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Masks in the Woods
John Tynes, a tabletop RPG developer well-known for work on products for Pagan Publishing and Wizards of the Coast, has a piece in this week's Escapist about the power of the tabletop roleplaying experience. He compares it to the experience of roleplaying in a Massive game, and finds it lacking. From the article: "There is no golden age here. There's just another group of players who tried to tell some stories and couldn't bend the tools to their will. The tools even made things harder in some cases - as in the contentious area of IC vs. OOC chat. Endsong says the guild started with local chat being in character. But more and more members switched to using voice communication via TeamSpeak. If you thought roleplaying online via text messages was a challenge, try it with a headset." Please note - this article contains some disturbing descriptions. No sarcasm, reader beware.
I will start off by saying I'm one of those guys who actually wears a mask in the woods, and plays a game that involves mock combat / sparring using padded weapons. When I saw the title of this article, that is what I thought it was about. It's a shame that they don't even touch on it. (Disclamier - I had to skim TFA, I'm at a work computer and some of the graphics on the site are not... office friendly.)
/cry. Good RP is actually feeling a lump in your throat as you see a zombie (actually a player in makeup) shamble towards you, knowing it won't stop just because you ran out of it's spawn range. And truly memorable is when your S.O. scares the holy crap out of you by simply smiling on a dimly lit woodland path. The fact that you didn't know she was there, she's a Dark Elf in all black, on a moonless night, and all you can see is her teeth and fangs adds to the atmosphere. (I'd like to see a Night Elf try that online.)
;-)
I do agree that Role-Playing is much easier to do at the tabletop than online, or on a PC. I've been playing Tabletop RPGs since I was 10, over 20 years ago. In the past 5 years, that has given way to Live Role-Playing Games (Also know as Live-Action RPGs, or LARPs), where there is no tabletop, but everything is acted out in real-time. Some times it's in a hotel room, some times it's in a whole hotel, and sometimes (my favorite) it's on a campgrounds, where you have a large expanse of outdoors to play in.
Don't get me wrong, WoW is fun - but it's not RP in my mind. RP is watching your best friend (acting the part of) breaking down in tears in a dramatic scene, live - not using
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I'm not a hard-core roleplayer, but I did spend a whole lot of time when I was younger playing pen-and-paper rpgs. The obvious advantage table-top rpgs or LARP has is direct interaction with other players. Things can happen as quickly as the players can talk, you aren't limited by the horrid spelling of your companions, you don't have to wait for people to peck at the keyboard, you aren't left waiting for a response because someone ran off to throw some laundry in the dryer without letting the others know...
As much as I like a lot of the emotes in WoW, they get boring...you can't make your character sound or look like you want them to.
I don't know what game companies can do to address this...probably not much.
One thing they _can_ do is to allow players to have meaningful impact on the world. Personally, the peak of roleplaying in a MMORPG, for me, was Shadowbane. There, players could form guilds/clans and actually build cities. You would stake out a plot of land, build on it, have to maintain it...and when the enemies came a callin', defend it or lose everything. You had a stake in the world. You could form alliances with other guilds and form nations and war with other nations. It was a lot of fun.
It wasn't perfect, though. While all of the above could help a player who cared about roleplaying feel invested in the world and the guild, someone who wasn't interested could simply ignore it. With a large segment of a server population not roleplaying, the roleplaying experience is lessened for those who want to roleplay. There is no solution for this. You can't enforce roleplaying. People have different definitions of what roleplaying is, when its ok to ignore roleplaying, etc. I'm sure most people have encounted someone of the mindset "No, i'm not just a rabid playerkiller. I'm actually roleplaying a psychotic assassin who thinks everyone else is trying to kill him." Bah and feh.
The other problem with MMORPGs is the grinding. I just reached lvl 40 with my first WoW character. The first 20 levels or so I was just exploring and questing...really having a ball. Eventually started reading character build guides, using the talent calculators to figure out how I was going to develop, looking into the best equipment for my character, etc...essentially, I started grinding more than playing. Lvls 35-40 were nothing but grinding...I wanted my mount. Got the mount, rode around everywhere for a few hours...and then felt completely let down. Whats left before me? Grinding to 60, deciding if my current guild is up to the end-game instances, perfecting my build, tracking down the epic equipment, etc. Nothing but grinding. Lost is the exploration and any sense of novelty. Its down to math, now.
Table-top RPGs, in my experience, have none of this. I had as much fun as a low level character as I did as a high level character. The game was about the process, not about the endgame...cause there was no endgame. The focus was the story the gamemaster had created from his own demented imaginings. Unless we were using a commercial scenario (which was very rare) it was "our" story, our games, our ideas. Each "adventure" was important...it was part of your character's life.
I suppose the the Holy Grail would be for a MMORPG with the scope of WoW or Everquest or combined with customizable instances or dungeons (like the Neverwinter Nights build tools with GameMaster led adventures). Guilds or players could build instances for their members or friends. Hell, good designers could build exceptional instances and charge a fee to run a group through their creation...but I don't see that happening any time soon.
-p