Actual RP in MMORPGs and World of Warcraft (split)
FredGarber:
Don't have a lot of MMORPG experience, but I have a LOT of LARP Plot crafting experience. (I was involved in a 20-40 person Larp for 4-5 years, helping run it for 2-3). We ran a Vampire WOD larp, and we had a pretty average mix of Creative Agendas:
We had a handful of players who were very Story Now in their goals: they didn't care exactly what was going on, except as creating a reaction to it, and speechify somewhere in the play site. I would say they were about 10% of the group, but they were loud, and popular (ie, almost everybody want to be in a scene with them). We had a couple of themes develop around these characters (which gained or lost momentum when certain characters died/or entered play): "What will you pay for power?" and "How far will you go to protect your clique?" We had about a third of our players as more Step On Up in their goals: Show them a werewolf, and they'd look for their silver weapons. Show them a ghost, and they'd get a wizard to exorcise it, etc. They tended to have the most and strongest powers, and even though they didn't always wade in swinging, each plot element the StoryTellers introduced was another plot element to put down. They loved to hear that a storyline was finished.The majority of the players, however, came every night to watch the Combats (and maybe participate in a round or two of a combat, if the risk.reward was high enough), or play as the audience to the speechifying (and maybe choose a side or not.) I don't want to indicate that they sat on the couches and watched (although we had some of those), but their primary interest was staying in character, and experiencing how things developed.
When designing a plot, usually we set out a Bang, something for the characters to see that their stasis had changed. Some would then go to try and kill it, some would figure out what it meant to them personally, etc. As a Storyteller, you had to plan for a wide range of potential outcomes to the plot. Successful plots couldn't depend upon a certain character being in a certain group, because that player might not show that week, and the whole plotline would fall apart. Plotlines couldn't depend upon key items being found and/or used, because you couldn't MAKE the guy with the magic heart shaped gem put it in the magic heart-shaped opening in the rock to open the magic, heart shaped door. He might decide to cut the gemstone up for money, and what would THAT do to your plot? Plotlines ended when either all of the NPCs you introduced had been placated or killed. Unfortunately. Sometimes, you could build a big set piece and throw a lot of cinematics in there at the end to make it look like a story climax."Player Driven Plot" was code for PvP conflict. Many weeks there was so much PvP going on that we didn't need to add PvE to keep the players entertained.
I was writing a book about it, until I realized that the vast majority of my advice actually boiled down to "know your players." If you throw a bunch of Challenges at characters who are more Story Now oriented, they will spend all night talking about what to do, and never Stepping Up. If you throw Premise at Step Up characters, they will deal with the irritating event, usually lethally, and then sit back down and wait for the next thing. They won't wonder if they did the right thing, only that they used the right tactics. If you start sending Ancient Elder Vampires after the powerful Challenge Characters, the Shared Dream characters will be upset because those things are supposed to be rare, and they'll see them every week.
MMOs tend to be, well, Massive. I don't know if they can be as aware of the mood and attitudes of their playerbase. Maybe they can. But IMHO, they tend to throw out new content to keep Stepping On Up, and occasionally they sell a new supplement to Change the Dream, and they put all the Story Now as Story Before in the fluff text or scripted NPC speeches.
Also, the fact that your character can't be permanantly killed (except by the developers) means that there's a much greater allowance for risk.
Without any easy access to resurrection, it made for a constant conflict between the players who treated their characters as a collection of skills of varying Effectiveness to interact with the SiS, and the ones who really went for the Deep Immersion. There were Speech Codes as elaborate as "activist judge" being American Political Speech Code for "Pro-Abortion and Gay Rights judge"
"It's only a game" was code for "who cares if your character dies, just make another one, you drama queen."
"I just show up for the people" was code for "If you try and MAKE me react to plot, I will sit here and turtle,"
"I don't like to worry about Game Mechanics" was code for "Listen, GunBunny, I'm trying to ACT over here."
One of the things that was constantly in flux in the LARP was the lethality level and the spillover from the challenges. For example, the powerful characters wanted challenges, and they didn't want the game to become The League of SuperFriends (Vampires version), where the players swooped in like Superman and saved the world from the Deep Black Evil, without challenge. On the other hand, many of the other players were not happy when they were finally making that deal to learn the forbidden lore, and their teacher was killed by the Deep Black Evil which they had neither sought out nor planned to defend against.
-Fred
Callan S.:
Quote
Also, the fact that your character can't be permanantly killed (except by the developers) means that there's a much greater allowance for risk.
I'd be thinking more an allowance for the illusion or impression of risk? Or am I being pedantic? Sometimes the distinction gets lost though...
FredGarber:
I'm parsing my sentence, and getting lost in my own grammar....
I mean to say that in our LARP, once you died, that was it. Generate New Character, leave your loot on the corpse. It made most people avoid combat or situations where their avatar might die (they were Avoiding Risk) , because they spent a lot of time on the persona and upon building up their persona's place in the SIS. We had a rule called the Inigo Montoya Rule: your next persona had to be sufficiently different from your last character to avoid taking over where the dead persona left off.
I watched the movie Darkon, about the foam sword LARPers, and they had a less permanent sort of death. In that LARP, it was somewhat like the MMORPG model - if you were Killed in LARP battle, you had to take a time out from fighting to "travel to the underworld and back," but then you came back as the same persona.
I can not imagine WOW's business model surviving if they implemented my LARP's death of the avatar. Are there any MMORPGs that do? Are there any WoW quests that are try once, and fail? Or all they all try and fail until you succeed?
-Fred
Lance D. Allen:
Fred,
As far as I know, permadeath hasn't seen any sort of implementation in any MMO. The trend has actually been toward making death less harsh, rather than more. Ultima Online's original death penalty was probably the harshest ever implemented (in an MMO; I know nahthing about MUDs/MUSHes), and it's gone more 'care bear' since then.
That doesn't mean it hasn't been talked about. I used to follow discussions on MMORPG.com for a while, and there was more than a little bit of advocacy for permadeath in MMOs. Now, I honestly believe that many of the strongest advocates for it would find that they actually hate it in practice.
The effect it would have on step-on-up gaming would be phenomenal. The effect on deep immersion roleplayers would also be sizable, as suddenly there would be real reason to react to defeat in battle, and the roleplayed respect for valorous action would likely be supplemented by real respect, because the risk is real.
Likewise, the "single use" quests would have a fairly profound effect. Roleplayers wouldn't have to tapdance around talking about an "epic" quest that they'd both accomplished. "Oh, I just assisted in taking down the liche who ruled over the Vale of Shadows." "Oh, yeah.. I, uh, also took down a liche recently. Probably a totally different one, of course." Step-on-up gamers wouldn't be able to master a quest by doing it over and over. There wouldn't be websites devoted to lessons learned on a quest as group after group goes through it and tries new tactics. Your bragging rights would be "I accomplished this one quest, it was badass." "Oh yeah? I failed that one. It was really hard." And so on.
But those sorts of things would discourage the casual gamer, which is where WoW largely makes its money, so you'll never see them in a mainstream MMO. It'll pretty much require some little indie upstart to do the scary failure-ridden things, because we're not ruled by that bottom line.
Callan S.:
That kind of raises the question of 'Why a mmorpg at all?'. For instance, nethack has quite a following, dedicated players, a real passion and has certainly got perma death. If you were to make nethack a mmorpg, would it really add anything?
Thing thing with a mmorpg is that you could use it to foster a certain community with certain values, atleast in terms of the activity (perhaps a bit like the forge that way?). But that goal certainly isn't compatable with "Get as many punters in as we can" which I think WOW does, with only a slight concession toward any non fiscal goal they might have. If you want to foster a certain mindset, you have to put up with a certain amount of unpopularity. The more focused the mindset, the higher the unpopularity, I'd postulate.
I suppose, and perhaps table top is like this too, they lend themselves to appear to be a bunch of enthused people available to engage some new idea. There seems to be that potential.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page