Chapter One.

What a collection role-playing game actually is

Step 1 of 5

The shape of the thing

A collection role-playing game is a game in which you gradually assemble a group of characters and send them into fights that the computer controls on the other side. The characters are usually called heroes, champions or units, and each one has a short list of numbers attached to it — how much damage it deals, how much it can absorb, how quickly it acts. You are not controlling a person running around a world. You are choosing which four or five characters go into the next fight and in what order they act.

That is the whole genre in one paragraph, and it is worth holding on to, because the advertising around these games rarely describes it that way. Advertisements tend to show cinematic fantasy scenes. The actual minute-to-minute experience is closer to arranging a small team on a grid, pressing a button, and watching an animated exchange of attacks resolve.

The word "collection" in the name is the important half. The game is built around acquiring new characters over weeks and months, and around improving the ones you already have. A new character is both the reward and the reason to keep going. How new characters are obtained is the single question that decides what the game will cost you, and that is the subject of Step 3 rather than this one.

"Role-playing game", often shortened to RPG, is an older term borrowed from tabletop games. In this context it means little more than that your characters have statistics, gain levels and get equipment. It does not promise a story you make choices in, and it does not promise anything about the quality of the writing.

The loop you will repeat

Almost every game in this category is built from the same repeating sequence. Understanding it before you install anything means the first evening will not feel bewildering.

You are given a small team. The opening hour hands you a few characters so that you have something to play with. These early characters are usually weak by design and are replaced later.
You play through a campaign. A campaign is a sequence of pre-built fights, grouped into chapters and locations, that gets slowly harder. This is where most new players spend their first weeks.
Each fight consumes a resource. Most of these games meter how much you can play in one sitting using a resource usually called energy or stamina, which refills on a timer. When it runs out, the game expects you to stop, or to buy more.
Winning fights yields materials. Not usually new characters — more often the components used to make existing characters stronger, plus a currency of some kind.
You spend materials upgrading. Levelling a character, improving its equipment, opening up an extra ability. This is where the numbers you saw in the first paragraph go up.
Occasionally you acquire a new character. Through progress rewards, through events, or through the randomised system discussed in Step 3.
Harder content opens up. Dungeons, timed events, fights against a single very large opponent, and, in many titles, matches against teams assembled by other players.

The loop is deliberately long. These are not games with an ending you reach on a Saturday. They are designed to be returned to in short sessions over months, which is a neutral fact about their design rather than a criticism — but it is a fact worth knowing before you start, because it is the reason Step 5 exists.

Words you will meet on day one

None of the following words are technical in any deep sense; they are simply shorthand that the people who make and play these games use among themselves. Each is defined here as it is ordinarily used in the genre.

PvE: Player versus environment: fights against opponents the computer controls. Most of a collection RPG is PvE.
PvP: Player versus player: your team is matched against a team another player has assembled. In most of these games the other player is not present; the computer plays their team.
Campaign: The fixed sequence of story fights that forms the backbone of the game's early hours.
Dungeon: A repeatable, usually harder fight or series of fights that drops a specific kind of upgrade material.
Energy or stamina: The resource consumed by playing a fight, which refills slowly over real-world time and caps how long a session can be.
Tutorial: The guided opening that walks you through the controls. In this genre it is usually the first ten to thirty minutes and cannot be skipped.
Account: The record held by the publisher of your progress, your characters and anything you have paid for. It lives on their servers, not on your computer.
Patch or update: A change the publisher sends to the game after release, adding content or altering how existing things work.
Live service: A game that is run continuously and changed over time by its publisher, rather than finished and sold once.

Why the game you install is not the game you keep

This genre is almost entirely made up of live-service games, and that has two consequences a new player tends to discover the hard way.

The first is that the game requires a connection to the publisher's servers in order to run. Your progress is on their side, not yours. If your internet drops, the game stops; if the publisher closes the servers down one day, the game stops permanently, and nothing you have accumulated continues to exist in a form you can use. This is normal for the category and is usually stated somewhere in the terms you accept at sign-up. Step 4 shows you where to find that clause before you agree to it.

The second is that the publisher can and will change the rules. A character you worked on for a month can be made weaker in an update; a reward you were saving for can be repriced or withdrawn. Again, this is normal and generally permitted by the terms. It matters mainly for how you decide to spend money, which is why Step 3 asks you to treat any purchase as buying the present version of the thing rather than a permanent asset.

A note on consumer rights

None of the above means you have no rights. Goods and services supplied to consumers in Australia come with guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law that a contract cannot simply remove, and digital products are not exempt from the law. What a particular clause can and cannot do in your situation is a question for the ACCC's own published guidance or for legal advice, not for a course like this one.

Reading a vendor's own description

Sooner or later you will be standing in front of a game's own website, trying to work out what it is. The useful skill is separating three kinds of sentence, and it takes about a minute per page once you have the habit.

Mechanical sentences describe what you will do with your hands and your attention: how fights are resolved, what the modes are, whether there is a campaign, whether other players are involved. These are the sentences to read closely, because they are the ones you can check against the genre description above.

Atmospheric sentences describe the world, the art, the voice acting and the feeling. They are not dishonest — a game really can have an elaborate setting — but they tell you nothing about whether you will enjoy playing it. Read them once and set them aside.

Commercial sentences describe what things cost, what a currency is, what a pass or a bundle includes, and what happens when you run out of something. These are the ones most often skimmed and most worth reading twice. Step 3 gives them a page of their own.

One title is named throughout this course because the site is funded by an affiliate link to it: Raid: Shadow Legends. What this course states about it is limited to what the vendor and the network state — that it is promoted for desktop computers running Windows, macOS or Linux. Everything else about it, including anything that would make it sound good or bad, is for the vendor's own pages to say, and for you to read with the three categories above in mind.

The following link is a paid affiliate link; if you open it, register, install the game and launch the tutorial, Hidden Assets s.r.o. earns a commission at no extra cost to you. To try the reading exercise on a real page, visit the Raid: Shadow Legends website and count how many of its sentences are mechanical, atmospheric or commercial before you do anything else.

Why this course assumes a desktop computer

Many games in this category exist on phones as well as on computers, but this workbook is written for desktop and laptop machines running Windows, macOS or Linux, and the title it names is promoted for desktop only. That is not an arbitrary restriction on our part. The practical advice in the steps that follow — reading system specifications, checking where an installer came from, finding the folder a game has written to, closing an account from a browser — assumes a machine where those things are visible and under your control. On a phone, most of them are either hidden or handled by the app store.

If you intend to play on a phone instead, Steps 1, 3 and 5 still apply almost unchanged. Steps 2 and 4 will not, and you would be better served by guidance written for mobile devices.

The example household, at the end of Step 1

The two adults sharing the laptop in Adelaide — a hypothetical household invented for this course, not a real one — finish Step 1 with a short written note rather than an opinion. They have established that the genre is turn-based team fights rather than the cinematic action the advertisement suggested, that the game will need an internet connection every time it runs, and that progress lives on a publisher's server. One of them writes down "energy = session limit" because that was the part neither of them had understood. They have not installed anything. They have not decided anything. That is the correct position to be in at the end of Step 1.

Before you move on

You should now be able to say, in your own words, what a collection RPG asks of a player: assemble a team, repeat fights, spend the rewards on making the team stronger, and come back tomorrow when the energy has refilled. You should recognise the nine words in the glossary strip when they appear on a store page. And you should be able to look at a paragraph of a game's marketing and sort its sentences into mechanical, atmospheric and commercial.

What you do not yet know is whether your computer can run any of it, which is Step 2, and what any of it costs, which is Step 3. Neither question is answerable from a marketing page, and neither is worth guessing at.

Checklist for Step 1

Write one sentence, in your own words, describing what a player of a collection RPG actually does in a five-minute session.
Name the resource that limits how long a single session can be, and say what refills it.
Confirm you understand that your progress is stored on the publisher's servers and requires a connection each time you play.
Find one game's official description and mark three sentences as mechanical, atmospheric or commercial.
Write down one thing that description does not tell you and that you would want to know before installing.
Check that the game you are curious about is published for the operating system your computer runs, before you spend any time on Step 2.
Decide whether you are reading on behalf of an adult, a person under sixteen, or both, and note it next to your monthly limit from the homepage checklist.