|  Athaton | Nov 24, 2007 8:25pm | | I would say there is so little role playing that what you see is an exception and a rare one at that. Its not really the players fault the games have so little freedom of action, that its quite understandable. Most, ok all that I have seen of the actions involve a few possible things done to death. THe amount of grind is immense and annoying. Killing X N times to get Y and bring it back to B is not role playing. Its boring, and the other activities like PVP are zero sum actions. Diplomacy is impossible with the NPCs, every thing is combat oriented. Oh and walking slowly, yes lets waste the players time with boring transport just to make the content stretch further. |
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Sponsor |  CastorQuinn | Nov 24, 2007 11:13pm | I'm involved in two heavy-RP groups in the City of Heroes MMO. These are people who have gotten together and formed a supergroup (a guild) that only contains players who want to roleplay. Of course if you think roleplaying requires people to physically gesture and act out their character, then this isn't going to count as roleplaying - but then neither would MUDs, D&D games played by email, messenger or on forums, or anything else that doesn't involve people sitting together in the one room, and I think that's needlessly elitist.
For me roleplaying just means you have an actual character concept, a background and history, a relationship to the lore of the world you are playing in, and you interact with other players based on this. The groups I play in do this - in fact that's the only reason I play the games, because if you take out this character interaction/roleplaying the game holds zero appeal to me.
To take this one step further, last week one of the guilds I am in held a big event, where they went to a high-level area of the game and ran a long, important mission. My character was too low a level to actually go on the mission. But that didn't mean I was out of the game. My character and several other characters sat in our guild base, talking about how we felt about the mission, getting to know each other. But more than this, the group who did go on the mission carried their whole conversation over the guild comm channel, so those of us in the base could hear them - and join in.
So there are three of us sitting there, organised around the various base computers. We'd decided one of them was now a monitoring station, one was the comms control, one was the city police channel. The guys on the mission would say something suggestive so we would have an idea what was about to happen, and then we could call things out over comms like "Careful guys, the shields are about to go down!" or "There's a group of invaders in the chambers to your left according to these readings". This went on for close to two hours. There was actually one character who was high enough to go on the mission but who stayed in the base with us because she wanted to try this different style of roleplay.
I'll be the first to admit that MMOs are generally full of people who don't roleplay. But MMOs themselves are not incompatible with roleplay. You just need to make sure you are grouped with people who know how to play. The players in this group pumped in some serious roleplay for that mission, more than you would get from your typical pen and paper player who picks a feat because it increases their damage or tries to find an in-character excuse to grind mobs to gain a level.
MMOs have their faults, but RP is possible, if you know where to look. |
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| | | Omnius | Nov 26, 2007 5:43pm | I have loved many MMOs in my day, and started off playing the old MUDs on Telnet. I still have fond memories of Dragon Spawn...
That said, I think there is only one thing wrong with the system, other than the players generally destroy any ability to have cohesive role-playing. MMOs are thousands of people all playing different games in the same world.
That said, I think that the only true problem with MMOs is that you cannot make lasting impressions on the game world, or when you can, it is a truly rare event (unlocking something on a server is done by 1/1000, if that many.) More so, those changes can only be implemented by people who are high in power levels, and don't rely on role-playing..
The lack of a GM means a lack of a cohesive story, which means everything is fractured. The NPC scripting programs are too limited to really allow conversation, forcing PC-only interaction.
All that aside, I think MMOs are just fine. They just aren't role-playing games anymore than Final Fantasy is. (Especially the early ones.) |
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| | vodric | Nov 28, 2007 6:45pm | | The problem in regards to rp is that most mmo's are automated dungeon crawls. I do enjoy some of them, but the majority of the game, both with pc's and npc's is set up to have players kill things. I enjoy mmo's but many seem to be filled with pre-teen, foul mouthed, whiny, brats. I am currently holding out hope for the upcoming Conan game. The mature rating may keep out some of the problems. |
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| | | Omnius | Nov 29, 2007 4:57am | "The mature rating may keep out some of the problems." One would hope so, but I unfortunately doubt it. The number of parents who simply disregard such things and buy the games for their children anyway...
And besides that, in my experience though most of those people you were referring to can grow up enough that their voices no longer screech over Teamspeak, their personalities don't seem to mature at nearly the same rate.
Here's hoping, though. |
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| | KonanDUgly | Feb 13, 3:05pm | But I, the real Konan, walk amongst you now. When you feel that chill wind, or hear a distant wolf howl, I am there. For I, and my hardy band of friends, are the ones that remember the Riddle of Steel.
see...RP is where you make it. So sayeth the old fart gamer, so let it be done :) |
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