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ArtificeVenatus
Member UncommonPosts: 1,236
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
ArtificeVenatus
Member UncommonPosts: 1,236
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Do you want to include or exclude diceless online roleplaying? I have way more experience with that than with more traditional tabletopping or larping. (I liked GMing a tabletop campaign ok, but could never get into playing them; couldn't find a good fit with a GM, campaign setting, and major activity within that setting.) Diceless Online Roleplaying (DORP) has about 50% overlap with tabletopping in terms of what players are doing and why they enjoy it.
DORP eliminates several of the objectionable aspects of tabletopping:
- being in a room with others who might criticize your choices and desires
- gaps of several days between play sessions
- need to respond in realtime rather than thinking things over and responding at your own pace
- math and dice-rolling
- over-focus on combat and restriction to content rated R (NC-15) or lower
While keeping some of the appealing aspects of tabletopping:
+ interactive storytelling: players and GM(if any) surprise each other regularly, preventing boredom and allowing players to partially control the focus of the story
+ verbal/text-only format makes it easy and fast to customize content or create original content
What features from Tabletop RPGs would you want to see in an MMORPG, and how would you implement it?
1) Die Rolls = RNG.
(I enjoy being someone NOT me in games.)
2) Narrative between NPCs, Players, and Friends = Text Chat.
(The interactions within the game was what made them memorable. Not the fights.)
3) Nudges from the DM/GM for a direction, and then up to us to figure how to proceed = Multiple ways to accomplish goals, not just one or two.
(We were never "on rails." Instead, NPCs threw out "hints" about what may be going on.)
4) We moved into a cleared out dungeon = Housing.
(A place to call home is important to me in "feeling at home" in a game.)
5) A feature from a specific RPG (Champions), Disadvantages = Let me alter (lower) my character's stats and give them "quirks."
(This gives more variety, and would be shunned by min/maxers, hopefully keeping them out of the RPG game. Examples from Champions: Code against killing, vulnerabilities to specific attacks, dependent NPCs. Champions was based on a point buy system.)
What Tabletop RPG features did you like in Tabletop RPGs?
1) My visual imagination from great descriptions can not be reproduced with non-text based video games, unfortunately. (I mostly played with great DMs/GMs.)
[EDIT]
2) One thing I forgot to mention was that my group of RPG friends all liked very similar gameplay experiences. This is getting harder and harder in today's MMOs.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
I was so upset when I realized that the Rock Band games used to sell 3D-printed figurines of your band members but I started playing the game after they discontinued them. T_T I love it when games sell plushies of the monsters and joke t-shirts and posters. I keep seeing minecraft toys in the bookstores around town and it kind of makes me sad I don't play minecraft. I don't really understand why more MMO cash shops or subscription sales interfaces don't sell physical items.
I roleplay in forums too, though some people prefer private messaging or email so they can know random people aren't reading their roleplays. I'm a bit more brave about that than people who have true social anxiety or uptight jobs where they might actually get in trouble over what they roleplay. But it would just be incredibly awkward in a live gaming group to seriously make a pass at the hot elf NPC being played by the GM who you really don't want to make a pass at. Not to mention RPing a date between two characters while unrelated players are in the room snickering? Not worth it no matter how much fun I'd have roleplaying a romance.
As far as printed-up literary references, many DORPs do not require more than a paragraph, or at most a page, of set-up. The ones that have actual combat rules and economic options could be written up like a roleplaying handbook if one wanted though. I was idly contemplating the other day whether there would be any point in writing up the roleplay I'm currently GMing 2 single-player sessions of. "Adventures in the Airsea: Revenant Hatchling" is my (terrible) working title. I don't think anyone would actually want the resulting handbook though.
DORPs also do not require more than two people, which can be either one GM and one player or no GM and two players. So that kind of interferes with your "group of friends getting together" criteria. Even public group DORPs tend to have the players pair off, while the GM only handles the ones who haven't found a partner within the game yet. 3 players is about the max you can have taking turns interacting with each other before it gets annoying and bogged down, so players just naturally split into 2s and 3s.
The first thing that comes to my mind is character alignment that could be either complied with or violated against, and so the alignment would change accordingly.
Admittedly it would probably be difficult to implement and a proper implementation would for sure require a very inventive mind. I don't know what kind of a system it should be handled through: game masters rating player actions, a rating/voting system for players to rate each others' deeds, hardcoded alignment changes tied into in-game actions or something completely else? There's a myriad of other problems as well, which makes me want to see the feature implemented all the more.
The Weekly Wizardry blog
So, if *you* took the Dependent NPC (DNPC) disad, and *I* also took it, the benefit could be different for both of us. Maybe you spent the points in more Dexterity and I spent those points to make my laser beam more powerful, maybe adding 1 or 2 D6 to the damage
Champions was also different in leveling. Most players "bought off" their disadvantages as they leveled. Some kept them and improved their powers. Players were awarded points to spend as they leveled. The fun part was figuring out how or why these things happened into the character's story
This is why I do not think it would make a good MMORPG feature
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
I can think of 2 main things that would be really great to see more of in MMOs.
1) Character Alignment. SWTOR tried to do something like this, but it was very limited and affected little outside your character's complexion and personal story. I would like to see games involve more from the D&D alignment system (i.e. what the old Neverwinter Nights games had) Have the basis for these determined on character creation. Have them help to influence / determine your dialogue choices, perhaps even what quests you can accept in certain cases. If you're chaotic, for example, you probably won't be accepting a quest to help a bunch of church kids. Unless there was a spin off that same quest to do so as a pretext to stealing something from them / etc.
2) Player-generated quest lines. Neverwinter has a good basis for this, but again it feels very limited in a lot of ways. It also feels fairly detached from the rest of the game world, which is somewhat of an issue. If such a system was designed so that the rewards were not determined by the creators, but more-so by the mobs fought along the way (perhaps even having a component where the 'final' reward at the end could be a custom crafted piece which used some of the rarer components of the mobs fought along the way), would also help to alleviate the issues with people exploiting such a system to grind for easy exp / loot / etc. etc. etc.
Also if it was more tied to the game world it would be much harder for players to make quests that were essentially just killboxes, because such a state would have to already be present within the environment somewhere. I believe such a system is very doable as an MMO. It wouldn't be able to be as expansive as it would be via a tabletop, but it could still be an awesome feature in its own right.
It's a bit like the question "What design elements from cars should apply to subway trains?" really.
Each product is similar in several ways, but overall the design elements are distinctly separate. And once you start imagining bringing these square-shaped features from the original product and trying to socket them into the round-shaped holes of the other product, you realize that they're separate largely for well-designed reasons.
Each product has different needs and design constraints, and the quickest way to fail is to assume all those needs and constraints are identical across the two products and everything is translateable.
In the end, MMORPGs are possibly never going to support the ad hoc storytelling and social environment of tabletop RPGs, nor are most of the character creation options -- and most things specifically to do with dice -- good ideas in an MMORPG. Instead, the right path is to build off existing MMORPG learnings and explore the extremes in those same directions (like how WOW eventually eliminated random missing entirely; except...well...I feel that's actually a learning that can be carried back over to tabletop gaming and applied there too.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I would have to disagree, I don't think it is that simple, and if it was, alignment would already have been implemented before.
The problem comes from player interaction. What if a player kills another player? What if that player attacked you first? What if that player had killed your friend a long time ago and you simply took revenge?
How about things such as greed, often regarded as an Evil trait. Would playing the economy for profit be deemed evil? How would you tell if the player made a profit or not, and if it was on purpose or not when they bought an item and sold it for higher, possibly much later and under different circumstances?
Also, what sort of acts would count as good acts? It is easy to think of things that would move your alignment towards evil: killing, being greedy, graverobbing, etc. But what would you need to do to another player to make your alignment move towards Good? Giving a poor character some money? Would that, amongst other things, be easily exploitable?
Its easy enough to implement an alignment system into quests, like in SWTOR's Dark-Light system. But that's not what I am talking about, and its more of a single player feature when it only concerns quests and NPC-to-player interactions. I'm mainly thinking about player-to-player interactions.
The Weekly Wizardry blog
I don't think the way forward relies on lifting analog mechanisms from 45 year old games and translating these into digital versions. I think it a far better to re-think these things as digital systems in the first place. Conventions like hit points were a great way to model a human's resistance to damage. The math was simple enough to do. But computers can do much more complex computations far faster than a human. I can't believe that hit points are the best way to simulate a body in a computerized game, however.
If a battle axe does 3d10 damage, and I have 72 hit points, how many times can I get hit in the face with the axe before I die. If you ask a medical doctor that, and they give you any answer greater than 1, find a new doctor.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
Yes I've done professional design work on RPGs in the past.
Tabletop RPGs are not the backbone of MMORPGs. They're the evolutionary descendent. A handful of the traits inherited from the old species are relevant. But environment and food sources of the new species are completely different, so many of the older traits aren't relevant, and some are outright detrimental. A non-digital tabletop game and a digital MMO are completely different beasts.
Saying that things must be "conceptually laid out" is useless. Yes, products must be designed. Designers do that. Some design elements can be shared, and certain broad concepts (like efficiency) even apply universally. But when you're tasked with designing a peg for the square hole, it's a design failure to say "Well...round pegs worked for that other problem. Let's do those again!"
Dice aren't automatically incompatible with MMORPGs, but you have to understand the purpose of dice in tabletop gaming is produce more dynamic results so that the decisions are more interesting and varied, as well as bringing a gambling element (while gamers enjoy pretending that BF Skinner's "skinner box" only applies to games they hate, the reality is it applies to every game they ever landed a critical strike in, in addition to easier to demonize games like slot machines. So usually those bludgeoning game A with "skinner box" insults go right back to playing their game B which does the exact same thing in a slightly different way.) A digital game isn't forced to just use dice and cards to achieve that randomness; the player isn't directly the one performing the underlying mechanics, so the game rules don't have to be simplified to a couple die-rolls and can actually be such complicated rules that no random elements at all are required (when enough dynamic factors impact each other, the game effectively feels random to players...even if we ignored the fact that arguably even when it's a "random die roll" in a computer game it's not actually random.)
A car's bucket seat is translatable to a subway car. But we're not discussing whether things can be translated. We're discussing whether they should be. The core of what I'm saying is that nostalgia alone is not a good reason to bring these elements over. Unless they serve specific purpose(s) relevant to the platform, it's not going to be a good idea. And of course there's a niche for a game that just goes ridiculously hard at the nostalgia appeal, having dice fly all over the screen, covered in blood, with wild dramatic effect, but in that case the purpose being served is pure nostalgia and not actually that dice are a particularly good way to handle combat in a videogame.
Tabletop RPGs are in no way the "engine" of any videogame RPGs. They're a specific type of RPG optimized around the specific way they're played. Just as videogame RPGs are optimized around their platform.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Theoretically most RPGs still use random number rolls (dice rolls). Even most FPS now use random number rolls to determine the range of damage along with incorporating other RPG elements into those games. MMORPGs still use mostly random number rolls to determine things. They just trick you into thinking you are actually able to dodge an attack manually in most cases. In reality all you are doing is pushing a certain button at a certain time. Something that has been done since MMORPGs were created. MMORPGs have always been held back by band with in terms of combat, but I still enjoy turn based combat sometimes. It's far more strategic. Games like Divinity Original Sin and Shadowrun have done pretty well even in this market where most people want action, action, action.
1. Multiple solutions to a problem. In PnP you don't actually have to kill everything to complete your mission (that is plan
. You can solve problems with smarts, stealth, intimidation or in whatever you feel for as long as the resaults are right. MMOs tend to tell you exactly what to do and how which can get pretty predictable.
2. The right level of challenge. Usually (unless your GM is retarded) your fights are just diificult enough for you too handle them. Of course MMOs have harder to give you the right challenge but I think if they tried things would be a lot better.
3. Little or no vendortrash junk. Never played a P&P campaign where the GM bothered you with trash like old belts and shoes. Of course a really weird player could loot it there but it's honestly not worth the job.
4. Less focus on gear, more focus on actually improving your character.
5. The mobs actually tries to outsmart you in battle and target the weakest link. Positioning is A and O.
6. Sometimes the story is a reward in itself. Sadly very rare in MMOs.
7. A small permanent team of adventurer (not a guild but people that usually adventure together) get in game reputation. Bad guys fear you, villagers might give you a beer at the local tavern.
8. Far more character customization. Just look on games like Pathfinder, it still have the basic MMO mechanics but there you can make yourself an almost unique character.
I used to play AD&D in grad school. My take is .. leave tabletop RPG and video games separately. They are not appealing to the same thing, and the medium has very different advantages and disadvantages.
Video game is great to be entertained by professional created content .... tabletop RPG is about your friends.
One element I have been thinking about is the minds eye element. Table top games have very simple graphics. You know most of your world consists of bits of flavor text, some mechanical stats and maybe a impressionist map and some counters. It ends up making the system so very very flexible. Want to change how your character looks, or acts well that is just some extra flavor flourishes. Want to make a new monster, all you need is some new stats and a few lines of description and dialog.
Like what if you took an mmo and really striped down a lot of the graphics to a more impressionist style. Make it mostly text and vague images to act as counters.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Rent-a-DM packages.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Tabletop RPG features as translated to MMORPGs:
-everything is instanced
-instant travel between encounters
-very little grind
-consensual PvP only