RPG Irony

[trouble_gum]

Roleplaying in MMOs is the ultimate in player-driven content

For them to be truly good RPGs, they need roleplaying to start being a part of the game mechanic. The primary game mechanic is what it should be, but MMORPGs don't even have it as a part of the game mechanic.

And for this reason, we pretty much stopped referring to MMORPGS as MMORPGS and just as MMOs

And what's the point of playing a RPG for the fighting?

Plenty, if the game gives your combat a context and an impact on the game world. And again, this is were MMOs and CRPGs tend to fall down, albeit for different reasons. The latter have a vested interest in limiting your impact on the game world due to the limitations of what can be coded for and how many branches off the path the writers can account for. The former have a vested interest in keeping most of the gameworld the same and having it go on for perpetuity so as to continue making money and allow new players to experience the same things when they start as someone who started several years ago.

The stasis this generates in MMOs is more noticeable because CRPGs have an ending; the main storyline/quest/arc/whatever comes to an end and you 'win.' MMOs have a vested interest in changing as little as possible so that a new player now encounters broadly the same starting experience as a new player did four years ago.

I'm going to refer to EVE again, as its the only MMO I've any long-term experience with, but it does both well and badly on the giving conflict context thing via the sovereignty system. The vast swathes of player-conquerable space give players a reason to group together, something to fight over and see great "stories" of the rise and fall of Alliances, the death of virtual nations brought about by protracted conflict, single incidences of espionage or internal strife and the rise of new enemies.

By contrast, Factional warfare, intended to make a similar experience open to players who didn't want to partake of the 0.0 space alliance life; didn't do as well - mostly because its impact on the game map are extremely limited in comparison; you can't bring down any of the four NPC factions, cause one to gain control over another's territories or plant your flag on the map.

Even here, players are cordoned away into special areas for these activities and there's no denying that the political situation can be just as stagnant for all the influence that some players may be able to exert.

For an MMORPG to have true dynamism, they'd have to move away from the non-permanent death of characters and the static nature of NPC factions.

And this would a pretty unpopular paradigm-shift, from both sides. Lose the character I've spent months levelling? Lose all those subscriptions when players long-time characters are killed? Even a step towards making an MMORPG with a set timeframe and a detailed campaign would probably see limited takeup. The effort in making and maintaing a world that the players can affect on such a fundamental level is, alas, at odds with openness of the MMO. Like with any RPG; the larger the world, the larger the playerbase and the more difficult it becomes to provide them all with something enjoyable and accessible. The very scale of MMOs actually works against them in that sense.

 

[salfiert]

its ROLE playing, role is more than just what you say...dialogue is only part of a role

 

[CrystalShadow]

snip.

More or less this.

However I have played a few d&D games and well let?s say the DM was stricter than oblivion with moving the plot. My team all wanted one person to be leader so none of them ever made a choice.

So I as a thief snuck out one night hired the monsters were supposed to kill and raided a dungeon with my hoard. I then set out to out evil the bad guy. Needless to say the game broke because of the DM's strict rules and my teams inability to do anything.

XD. Yes... I can see how that would be a problem.

Of course, just because human beings can improvise and adapt to unexpected events (or even those outside the scope of any rules such games are based on), doesn't mean all people are good at handling such things.

And... Game masters in particular, because they have final say on what actually happens can be very rigid if they don't want to think about things that stray too far from their plans...

 

[LilithSlave]

For an MMORPG to have true dynamism, they'd have to move away from the non-permanent death of characters and the static nature of NPC factions.

To be honest, I'm all for that.

I know it would be a paradigm shift. But it would be a paradigm shift that would move gaming forward.

Also, one way to compensate for character death, a part of characters essentially being a realistic, living breathing part of the world as much as an NPC or PC in any story drivel offline RPG, you could simply reward the account, instead of just the player.

For instance, if even a character dies, say they died a particularly honorable or impressive death, defending their country, or finding a cure for their daughter's fatal illness, and some credits and bonuses to their account that will go to their next character or their new characters in general.

 

[badgersprite]

I've never really understood this proposition that predetermination or restrictions on what you can do is fundamentally incompatible with roleplaying. To me, it just kind of sounds like people aren't willing to use their imaginations to let their character's actions or dialogue choices inform the role you've taken.

Roleplaying doesn't HAVE to be entirely player-driven. If that was the case, then any kind of main quest or prologue that establishes character motivation would be inconsistent with roleplaying. Roleplaying is as much about responding to and interpreting your character's actions and motivations as it is about rigidly controlling them. Rigidly defining your character at the start and refusing to let any subsequent events or dialogue inform that character just sounds lazy and unimaginative to me.

The best roleplaying experience I ever had came about purely through accident in Fallout 3 when I realised the actions (including mistakes) and dialogue choices I had made had caused me to create a very different character than I first intended. That wound up becoming the single most three-dimensional character I've ever played, because I allowed the events to inform the character and thought about those actions and events in the same way I would had it been a pre-programmed character. That told me so much more about the character I had unwittingly created than just blindly adhering to the idea of "I'm going to play a good guy who steals things and doesn't go into towns very often today".