Actual RP in MMORPGs and World of Warcraft (split)
Ron Edwards:
Hello,
"evilphd7," welcome to the Forge!
I am probably going to split your post and replies to it into a thread of its own, so be prepared for that when and if it happens.
We've discussed the issues underlying your conclusions for many years here at the Forge. A lot of the hassles you've encountered concerns what I call Creative Agenda, which is somewhat simply, "why we play," and one controversial point made long ago is that there are several, and they are not compatible (not even a little). The common on-line circumstance (and tabletop ideal) of "anyone and everyone come and play, for whatever reason you want," is as I see it, plain madness and stupidity. It's not even remotely possible if one's goal is anything but Brownian motion. A lot of the issues you've described are resolved by playing with people who, all together including you, share such an agenda, which is another way of saying, agree for this game and at this time that they want to have fun in a particular way.
Or on a related note, that all social-leisure activities, role-playing included, occur successfully only in the presence of a working social contract. By that term, I mean all the unspoken as well as spoken human interactions.
This is where Callan and I disagree profoundly. I think humans can communicate and play together without a manual for every imaginable exchange. However, to do so, the social situation cannot be come-one, come-all, do-as-you-please.
Your point about supervision, which is a good name for it, arose in a discussion about authority and leadership some time ago. I classified it as a distinct kind of leadership, distinct from other kinds of leadership. I think you'd be interested in that and in the overall framework I constructed to talk about it: You've Landed on Gaming Group "Park Place", Pay $15 Rent.
Best, Ron
AJ_Flowers:
Quote from: evilphd7 on May 20, 2009, 01:55:43 PM
Ultimately, I'm trying to decide if finding RP online is even worth the bother. I'm not sure if the problem is that online environments simply can't have the basic elements required for RP, if my standards for RP are too high or if the average gamer is a personality so unpleasant that I'd rather not bother interacting with them.
My guess is you're looking for love in all the wrong places. What counts as "RP" is such a broad category that I don't think I've managed to nail it totally down myself but it seems like you're looking for a particular sort of RP that mimics the kind of experience you have at a traditional gaming table... and you're looking for it in Second Life. However, SL does not have a strong division between the player's avatar, and the player, which lends it toward a style of RP that is a little more like a Live Action RP or a LARP than a tabletop RP where there is a somewhat stronger division between character and player (at least in my experience). SL is commonly referred to as a social environment first, so a lot of people are "roleplaying" on Second Life, but not in the way you're imagining it where there is a DM, a social contract, and some kind of overall governing force. Rather, SL is more designed for people who want to be "in character," all day, all the time.
I find that I enjoy roleplay better when there's a stronger division between player and character, which is why I never got in to LARPing (or, at least the roleplaying side of LARPing; I'm all for hitting people with foam-covered sticks if the time arises, but to me the RP aspect always felt like I was in some kind of play but nobody bothered telling me my lines). You seem like you're looking for the same sort of thing, on-line.
I do the majority of my on-line roleplaying in MUSHes and MUCKs, and while I have some problems with the format at times it does tend to have more of the stronger rules set and directoral hand that you're looking for. There are also a lot of RPs going on in forums, on journalling/blogging software such as LiveJournal, and games played by e-mail. I have both played, and run games through e-mail with moderate success, and these tend to run a lot like traditional tabletops, only at a very slow pace. Sometimes a little too slow, but other than that they can be pretty good, with the occasional player collaborating on instant messenger or another type of software to make a larger plot post. Also, I'm in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign that's being run using an on-line utility, and that works fairly well, if a little bit slower than tabletop D&D. I've also heard of players running successful traditional campaigns over utilities like Skype.
So to say "I think it's not possible to find good RP on-line" you probably need to specify your definition of "roleplay" and broaden your defintion of "on-line." Because it's definitely out there, and quite good when you can find it. A livesaver for people who can't always find a local gaming group easily or who move frequently but still want to play with their same group of friends.
Quote from: evilphd7 on May 20, 2009, 01:55:43 PM
The end result is that players eventually realize that the GM character cannot be damaged, toppled or removed so ... why bother playing a game you can't "win"?
Now this is probably really diverting from my original thread, but I find this assessment interesting because it's something I see in other on-line RP as well. Do you have to defeat the GM's main character to "win" the game? Many people see RP games as something that cannot be won per se, while others take a more gamist stance, something covered in more depth elsewhere on the Forge in many places. Here's my counter: so, the GM has a powerful character or two? So what? Unless the GM has set the game up with the express purpose of it being about "beat my guy" what does it specifically matter?
Now I've dealt with horrible on-line twinks, where it seems like you don't even want to play with them, because it's all about setting up some situation for their character to look awesome while you play an audience role and sit back and gawk, over and over again. Since there's nothing for you to do in this "game" but look at the GM's awesome guy beating scenarios the GM set up for his own guy to beat, that's no fun at all. And I think that's what you're getting at: but phrasing it as "I have to beat the GM's best character to win at the RPG" seems off to me.
Callan S.:
Hello Ron,
Quote from: Ron Edwards on May 21, 2009, 03:46:28 AM
This is where Callan and I disagree profoundly. I think humans can communicate and play together without a manual for every imaginable exchange. However, to do so, the social situation cannot be come-one, come-all, do-as-you-please.
I'm not sure you do disagree with me? I meant it when I wrote
Quote
What I often see is that these 'rules' are usually a string of ambiguous words and non explicit context that requires sympathy toward them, for some sort of semblance of following their intent to occur.
I meant it when I said a semblance of their intent can occur. This works out when the sympathy goes both ways. It might end up having a high time spent on sympathy relative to time spent on play, but it works out. Though it is a sembalance of the intent, not an exact rendition of it like you'd get following a maths equation.
What I'm refering to is when something like "If you've been in the presence of the wolf king in the last 24 hours, you get X" is treated the same as "base attack bonus (3) + d20 (rolled a 12) = attack roll (result: 15)". One of them requires sympathy from all parties involved as to what the hell that text 'means'. But if it's treated as being as clear cut as 3+12=15, and yet the other guy is stating that he gets X when hell no, it's 'clear cut' that he doesn't! Or he says he doesn't get X when it's 'clear cut' that he does (whichever way around)! That's like saying he got an 18 total! He must be being a cheat, or deliberately being a jerk, or a number of other social derogatives that come all too easily to posters on various forums, it seems, when describing their fellow men. When the wolf king rule gets treated as being as clear cut as the attack roll, then the idea of working it out together, with all parties having some sympathy toward each others position, gets chucked out the window. Then the social sanctions that you'd find for saying you got an 18 (when it was 15 total) or stealing from the bank in monopoly, get pulled out and applied. As I said before, a game can work by calling for sympathy to whatever extent it does - and for a game that does require some sympathy to work, the social sanctions destroy sympathy real fast.
I'm probably being pedantic with the second paragraph when the first probably clears things up. But I dunno, where are we on that?
Frank Tarcikowski:
Hi “evilphd7”,
I can relate to your frustration, which I have experienced myself in some “random” games in various media. What you are perceiving, I think correctly, is a lack of common ground and a lack of interest in the other players. In order for RP to work out in the online environment, first a shared understanding must be established of how the participants should contribute to the game, and also, the participants need to actually be interested in what others have to contribute.
However, in my personal experience, the idea that such shared understanding and interest is best established through rigid enforcement by someone who is “in charge” does not work out. You can’t force people to “play right” if they don’t want to. Or even if you can force them: You don’t want to play with them if they have to be forced.
As Ron said, “anyone and everyone come and play, for whatever reason you want” is madness. The people I know who actually role-play in an MMO environment do so with a small, distinct group of people, and withdraw from the other participants or ignore them. Which consequentially means that it’s not actually MMO-RP, it’s just RP that incidentally happens around MMO.
- Frank
E:
Quote
What you are perceiving, I think correctly, is a lack of common ground and a lack of interest in the other players.
I agree, I was also turn off by the "lack of interest in the other players", from my mmo few roleplaying experiences, it felt like each player was playing alone in the same scenario (I often feel the same thing in some LARP). As a player, it is frustrating to have nearly no tool to make and share your contributions and to make them meaningful or interesting to other players. Often in those kind of game, in the name of "immersion", a player point of view is ideally limited to his or her character point of view.
This kind of fragment the game play in small temporary player cells who don't often communicate with each other. What I try to say by this last sentence is that if you roleplay with a other player, what you roleplayed become a contribution to the game only if the other player share it with other players, and if those other players share it with others. Often, what is not directly linked to "winning" the scenario is not shared from players to players.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page