My idea of a true MMORPG

Games
21

I was on one of the RP servers in DAoC. While most players were just playing and had created characters there to avoid the worst of the dudes, there was quite a lot of roleplaying going on.

Most people went with the flow whenever a RPer turned up in a raid or a group but didn’t otherwise RP. After a couple of years however I think most of the RPers gave up and it may as well have been just another server. But for those two years it had an interesting atmosphere, like when say you had a Shadowclan member in an otherwise hardcore group out hunting the bad guys.

So I think that you can get some roleplaying in a MMOG but it will always be a very small part of the population.

22

While I agree with you to an extent, I find that most people who even like roleplaying end up playing to a certain favored type regardless, and said favored type almost always matches their personality. Note that by “type” I don’t mean fighter, mage, thief. I mean attitude, goals, behavior, etc.

23

Like i’ve said before the perfect MMO game would be a strange combination of Dominions, Populus, Oblivion/Gothic, Real Time Strategy games and Role Playing Games.

You choose a faction (for ex., Byzantines, or Scythians, or Nords or whatever) and get placed into a socio-economic bracket by chance. So, even within your faction there will be friction. You might start you’re life in a “school” that runs through basic 101 things for the game, and lets you meet new players in the bargain.

The whole game plays out like a giant RTS/Populous game, only you get to control a single unit in the map. Empires’ expand, shrink, or grow. Towns get built or destroyed. Farms are pillaged, villagers starve, the Empire sends in aid which gets bushwacked by bandits, ect. Everything that happens in the game is emergent. The players can only influence these events in small measure by the additive combination of all their efforts. Occasionally a player will rise in ranks and become a Legionaire Captain or Head Merchant or whatnot and have more influence over players and NPCs and start to make real changes in the game world.

All the resources in the game are fixed. There might be huge numbers of game/trees/mines, but the total is still fixed. So Empires/players must compete in an abstract RTS ish way) over resources as the ones nearby become depleted.

Oh and btw death is permenant, as is all damage. BUT! all or most skills are on a Bell Curve, so it’s easier to train new characters to similar skill levels.

At first this would FAR easier to create in a Single Player experience. Sort of a Daggerfall times 100. The problem with adding players would be creating laws and policable environments to keep players from purposefully breaking the system. I.E., in a world with fixed resources, players burn all the trees down, or kill all the bears, ect, by catassing for months just to break the system.

24

I think mattbunch and others here are applying a needlessly restrictive (and, in my opinion, inaccurate) definition of the term “roleplaying.” The how’s and why’s would of course divert this thread into an argument about dramatic theory and criticism, and well, none of us really wants that, do we?

The City of Heroes character-creation process is widely hailed as the most satisfying of any of the mmo’s on the market. I’d say this is primarily due to the great degree of freedom of choice players have as they determine what their character looks like, etc. I’m unsure what effect this freedom of choice had on how much actual “roleplay” occured in the game, but I do know that to go the entirely opposite direction doesn’t strike me as a sound design choice for a game so focused on players valuing their characters.

25

But if things really worked the way you describe (sounds fantastic, by the way), it wouldn’t take very many players banding together to put a stop to such behavior either by murdering the offending catasser mob justice-style or through actual incarceration.

Such a world where, through sheer endurance/lack of a real life + skill an individual player would have an advantage over those who spend less time ingame or are less coordinated, but not so great an advantage they wouldn’t be overwhelmed by the will of the majority would be a really neat social experiment.

26

I hold that people playing MMOs do role play, all the time. They do so, however, exactly to the degree that the mechanics of the game support it–just as in any pen-and-paper RPG. The difference is that a tabletop RPG has a human gamemaster with the ability to create new rules on the fly and a computer game doesn’t.

For example, let’s say that I’m playing a lizardman in a generic fantasy game. I’m adventuring in the frozen southern wastes, and remark to my companions that it’s too damned cold for a cold-blooded creature like myself. If I said that because I’m getting pissed off by the penalty to my fatigue rolls from being a lizardman in a cold environment, that’s game mechanics-supported roleplay. If I said that because I wanted to get into character, that’s just acting–and at that point, I may as well throw out the game mechanics entirely and start making up the story without them.

The problem that people encounter in MMOs is that the game mechanics can’t support a very rich level of roleplaying. They can’t support a backstory for your character, since everyone starts in the same way–making up a story about how orcs killed everyone in your village doesn’t change your character in any way. They can’t support political views–no matter how passionately you declare that your orc is trying to convince Thrall to split up with the Forsaken, the game world won’t take any notice. They can’t support anything beyond the simple mechanics of combat and loot, and so the those are only areas that people roleplay.

And people do roleplay combat and loot. Listen to a couple of WoW warriors talking shop, and they’ll sound just like they should, all obsessed over the theory and practice of their trade of chopping things up. They’re playing the role the game gave them.

The difference with a tabletop game is that the GM can create rules as they’re needed. If a player wants to be from a village destroyed by orcs, the GM can place that village in the world and have NPCs refer to it. If the players want to affect political change, the GM can give them the opportunity to influence the significant figures of the game world–or replace them. The sky is the limit.

Some MMOs do have the mechanics to support more interesting roleplay. Consider EVE Online, where mercantilism, piracy, war, and treachery are the order of business–all solidly supported by the underlying game. Or Achaea, where GM-run gods regularly interact with players and influence the course of the world. The key point of the games that successfully encourage deep roleplaying is that they include the tools to make roleplay meaningful, and not mere acting.

27

Not true. People play the games they are given, and play to the rules they have.

The idea that it’s “stupid players are not playing right” is part of the problem, not the solution.

You want people to “roleplay” more? Then you need to reward them in-game for doing it.

28

Exactly.

29

Absolutely agreed. There’s many cases even in WoW, which has a pretty consistent fiction if you choose to read it, where they got lazy and half-assed it.

Why am I rescuing a NightElf pallie from Jaedanar?

Why am I rescuing some other NElf from the fortress south of Ratchet?

Seriously, those NElfs would be KOS if they were PCs.

I have no idea what you could do to increase RP in game however - that is, without the ability to actually live in the game.

30

How about something as simple as “Player Rewards”?

Points you can (only) spend on other players for Roleplaying well, that can be redeemed for rewards if you collect enough of them from other people.

They regenerate slowly, and can’t be spent on members of your guild, or the same person within X days.

31

Give players the chance to control their own destiny and make their own story. EVE does it with the whole idea of corporations controlling space, it’s an elegant and in-theme (corporate future sci-fi) way of doing it. EVE is rich with in-theme toys for the players, eg:

  • The leader of a corp is a CEO
  • All corps have shares which can be issued, and you can pay dividends
  • There is a corp wallet, purchases, hangers, delivery hangers.
  • Corps own structures and access structures
  • There are roles like ‘accountant’ ‘communications manager’ etc which give the players in the corp certain accesses and rights.

These mechanisms don’t lead directly to “hark! Well met stranger!” type role play, buy they take us one step further away from -roll- play.

You can’t help but read about massive theft, corporate espionage, market manipulation and the rise and fall of great alliances and not imagine the sort of sci-fi future that EVE is all about…

In an MMO I think EVE is about as close to table-top roleplaying as you’ll get. So how to encourage it in a fantasy setting?

  • Give players tools to shape their destiny
  • Give them different structures and organisations to join and create
  • Give them a chance to ally with a faction, team, or player group
  • Let the players compete in a variety of in-theme ways
  • Let the competition result in real benefits for one side, and losses for the other.

Most MMO designers would not allow the last point in particular, which for me means the rest are pointless. The best example of that thinking is Planetside, where no one side can win. What they really wanted was that no one side could ever -lose-. But players don’t imagine they will lose, they just see themselves from being blocked from ever completely winning, making the conflict pointless.

This for me is why I just could never be bothered with sticking around in WOW for the PVP. There’s no real point to it, and the grind to get to it compared to, say, bunging a BF2 disk in the drive, seemed a waste.

In EVE, the largest alliance in the game just got completely wiped out. It’s eastimed that 1.5 TRILLION credits were spent in the war (sold on the market, that’s about $200,000us I think?.. Anyway, it’s lots), and the losing alliance has been shattered. Common design as seen in most MMO would prevent such massive crushing of players…

…but many of us love the fact that this can happen in a game. And we love it, as much as we hate being crushed.

Anyway, I’m rambling. You get the idea.

32

ORLY? You think there should be rules, it should be legislated and then people will do it? I played on all three of the DAoC roleplaying servers, for over four years, servers which had rules about roleplaying: NO speaking out of character in public channels… NO anachronistic character names… No guild names that aren’t appropriate for a roleplaying environment…, and guess what? We (and by we I’m referring to the actual roleplayers who went to those servers explicitly to roleplay) were okay for a year or so; we had a lot of people who weren’t roleplayers, but who were there because they thought the servers would have a more mature, more respectful community, and they were mostly okay.

And then something happened - either word got around at how much fun the RvR endgame was, or a whole generation of teens suddenly found themselves with access to a credit card - and it turned into a wet doughnut. People didn’t give a fuck about the rules, people didn’t give a fuck about the spirit of the servers, they just wanted to run diamond groups in DF over and over again, or camp those bloody lawn gnomes and get powerlevelled to 50 so they could go RvR.

DAoC had three servers that were set up specifically for roleplayers; they had CSRs who would change names that were not suitable for an RP server, they had a Roleplaying Team Lead, they had the rules. And ultimately none of it mattered: the d00ds moved in and the community went to seed. It’s not the games, it’s the players.

33

GAMEPLAY rules.

It should be a part of the GAME.

Jeez Louise.

34

The market that MMOGs are chasing (average humans) is short on folks with imagination and long on folks who want to hack and slash while chatting with their friends. It isn’t easy to keep non-roleplayers out anyway. So, most games consist of hack’n’slash while chatting, with other minigames tacked on (crafting, auction house, whatevever).

I think at this point, WYSIWYG.

35

Won’t work. You’re just adding a new currency to the world, and it won’t get used for the purpose you intended. (“/yell Selling Axe of Leetness for 300g and 10rp points!”)

You can’t put generic “roleplaying” into a game that doesn’t use a human GM, because it covers too much space. What you can do is implement the capability to roleplay in specific areas.

EVE remains the perfect example, for all the reasons brought up so far. When players can form alliances, take and hold territory, and betray each other, they do. And that’s roleplaying of the finest kind, right there.

36

I agree that it would (as most systems do) end up being stripped down to it’s most mechanical form.

I don’t agree that you couldn’t drive a secondary system with it as long as you don’t cross the streams.

Problem is, to drive story based combat you need to define the dramatic outcomes before the conflict, and to parse it you still need human “referees”.

One day we’ll have real-time prose generation and parsing. Then everything will become a literal storybook wonderland. Until then I’m afraid it’s hitpoints for everyone.

37

I lots of ideas about how the present system of MMORPGs could be improved (since right now I think they’re all bloody terrible) but I think the relevant one in terms of improving the roleplaying situation would be to take out the free-communication ability - ie, to cripple the chat client. Instead, each character would be equipped with a menu system of standard things they could say or responses that they could make - and this menu would expand and improve with appropriate use. In other words, sociability would be like an improvable skill in Morrowind or Dungeon Crawl - the more you use it, the better it gets. Except instead of the improvement being represented by an increasing number, you’d just organically find you had more things you could say or more eloquent ways of saying them.

I suppose you could include an OOC backchannel for friends to talk over if they wanted to, but I think the experience would work better without it.

38

:)

No need to get sniffy and bring the CAPS LOCK out. I’m telling your Mum, Andrew Mayer!

39

The thing is metta, the CSRs didn’t do anywhere near enough to keep the doods out. Yes you could get their name changed and eventually it would get done. However they did nothing about enforcing chat channel discipline which was very good for a couple of years until the doods rolled in en masse. Eventually we all gave up on the rp thing as it was pointless to continue. (I was one of the just there for a more mature atmosphere btw)

The only way I can see a rp server working is coupled with an additional fee to pay for extra csr’s to enforce the rules. I would pay such a fee but I doubt most people would.

40

I agree, mate; my point was that we had all kinds of rules and it didn’t make a lick of difference. I didn’t realise Mr Andrew Shouty Caps was referring to in-game rules (maybe if he’d written ‘rewards’ my palsied brain would have cottoned on), but as you point out: everything was fine until the d00ds showed up at the gates with their noxious body odour and low manners :o