Roleplaying

A couple of weeks back, I wrote an article about dealing with a major ongoing storyline in an MMO. For those of you who neither read the article nor can spare the time to click the link and read it now: It talked about the problems presented by having a storyline and offered a few different solutions for handling such inconsistencies. Of course, as I noted, very few of these problems apply to open-world sandbox games that have no sort of ongoing developer-run story for you to stumble around.

No, those games have issues entirely their own, starting with the very nature of player-run stories.

A completely player-driven story has the advantage of not having several issues that can crop up when dealing with an ongoing in-game story, but it also still has some serious problems. There are still issues that you're going to have to have answers for when you're in a game that lets you craft the world to match your whims, and unfortunately the methods for doing so aren't quite as straightforward as the methods for dealing with an in-game storyline.

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Guild leading is often as much about managing personalities as it is about managing the nuts and bolts of the game. In previous columns, we've looked at all sorts of issues that guild leaders have to solve, and at the root of almost all of them is some sort of personality clash. Show me a nice blend of personalities, and I'll show you a happy guild that will stick together for years.

What makes guild leading so difficult, though, is that unlike real-life leaders, guild leaders need to manage two identities for every member. There's the real-life identity of the player, and then there's the identity of the in-game character, and they aren't always the same. If you talk to a guild that's met at a guild gathering or convention, one of the things you'll always hear is how a particular member is so different from his in-game character. In game, for example, he might be a rough-around-the-edges general, but in real life he's a quiet teddy bear.

MMOs give us the opportunity to be someone completely different from who we are out of game, and even non-roleplayers will sometimes behave differently when they're playing. But Star Wars: The Old Republic has taken away some of our power to construct our own identities in game. In this edition of The Guild Counsel, Let's look at how that's happened and whether it will affect the way we game.

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A very clever Massively poster once remarked that BioWare is indeed famous for story -- the same story, over and over. OK, so he was exaggerating for effect, but even I sometimes feel as if I've seen this scene before once or twice in BioWare's storygames. That hasn't driven me to skip over cutscenes or dialogue, not yet, but judging by how many gamers are already sitting in the endgame of Star Wars: The Old Republic, I have to wonder whether that's exactly what everyone else is doing.

So 'fess up -- are you wearing out your spacebar key skipping through dialogue, or are you drinking in every last line?

Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!

My days of playing Magic: the Gathering are... well, they're not over, exactly, but I'm certainly not in my heyday any longer. Despite this, I've made no secret of the fact that I still avidly read Mark Rosewater's Making Magic column because the stuff he says in the column is applicable to game design in general. There are a lot of ideas that I've drawn out of there over the years, and one of the ones that's stuck with me is the Timmy-Johnny-Spike split that Rosewater's quite fond of explaining at length.

For those of you not interested in reading a decade's worth of columns just to understand what I'm talking about, the three names in questions are the so-called "psychographics" for Magic's audience, three psychological snapshots of why people play and enjoy the game. They're useful tools for understanding the reason certain cards resonate well with some players and not with others. And they're applicable to almost everything -- even roleplaying.

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I don't like to rant. Really! Usually, ranting is full of emotionally charged rhetoric, and oftentimes it's riddled with inaccurate statements. I especially don't like to rant about something that I like a lot. For instance, Star Wars: The Old Republic has, by far, exceeded my personal expectations for any MMO; however, some missteps in production have tainted its perfection. (No, I'm not going to talk about Ilum again.) Of course, we are all looking for our version of perfection in an MMO, right? Unfortunately, no MMO will live up to that expectation. In fact, if I did find my version of MMO perfection, I would probably be the only one playing it. But I do believe I have ideas that those in my community could latch on to. They are also relatively simple. Yes, yes, I know nothing is ever as simple as it seems, but indulge me for a few moments.

As many of you know, I enjoy roleplaying in my MMOs -- character creation, really. I'm not one of those roleplayers who hang out in a pub all day never experiencing any gameplay. Although there's nothing wrong with that, I find it a be a waste of $15 a month.

I have complied what I believe will make the experience of SWTOR more enjoyable for those who enjoy playing the game like I do, and I think that those of you who don't necessarily like to roleplay per se but do like to create unique characters in the MMO space will agree that these are a must. I did set some personal criteria when compiling the list. For instance, I didn't want to break BioWare's general vision for the game. I also wanted to use existing items in the game so that my expectations were realistic -- no guild capital ships or image design system. And all of these items have been mentioned in print someplace before, so I'm not the only one who believes these should be implemented.

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The night before I started writing this column, I finally managed to clear Chapter 1 in Star Wars: The Old Republic with one of my characters. I overcame great obstacles, beat back horrible odds, and defeated a great menace to the galaxy. I was hailed as a hero by the authorities in charge, and while it had been at great cost to myself, I was now more than worthy of respect, accolades, and the gratitude of a galaxy unaware of how close it had been to almost insurmountable danger.

But then I finished the quest.

This problem is not unique to Star Wars: The Old Republic at all, though. By the end of my career in World of Warcraft, I had slain several unique individuals dozens of times on multiple characters, including several kills that were noted by NPCs as being once-in-a-lifetime achievements. Final Fantasy XI made me a pivotal figure in historic events that I could then jump right back into any time I had a friend doing the same quest. And let's not even get into the chronological strangeness that can erupt in Lord of the Rings Online. What's to be done when there's an ongoing story that your character is part of and not a part of?

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So you're an armchair game designer, eh? Well, EverQuest II invites you to put your money where your mouth is -- at least as it relates to dungeon creation.

While Sony Online Entertainment's venerable fantasy title is no stranger to player-generated content given its spectacular player- and guild-housing mechanics, this winter's Age of Discovery expansion upped the ante a little bit in the form of the new dungeon maker toolset. The system is a bit rough around the edges, but it's nonetheless a fantastic first iteration that adds a lot of fun and replay value to an MMO that was already chock-full of both.

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As you probably know by now, Star Trek Online is converting to the free-to-play format this coming Tuesday, January 17th. If you've held off subscribing to STO for the past two years, you might be wondering what you can expect should you decide to give STO a try.

If you've never played an MMORPG and are thinking that this might be a perfect time to try one, I think you might be right. STO is not like most other MMOs. That can be a good thing but also a detriment.

This column is here to help you, Trekkie or not, gamer or not. And I'm going to try to help you decide whether STO is the F2P game for you.

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Over the past 80-odd columns, I've covered ways to improve dramatic tension, to provide interesting character interplay, to improve out-of-character communication, and to enhance the experience of roleplaying. What I have not covered, somewhat to my surprise, is an important but often forgotten component of good roleplaying: humor.

I realize that there are circles in which humor is anathema, where the mood moves between "somber" and "depressing" with nary a chuckle between, lightless pits into which no good cheer is allowed. Far be it from me to say that you're doing it wrong if you happen to be one of those people, but there's a reason why people don't want to join you in a roleplaying session. You guys are kind of depressing just to be around, and your roleplaying has all the verisimilitude of a goth kid's poetry while his parents are getting divorced.

But let's not kid ourselves. Doing humor effectively anywhere is hard, and in roleplaying it's made even more difficult due to a variety of circumstances. So let's start out by examining some common pitfalls and laying some ideas down for what you can do to make your humor go over better in a game.

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Recently, I've run into some troubling developments while roleplaying in Champions Online. I've encountered quite a few "troll characters" who seem designed soley to irritate and annoy other people. The characters in question are often played by otherwise-good roleplayers, which makes me wonder: Why would someone do this?

This is as much a topic for Storyboard as it is for Behind the Mask, but because it is very common among Champions Online roleplayers, I feel it deserves extra consideration. This article isn't going to finger-point at bad roleplayers and say why they're wrong. Rather, the point of this column is to inform good roleplayers about elements of RP that can quickly ruin people's fun.

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Oh, that feeling when a game is new and everything is an adventure! Say what you will, but I cherish those moments of still being a newb and getting to experience things for the first time while exploring a new world (mind you, that is newb as in "new person," not n00b meaning "hopelessly moronic"). The problem is, once you have been in a game for a while, that whole aura dissipates and you lose that feeling of wonder. I envy those just now coming to Aion, as those of us who have been here for the past two plus years have lost that initial excitement. And when you've lost that newbie feeling, then it's gone, gone, gone, whoa whoa whoa...

Or is it?

When you have played the game for a long period of time, you tend to settle into a rut that is hard to break out of. Log in, do dailies, do arenas, do dredge. Toss in a siege. Rinse and repeat. In the past, Wings Over Atreia has delved into some of the reasons to stay in game when things become a bit monotonous and we sludge through some of the more difficult times. But why should we sludge? Why not find ways to make Aion more interesting when you hit that plateau?

Some players have done just that. A little creativity (and sometimes some really insane friends) can really make a difference and bring back that newbie feeling -- or at least make things interesting while adding some variety to gaming.

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The permadeath-in-MMOs issue has been debated to death. Most of us have probably either played in a Diablo-esque hardcore mode or gaped at the stones required to publish a true MMORPG with permadeath (hi, Salem). But who says you need game mechanics to make permadeath a reality?

I've gamed with roleplayers who took their characters deadly seriously and would delete their characters if they were killed off within the context of the game. (So much for the idea that roleplayers are casuals, eh?) Their web of self-inflicted rules is so complex (maiming? dice rolls? emote-combat?) that playing with such RPers can actually become stressful, especially if you don't want to be responsible for their having to delete and reroll.

What about you folks? Do you play or roleplay in a self-enforced hardcore mode? Do you do it because it's fun, because it makes gameplay more intense, or because you like a good challenge?

Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!

Over the past two weeks, I've been essentially playing politics. That's a bit glib, sure, but if you have a better term for arguing two sides of the same issue over the course of two separate essays, I'd love to hear it. Of course, turning around and arguing the other side of my own points is something that I've been doing for years now; it's really not surprising.

For those of you just catching up, we've been discussing player-generated story in games -- whether it deserves to be the only form of story and whether or not it's any good at that goal. Today, I'm going to try to wrap up this discussion forever, or at least for the purposes of this little mini-discussion. That requires a bit of re-framing, since I think that like a lot of other issues, this one isn't nearly as monochromatic as we like to pretend it is. There are virtues to both sides, and the real danger lies not in preferring one but demonizing the other.

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Last week on Behind the Mask, we talked about the basic dimensional structure of the Champions universe and its parallels with the Kabballah. This week, we take you a bit deeper into the mythos of Champions Online. We'll take a look at the Astral Plane, or Yetzirah, and the key places that exist there. I'll be focusing heavily on the Quaternion -- a series of four planar zones within the Lower Astral Plane that embody most fantasy elements critical to the Champions Universe.

If you have ever wondered about demons and angels, this is a must-read. The Vibora Bay story arc paints a very unusual picture about the nature of these planes, and we'll be covering just what Heaven and Hell are in respect to that story. We'll also be covering faeries, elves, dwarves, and other popular fantasy elements. If you're planning on creating a roleplaying character who fits into a fantasy subtype, travels through dimensions, or just uses magic, this information will be critical to you!

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Those of you who haven't been in Star Trek Online in a while will be happy to know there was a new event system put into place after the advent of A Call to Arms. The event calendar appears the moment a player clicks on his Starfleet delta to hail Starfleet and contains a neatly reorganized mission menu as well as an hourly listing of special daily events in which players can participate. Missions range from the KDF Mirror Universe and the new Borg Invasion of Defera to the Multiphasic Event in which players who farm anomalies for crafting are granted extra rewards during the time period in question. The new event system is very helpful to those players who get satisfaction from a specific type of play as they are able to obtain extra rewards for undertaking that play during the scheduled times.

Of course, events aren't the only way to spend your STO time during this content drought, and this New Year's Eve edition of the Captain's Log has a few other ideas for you...

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