make a character stronger. In this genre the upgrading of characters usually matters more than the skill of the player in any individual fight.

Summoning

Spending an in-game item or currency to receive a character chosen at random from a defined pool. This is the acquisition method that gives the genre its distinctive shape.

Player versus environment (PvE)

Fights against opponents controlled by the game rather than by other people.

Player versus player (PvP)

Modes where your team is matched against another account's team. In many of these games the opposing team is controlled by the game using another player's roster, rather than by that player in real time.

Free-to-play

A business model, not a promise about cost. The software is made available without an up-front purchase and money is made from optional purchases inside it. What is optional and what it costs varies by title and is covered in Step 3.

The shape of a session

Almost every game in this genre arranges a sitting the same way, and knowing that in advance removes most of the confusion of a first evening.

You open the program and are shown a central screen with a character or a map on it and a ring of buttons around the edge. You collect whatever has accumulated since last time: a daily reward, the result of something that was running while you were away, a message from the publisher. You then spend your energy on fights, usually by repeating a chapter of the campaign that gives a resource you currently need. When the energy runs out, the useful part of the session is over.

What remains is the part people enjoy or do not: arranging the roster. Deciding which character to upgrade next, which to retire, which equipment to move from one to another. That is the genuine decision-making of the genre, and it happens between fights rather than during them.

The practical consequence is that these games are built for short, regular sessions rather than long ones. A session of twenty to forty minutes exhausts what the game will let you do that day. This is a design choice, and it cuts both ways: it makes the game hard to binge, and it makes it a habit rather than an event.

Two currencies, and why there are two

Nearly every free-to-play game of this type runs two in-game currencies, and the difference between them is the single most useful thing to understand before you start.

The first is a soft currency. It is handed out constantly for playing: finishing a fight, finishing a chapter, logging in. It is spent on the ordinary business of upgrading characters and equipment. You will have more of it than you can comfortably track and it is rarely a real constraint for a new player.

The second is a hard or premium currency. It is handed out sparingly, usually as a reward for reaching a milestone, and it is also the thing sold for real money. It is spent on the acquisition of new characters, on extra roster space, on refilling energy, and on skipping waiting periods. Two currencies exist so that the generous one can be generous without affecting the thing the business depends on.

When you read anything about one of these games — a description, a forum post, a video — work out which currency is being discussed before you decide whether the claim matters. Generosity with the first kind tells you very little.

Randomised rewards, and the Australian markings

The defining mechanic of the genre is that new characters are usually obtained at random rather than chosen. You spend a summoning item or a quantity of hard currency, an animation plays, and you receive something from a pool. Rare outcomes are rare by design.

This is worth naming plainly, without alarm and without enthusiasm. It means that spending in these games buys an attempt rather than an outcome, and that two people who spend the same amount can end up with very different rosters. Whether that is enjoyable is a matter of taste. Whether it is relevant to you is something to decide before you begin rather than during a run of disappointing results.

In Australia, computer games sold or made available here are classified under the national classification scheme, and the way a game handles in-game purchases involving elements of chance is part of what the classification system considers. Rather than paraphrase the rules, read them from the source: the Australian Classification Board publishes the classification markings, the consumer advice that accompanies them, and a searchable database of classified titles. Step 3 walks through how to look up a specific game there.

What the genre asks of you

Four things, in descending order of how much they usually matter.

Regularity. The energy system rewards opening the game most days and penalises nothing except your own sense of progress. A player who plays twenty minutes daily will advance faster than one who plays three hours on a Saturday. Decide now whether a daily habit is something you want.

Patience with slow systems. Upgrading characters takes resources, resources take fights, fights take energy, energy takes hours. The genre is unhurried by construction. People who dislike it usually dislike that.

Disk space and a running program. A desktop title of this type is a substantial installation, not a web page. Step 2 covers how to check what you have.

Money, only if you choose. Nothing in the genre requires a purchase to begin. Whether you eventually want to spend is covered in Step 5, where you write a figure down before the question is put to you rather than after.

What it does not ask

It does not ask for reflexes. Fights are generally resolved by the strength of your characters and the order in which abilities are used, not by fast hands. It does not usually ask for other people, either: the social parts are optional in most titles, although some content is designed around groups.

A specific title, named as an example

Abstractions are easier to hold when one concrete instance is attached to them. The instance used in this course is Raid: Shadow Legends, a collection role-playing game available for desktop computers.

What is stated about it here comes from the publisher's own affiliate programme and nothing else. That programme describes the path a new player takes: a person registers on the game's landing page, installs the game, and launches the tutorial. It also states that the desktop versions are for Mac, Windows and Linux. The course uses those two facts, and no others. Questions about how the game performs, what its content is like, how its summoning pools are weighted, or how it compares to anything else are not answered here, because the vendor does not state those things to us and this site does not test products.

That is a narrower description than you will find elsewhere, and deliberately so. A site funded by commission can honestly tell you how to evaluate something; it cannot tell you the thing is good.

Paid affiliate link. Visit the Raid: Shadow Legends website — a commission is paid to Softprism Online if you register and install through this link, and the price to you is unchanged.

The household in the spare room

The hypothetical household introduced on the home page starts here. Two adults, one five-year-old Windows desktop in regional Victoria, one advertisement seen on a video. They are an invented illustration used to make the steps concrete.

Their first act is not to install anything. It is to read a description of the genre and ask whether a game built around a daily twenty-minute habit is something either of them wants in their evening. One of them decides it sounds restful. The other decides it sounds like homework and loses interest at this point, which is a perfectly good outcome for Step 1 and costs nothing.

They also note the two currency names they keep seeing in the advertising, so that a purchase screen later makes sense.

Before you move on

If after this step the genre sounds like something you would not enjoy, you have finished the course usefully and at no cost. If it still sounds interesting, Step 2 asks the next practical question: will it run on the computer you own.

Checklist for Step 1

Work through these on paper before opening Step 2. The boxes are printed marks; this site stores nothing, so ticks do not persist.

• I can say, in one sentence and without using the word “fantasy”, what the activity in a collection RPG is.
• I know what energy is and why it limits how long a session can be.
• I can name the difference between the soft currency and the hard currency, and I know which one is sold.
• I understand that new characters are usually acquired at random, and I have decided how I feel about that before starting.
• I have looked at classification.gov.au once, so I know where the markings and consumer advice come from.
• I have decided whether a short daily habit is something I want, and written the answer down.
• I have not installed anything yet.