Actual RP in MMORPGs and World of Warcraft (split)
contracycle:
Oh I think it could be done, but it would be a very different beast. What they need to do is take advantage of the large population and let the players make some decisions - to have a kind of politics a bit like Fred's LARP situation.
Imagine this sort of situation. Instead of writing quests for each group to take, write a quest for one group, but which impinges on everyone else. Then, "every else" must decide who to send to deal with the problem - the problem being something like a universal XP penalty for everyone until the issue is addressed. Now add perma-death on these community quests, and the temperature gets a little warmer.
Then you could really have people say, hey remember that time the Green Knight thing happened, and three parties were killed trying to solve it until Brave Bob finally smote the evil? Iterating such things could indeed produce a kind of history, the sort of thing the events introduction stuff in the modern crop already tries to do. The kudos to be gained from completing, or even trying and failing, will be real. The concern over who to send, and whether they will go, will be real. Make a FRAPS or similar recording of the quest for others to review, and even the dead will live on in glorious memory. Levelling just to be in the candidate pool will add an element to that activity - if you have levelling at all, which you might not.
So ok, this is all step on up and live the dream, but the points above about the lack of eye contact upthread are valid and the problems insurmountable in my opinion. But certainly MMO's could be much less flakey than they are at present, and make use of more orthodox story structures and take advantage of their mass populations, which they presently ignore.
Callan S.:
My question wasn't so much as to whether it could be done, but why? And to be specific, that doesn't have to be a 'why' that satisfies/makes sense in terms of my needs. As long as it satisfies the speakers needs, that's cool.
Lance D. Allen:
I really need to get my "manifesto" back online.
A lot of the ideas and concerns here are ones I've thought about for if I ever managed to get creative control of a MMORPG project.
Frank Tarcikowski:
I remember this guy who once told me about going to a LARP. He borrowed a foam sword and some funny ears and played a Drow. Proudly, he explained how he had waited in an ambush, motionless, for a very long time just to “kill” some other player. He did not have an in-game reason to kill that player’s persona, other than “I’m Drow, I’m evil”. So there was this troupe of teenagers running around this rather small LARP, killing off other players’ personas for no good reason at all. That was when I decided I probably did not need to try LARP.
This kind of crap, also well known from any MMO PvP server, seriously messes up the benefits of a “death system” like the one Fred describes. In a small LARP with dedicated GMs you can probably work against it. On a small NWN free shard with dedicated GMs, too. But with a mass phenomenon like WoW? Impossible.
On the PvE servers of WoW you can’t just kill random player characters but the idiots are still around. You don’t get to choose whom you play with. Or rather, you don’t get to be alone with the people you have chosen. Plus, the official content makes so little sense in terms of Shared Imagined Space that most of it only gets in the way of actual role-playing, whatever that means.
I imagine that the dedicated “role-players” in WoW play outside the content provided by the quests and instanced dungeons, basically a fully independent chat or TS RPG that happens to take place on a WoW server and happens to use WoW avatars and environments as visualization. Only WoW avatars and environments are very limited visualizations.
Yeah, I guess I still don’t get it. I used to think that “RP” in MMO just means you talk pseudo-medieval and say “Lok’Thar” and “For the Horde!” Not that people would do that a lot on WoW RP servers.
- Frank
contracycle:
Quote from: Callan S. on May 10, 2009, 03:37:39 PM
My question wasn't so much as to whether it could be done, but why? And to be specific, that doesn't have to be a 'why' that satisfies/makes sense in terms of my needs. As long as it satisfies the speakers needs, that's cool.
Because it would be more interesting than simply going through the levelling grind for no good purpose. The whole thing seems pretty dull to me, all the worst bits of dungeon crawling and none of the good bits. Having some kind of continuity and progression (of the setting) in real terms would add a lot to the value of the exercise for many people, I think. Some of them may have decent mechanics that are sufficiently interesting to be engaging, but the reapeat-till-complete quest mode undermines real stakes.
Frankly I'm still surprised they are as popular as they are; you can't really RP and if you want to PvP why not just play one of the many team games out there? I can only think its just dedication to colour, to the extravagent costumes and semi-naked elves and whatnot. The only other thing they have going for them is the quest structure itself, the sense of pseudo-progress articulated through mission briefings and the variety of challenges to encounter.
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