It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Not sure why but it hit me today that I have very different expectations from a MMORPG than I do a paper and pencil type of RPG. When I play the later, I am a heavy role player and usually design a character, not to be uber but around a roleplaying concept that I have in mind. When I play MMORPGs, I am usually more concerned with things like how viable my character is... is he too weak, does he have too many weaknesses, is he desireable in a group or strickly solo, etc. The online games seem to be strictly number driven.
I'm not sure when it happened... when I started in MMORPGs waaaaay back in 1985, all you really could do was roleplay. Most characters were pretty much the same so the only way to make yours stand out was to role play. Both versions have much the same in common, certainly. In a group situation, you need a main tank, several damage dealers and one or two healer types to keep you all alive. Even in City of Heroes, a MMORPG about superheroes, this is true. Now a days, the newer MMORPGs will have at least 20 classes and sometimes as many races for you to choose from. You would think this would lend itself to MORE roleplaying but the effect seems to be the exact opposite.
Anymore, choosing a race is strictly a fashion statement. Choosing a class means choosing your play style. In the paper and pencil version of the RPG, this lent itself to role playing. Choosing class and/or race should enhance the role playing aspect of a game but once the computer gets involved, it gets reduced to a set of numbers. Don't get me wrong, I am not blaming the computer. After all, a computer is a mere machine and will simply do as it has been programmed to do.
The only thing I could come up with after much soul searching was that I was changing my style of play because a computer was involved. Because of the number crunching that seems to go along with computers, I stop role playing and just play the game. In a paper and pencil type of game where I can the and interact with people on a much more personal basis (things like facial expressions, bad puns, pizza and coke being shared, etc... does seem to make a diffence) I tend to strictly role play a character, to look past the numbers if you will.
I am curious... do the rest of you find yourself in the same situation? When online, do you tend to be a number cruncher while IRL you tend to be a role player? Does a computer take the Role Playing out of the game for you as it does me?
Comments
I'm a light roleplayer. (Translation to me means I stay in-game and don't talk about my comp, last nights ball game, etc. in open chat. I don't use d00d chat, etc.) I was a light roleplayer when playing AD&D or other pen and paper games. I wasn't in theater, and some people take it way over the top.
In games, I started expecting games to be light rp'ing. I started playing EQ, and grouped with like minded folks. Same when I moved to DAOC. Sure there were those that didn't RP, but it wasn't too hard to find. I do agree that it has gotten harder to find - but I don't think it's the game that is changing RP, but the players. I don't really run into a lot of people who RP at all. Even when games put in more tools to RP (like you mentioned) people don't use them.
I think it is because early MMORPG were full of nerds and geeks and computer freaks. They all knew how to play pen & paper games and use imagination. Games now include the full spectrum of society, and society doesn't really know how to RP. (That's why nerds and geeks and computer freaks aren't all that popular in school.)
In addition, there are more MMOPGs out on the market, so the RPers are spread out over more games, making it harder to find them. Some probably just give up, and get assimilated by the non-RPing masses.
Every one of these games has roleplaying...and tons of it.
What you define as roleplaying is purely yours. I define it differently...so does everyone else.
You will never, no matter how hard you try, find an entire server of thousands of players who think exactly the same way you do about roleplaying. It's foolish to try.
So your best bet to enjoy the roleplaying you enjoy best in these games is to try hard to find like-minded people and bond with them. Form a clan/guild/tribe and stick with it.
It's like life...it's what you make of it.
Role Playing: to play a role, acting. This is mainly a difference between PnP and CRPGs in general. CRPGs started as text based adventure games that were really unfriendly and frustrating to play. As CRPGs progressed, the focus of the game became more narrow. By the time graphics became mandatory, CRPGs had become scavanger hunts with some mild strategy and puzzle solving thrown in.
Fast forward to 1992. Doom was bringing multiplayer to the PC scene in a big way and a bunch of computer geeks figured out a way to play it over the internet by tunneling through their UNIX shell accounts. This phenomenon was not lost on game developers who began scrutinizing the online game market. Not surprisingly, those of us who didn't have uber fast 56K modems (hey at that time it was fast) or couldn't make heads or tails of UNIX, were playing MUD. And that led to......
UO was released in 1996 as one of those ideas that sounded great on paper and totally blew chunks in practice. This MMORPG was unleashed on a gaming culture that had grown accustomed to Quake and Diablo. The public didn't understand co-op play at this point and seemed to have absolutely no concept of "Role Playing". Player killing ran rampant and many countless skull caps and bows were made in the pursuit of better gear. And the economy of the game was shot to hell faster than you could say "Reaganomics".
Finally, EQ was born and it did the one logical thing that UO hadn't, it expanded the single player CRPG experience. We've been at this point ever since. Playing single player games, stretched out to accomidate thousands of players at once, for no real reason. MMORPGs have continued the evolution to the point where we just look for cool stuff using totally boring and watered down combat systems. We seem to have discarded puzzle solving completely.
And that leaves us with a question. With the ability to role play in spite of the game, why don't more people do it? My Opinion is that emoting is much more limited in a graphical medium than it is at a PnP table or on a text based MUD. In words, you make your character come alive with all kinds of subtle behaviors and habits. With graphical interfaces, you're pretty much stuck with the animations they give you. Even if they let you customize your characters animations, it's a hell of a lot easier to just say what they're doing than to animate a 3D model.
Just my two cents. ALL 2 of them!
As far as how much RPing I see in MMO's today I see only a little of what I would call Roleplaying. I think one of the problems may actually be NPC interaction. Sure you log online to group up with your friends, guildies, whatever, but you also have to interact with NPCs. In PnP you have a GM or DM controlling NPCs and they do react to what you do. They talk back to you. When the NPC is really responding to the things you do and say, I think it makes you feel like you are effecting the game world around you. Your action has a real consequence in the world you are playing in. When you log onto a MMO the NPCs have a preset response to magic words if you say them, and thats it. You cant negotiate with a gnoll in EQ. You cant talk a helion out of fighting in CoH. You cant outwit a troll in UO so that you dont have to deal with him. It may seem funny to say it, but maybe the NPC interaction is the damper on Roleplaying.
Thats just my opinion, but that is one of the reasons I was looking forward to Wish. Not the graphix, but the real roleplaying. Your actions did effect the world around you. With the live content sometimes the NPCs really did talk back to you, not just a prerecorded message. Wish also took a lot of time and effort to minimize the level grind.
The level grind is another RP killer. Its just like the poster who started this topic was saying. It becomes a game of numbers. You work so hard on min/maxing you toon, chasing down the good items, trying to keep up with the jones's that RPing seems to fall by the wayside. I played EQ for 5 years and when I left my main was level 54. Why? because I spent a lot of time RPing. Sometimes I was equipment hunting, sometimes I just logged on to talk with friends and hang out with them. If I felt like meeting new people I usually introduced myself in a RP fashion, not just a HEY YOU, WANT TO GROUP WITH ME. Because of that, I was always behind, even my friends. With zone level limits it sucks when your friends who you have been hanging out with for months get so far ahead of you that you cant group with them anymore.
The roleplaying in MMORPGs varies a lot. Someone said NPCs have a lot to do with the real RP feeling and I think this is one of the important factors. The most important in my opinion is the community and the GMs.
I remember that from the golden times of UO. I played on private roleplaying server with strict rules that kept 1337 n00bs away and this was the best time in MMORPGs I have ever had. It was a server with about 200 people, and a whole team of GMs and storytellers that kept the world alive in a form i can't find today Epic quests, battles and sieges that i have still in memory. Secret councils and political issues between the nations.. well i am goin to shoot myself, i want those times back!
You are correct. Your gaming style is un-interesting in the eye's of most. You are in the minority.
You are (usually) the virulent enemey of the PvP player, the hard-core gamer, and the leet dood which i would have to say are bad groups of people to make enemeys with, as we are in control of the MMO market at the moment.
Submit to our game, or have a civil tounge when talking to (and especially about) us. Becuase your community will shrivel as you shrivel in due time, and you will be hated in much the same way that you hate us.
Reply with the silver tounge lies you folk bathe in, it does not matter. One can get the message in my post as easily as one can read into yours, though your ego's may not allow you that insight.
There is only one definition of a roleplaying game:
The ability to effectively play the role of your character and make decisions that have a meaningful effect on the world in which you play.
This means any game that contains quests that you can just sit there and do over and over and over, or monsters that spawn in the exact same spot, or NPCs that don't have any dynamic chat are not it. If the players can't actually have any effect on the world, i.e. shape its politics, take over towns, build things, shape the world, etc the game is not condusive to roleplaying.
You can still have people playing in character in this game, but your options for roleplaying are pretty limited since you can't have any real effect on the world.
This doesn't mean that you HAVE to change the world to roleplay, this option just has to exist to make it an effective roleplaying game.
You may roleplay the simple hunter who goes out and gather's pelt and likes to drink beer with his friends. But if the game is static, you're not going to find much point in what you do since nothing ever changes around you, because it can't change.
Yes the R is gone from MMORPG. I have noticed though that several sites are starting to list the term 'MMOG' which is nice. I've always been a proponnet of 'If your game ISN'T a roleplaying game, don't call it that' When dungeon siege and Diablo finally drop the 'action-rpg bull' and just call themselves an action adventure game we'll have something.
To date all MMOG's are life support systems for a fight. Every class is designed to support those who want combat, and there is no other purpose for their existence.
The back story is used as an excuse to initiate that fight.
Wish was a great step away from that. Too bad its gone. The dev's are maintaining a solid position that their decision to cancel was based on potential subscribers, I'd honestly like to see their numbers.
Most MMOG's do not give you anything to do beyond fighting, so there is no real incentive or enjoyment for the light or non roleplayers to do anything besides grind.
Would there be plenty of story activities, or just things a person could do beyond grinding crafting or combat most games woudl be very different.
Jeonsa - Korean video games for Foreigners
He doesn't NEED an example to back up anything. There is nothing to back up.
Play the game you want to play and then seek out roleplayers within it and befriend them or guild up with them. Period.
In today's online gaming world that is the best you can do.
Nahallac Silverwinds
Alter Destiny
Tunare - EQ
Nahallac Silverwinds
Alter Destiny
Tunare - EQ
uhm.. just becuase thats 'all you can do' doesn't mean any MMOG currently has roleplaying in it. There is a difference between playing a role and a game being a roleplaying game. Heck I can play a role in space invaders..thats' not the point.
-----
Roleplaying Game: A game in which you can effectively play the role of your character and make decisisions that have a meaningful and lasting effect on the world in which you play.
Jeonsa - Korean video games for Foreigners
Saying NPCs have an effect on RPing was interesting. I hadn't thought of it that way. And the more I think about it, the more it does seem like a massive single player adventure game built to accomodate multiple users. Because nothing ever does change. Except EQ's faction, NPCs don't care about you. There's not multiple endings to quests (sure, maybe you get a choice between two items, but the quest doesn't change by your actions). Just a real static world, with toons running around inside.
I was excited about Horizons because players were supposed to change the world, but the game didn't deliver. Didn't test Wish, so I don't know. It sounds like it would have been an interesting game though.
Thats why a lot of the upcoming and some of the lately canceled project promise a dynamic world... this is what players crave for.. its only sad that so far none could truly deliver... .
Well, like Staxic, I hadn't seen that NPC aspect of it either. When I was first learning how to program in PL/I, my instructor said "Never conform to the computer, ALWAYS make the computer conform to you". Yet in the 20 years that I have been playing MMORPGs, I have always conformed to the computer. To a large degree we are forced to conform.... but did I give up too easily? Therin lies the greater question.
If I answer that question correctly, then I would have to say yes. When I started playing EQ1 (pre-kunark for all you EQ1 buffs out there), I wanted to play something I had never played before, so I created a Dark Elf Necromancer. As with any new game, the newness and sheer size & scope of the game kept me occupied for years. Somewhere around 50th level I started to get involved in "high end content". Things like my epic quest kept me busy for a long time. I had fun playing EQ1 but I wasn't roleplaying either.
Hindsight is truly 20/20 I guess. BTW, I would like to thank all of those who have posted so far. Your replies were very thoughtful and gave me quite a bit of insight. People like that are what these games so enjoyable. Again, thank you.