Question: How to tell a story to a group

craynlon

 lately i have seen many posts about about how everything was better in the old days when a mmo was a group effored and you used to spend hours upon hours involved in teamplay.



a short history of myselve since i think it reflects the market trend from teamplay mmo to single player online game with multiplyer option (spogmo)

for roughly 4 years i played lineage2. quests beyond "slay 100 of this" were almost none existant there and the game had a big fokus on grouping forcing you to xp with at least 3-4 other people if you wanted to progress at all. after that came some shortlived tryouts of ddo and wow and then i eventually ended up in aoc.

despite the negativity that it gets aoc is a very atmospheric, story driven game for me but (along with war wich i play atm) it is a game that seems to put single player, story driven gameplay over grouping.

the question now is how to make the pendulum swing back to build a system that involves deep atmospheric gaming and story yet beeing fokused on group play.

obviously its far harder to ensure a group of people is following your story then to make your story work for an individual. in ddo i sometimes got frowned by my party to stop and listen to a dialog or story detail because they wanted fast xp. i also remember playing never winter night modules where people goofed around and didnt even remember the quest goals.

for me a mmo is about story and immersion, the xp race is more or less secondary to me.

so far i came up with a few gaming mechanics that could support storytelling for groups and im very interested to hear from the community what other ideas are out there and if they could name mmo experiences where it worked for them.

- do cutscenes:

cutscenes allow for the game to take some timeoff and bring the fokus back to the story. 

- all quest dialog should be voice over:

since only few people have the patience to read text these days most information should be presented narratively with talking quest-givers

- build up tention:

what goes for movies, comics and books should be good for mmos as well. split the whole story into smaller parts that are easily followed yet build up on each other

- find comon motives:

if the story only involves one of the group members personally or the story in general is only about gold players will less likely pay attention then if the story involves them personally. if for example the mounts of all players in the group suffer from a strange illness that will kill them the players will feel more personall involved then if its only a chest of gold waiting for them at the end of the adventure.



- build in traps, information must matter:

if somewhere along the way a wise man tells the players to cross the bridge silently there should be a good chance to wipe out the whole party if someone just wasnt paying attention running over the bridge like a madman

i hope by collecting some ideas the 2 most important parts for me, immersion into a story driven world and experiencing that world with others can merge together again.