Storyboard

Explaining guilds to people who don't play MMOs is always odd. You have to explain the process of applying, getting interviewed, and generally being brought on some trial runs in a way that doesn't make the whole thing sound like an unpleasant second job. This is even worse when it comes to explaining roleplaying guilds, which often level all the same restrictions as endgame-focused guilds with the added benefit that you're being examined based on your character rather than your play ability.

So it feels like a real kick in the teeth to do all that and then get rejected.

At face value, this feels outright ridiculous. The only criteria for a roleplaying guild should be roleplaying, and if you're applying for one, you almost by definition pass. But there's actually a lot of valid reasons to say that someone just isn't right for your roleplaying guild. So you might not have been rejected because the guild is made up of judgmental pricks -- it might be for the best.

Continue Reading

Last year, I had planned to change up the focus of Storyboard a little. The "high and wide" format had been working, but I was worried that the column just wouldn't have legs if I didn't start going for more focused and narrow applications. So I spent several months working on just the right way to do more game-specific columns in here.

You don't remember them, of course, because none of them was ever posted. Those several months of work did not produce a single viable column.

At the capstone of the second year of Storyboard, I'm forced to basically eat crow about one of my major plans for the last year because it turns out that not only did it not work but it didn't need to work in the first place. I managed to fill up another year of columns just fine without going into great detail about one game over another, and as it turns out, I'm a lot happier with this year as a whole anyway.

Continue Reading

Why bother roleplaying?

I've covered a lot of topics in this column that circle around that topic. I've talked about why roleplaying is important and how you can roleplay without tears, but I've never touched the central question, something that was brought to mind recently by a fellow Massively writer. Why even bother with roleplaying?

The usual answer is a shrug and a self-evident "because it's fun," but that's more a dismissal of the question than a functional response. That's not a good thing because there's a case to be made against roleplaying. Your character doesn't have an impact on the game world. Your roleplaying is, in the context of the game itself, irrelevant. The game doesn't care why your character wears weaker gear than normal; it just downgrades your stats and makes your life harder. You derive no benefit and wind up losing a lot of time for social interactions that are prone to drama and arguments. So why bother?

Continue Reading

I don't tend to talk about the players behind the characters in this column because more often than not it doesn't matter. A good roleplayer is a good roleplayer, and if your characters can interact well, you don't really need to be close friends behind the scenes. Sure, I promote communication out of character, but that's to avoid drama, and liking the person involved is more of a bonus than a requisite goal. The majority of roleplayers won't have issues beyond character or story-based ones, and thus I focus on those.

There are exceptions.

Even if most of the troubles you'll encounter are the result of characters that don't quite work for whatever reason (something we're all guilty of), there are certain players who are going to cause problems no matter what. And I'm not talking about the guy who always makes the same character with minor setting adjustments. I'm talking about the players who will make you actively dislike the game you're playing, the cases where you're going to need to address the problem beyond just shaking your head at one character or another. These guys exist, and even though they're not the majority, they have an unpleasant impact.

Continue Reading

Everyone has had that friend. Heck, almost everyone has been that friend at one point or another. It's the guy who just found himself in a relationship, and suddenly every single topic of conversation jerks right back to that relationship. It starts out subtle, but eventually your friend will turn everything back to the topic of his relationship, up to and including a car crash. And while said friend isn't a bad guy, you start enjoying your time with him less and less because he's down to a single droning note that's no longer interesting.

The exact same thing happens in roleplaying. It's not usually about a girlfriend, although it can be. It's any aspect of a character's plot that grows until it's all-encompassing and grows into the plots of other characters as well. It's a plot tumor. It's a growth bigger than it has any right to be, and it's the sort of thing that can really drive you away from roleplaying whether or not you liked the plot in the beginning.

Continue Reading

All good things must come to an end.

Roleplaying is all about creating a shared space for your character to inhabit with other characters. It's about crafting trials and challenges that can be overcome through narrative means; it's about building a set of experiences together. And all of the columns I've written up to this point have been entirely about making that work well and creating a shared environment that's fun for everyone.

But it can end. One day, you may log in to find that the people you've been roleplaying alongside are no longer there -- that the friends you once had have left, the allies you once charished have moved on, and your universe has narrowed by degrees until it's just you. After all of the roleplaying you've done, it tuns out that your group of fellow roleplayers has slowly drifted away until the only person who remembers these stories is you. And it seems fitting, for the 100th column, to talk about what happens when you're left remembering a universe that never was.

Continue Reading

Just as in real life, player characters in MMOs have more than one set of clothing for different situations. Sure, I don't divide my actual clothes up in usual MMO categories ("well, those are my PvP pants"), but I have things I wear around the house that I wouldn't wear out in public or when attending a funeral, for instance. But even that doesn't compare to a high-level roleplaying character, who has not only PvP gear and PvE gear and solo gear tand the like but also funeral gear and casual gear and so forth. It's all the joy of assembling a real wardrobe alongside the joy of stat comparisons.

Roleplaying outfits are universally important. Even if your character is in a game without visible gear (such as City of Heroes), you probably have different outfits for different circumstances (civilian clothes, for instance). But there's an art to putting together a good roleplaying ensemble, and it's not just as simple as equipping the same equipment you wore 10 levels ago and calling it a day. You want to create a distinct impression, and that takes a little more doing. So how do you assemble a good roleplaying outfit?

Continue Reading

Sometimes, column topics get away from you. When I sat down to write last week's Storyboard, I realized at the halfway mark that I had spent a lot of time not really hitting the core of the issue, and the overall article wound up being much weaker as a result. So I went back, started fresh, and instead delivered a column aimed squarely at the central question of whether or not it's important to have a flagged roleplaying server.

But there is an issue that I didn't really address in that column but still remains relevant. If you're going to talk about having an RP server exist even if it's not policed, you do need to address what policing a roleplaying server actually entails. A lot of it is just plain speculative at the moment, given the overall track record of the industry, but that doesn't mean it's not worth discussing.

Continue Reading

A couple of weeks ago, Matt Daniel, Elisabeth Cardy, and I were talking amongst ourselves about the dearth of official roleplaying servers in Guild Wars 2. Lis was contending that the primary defense from ArenaNet was the idea that the GMs wouldn't be able to properly police these servers, so as a result the, studio didn't want to designate them that way in the first place. As she put it, she'd rather see them not do the servers at all than do them in a slipshod fashion, and she believed an unpoliced roleplaying server was worse than no roleplaying server at all.

This prompted me to ask whether anyone actually expected roleplaying servers to be policed, but honestly, that's a tangent to the real issue. I can convincingly argue that there are ways that the servers should be policed, but regardless of whether or not roleplayers expect this to happen, I think it's pretty absolute that not having a roleplaying server is much more slipshod than having one with inadequate support. The alternative suggests you really don't care whether your game has roleplayers or not.

Continue Reading

One of the great problems presented to roleplayers is the challenge of presenting audio via text.

We don't think about it all the time because most of the time it's easy to construct the sound of something from context. Sure, simply saying that your character sighs could mean any number of things, but contextually it's usually obvious whether it's meant as a gesture of exasperation or a sign of relaxed contentment. "Yes, I'm sure your new weapon will make a huge difference in the war" could be sarcastic or serious, but there are generally enough clues in the situation to make the difference obvious.

But there's one obvious case in which that breaks down, and that's in the matter of accents. After all, people from two different regions shouldn't quite sound the same... but there's also no effective way to communicate how one voice or another sounds different. And the most common solution is essentially a matter of making your character's words borderline unreadable in the hopes that you convey a sliver of your intention.

Continue Reading

I have, on occasion, joked that all of my roleplaying characters are either looking for a tragedy or recovering from one. It's not an intentional thing, but for whatever reason, an awful lot of my characters tend to have a whole lot of pain and sorrow wrapped up in their heads. My attempts at making a joke character usually derail to the point that said character is even more depressing, like the mage I played who was supposed to be eccentric and wound up being desperately lonely due to her horrendous inability to focus on any one thing for too long.

While it's very easy to go into the depressingly morbid side with a tragic character, we're not going into that this week. (Another week -- you know how I roll by now.) No, this week's problem is much simpler. If you're playing a character who's beset on all sides by misfortune, eventually you're just going to wind up with sadness-induced apathy. You're going to get tired of the fact that your character always fails and never wins and that things get worse every time he or she tries to fix problems. In short, you're going to not want to play the character because said character is just plain depressing.

Continue Reading

Every day it's the same thing. You wake up, you go to work, you convince your boss that you're actually working for eight hours or so, you go home, and then you log into your game of choice for some roleplaying. Except lately, that's been feeling like just as much of a routine. If your characters are supposed to be like people, it's not surprising that sometimes they'll wind up in the middle of a boring routine just like anyone else.

Granted, depending on your roleplaying, that boring routine might involve several betrayals, affairs, and potential murders, but a routine is a routine.

The point is that your character can get stuck in a rut. No matter how much you might like a character, it's no fun to keep running through the same basic stories again and again. You need to kick your character out of that rut, preferrably without destroying the elements you like about the character in the first place. So how do you get out of stagnant waters and start churning things up again?

Continue Reading

In tabletop games, the GM is sometimes referred to as the player who doesn't get to play. Running a plot-heavy event in an MMORPG is fairly similar -- you're still technically there in the form of a character, but the focus is on an adventure that you're presenting for your fellow players. That means a whole lot of extra work on your part because you suddenly lack the advantage of letting the game handle most of that pesky worldbuilding work.

You probably don't need to be told that this can all go bad. No, what you really want to know is how to avoid going bad. And while some of the stuff that I've posted in the past about running in-game events is still entirely applicable, there are also some unique issues that you're going to have to deal with when your event is meant to be tightly scripted. Plan it right, and the whole thing can go off without a hitch. Plan it wrong, and... well, do I need to do another column on drama already?

Continue Reading

It happens. Maybe you got sidetracked with an alt and another alt wound up gathering dust. Maybe you had real-life obligations pulling you away from a certain game for a while (like, say, a job that more or less relies upon a variety of game experiences coupled with apartment hunting). Or maybe one thing led to another and you just didn't think to log in for a while. Whatever the case, you've got characters who have been involved in roleplaying for a while but just dropped off the radar.

Of course, much like video game franchises, old roleplaying characters never really go away; they just go for longer period of inactivity. Unfortunately, diving back into a character you haven't played for a while prompts its own string of problems, namely the fact that from a story perspective said character apparently fell off the face of the planet for a while. So let's start small and lead your character back into the action, starting by figuring out where he or she has been for the past several weeks or months or years.

Continue Reading

One of the weird parts of roleplaying, at least for me, is the fact that I'm not really in control at all.

I don't mean in the narrative sense, although that's also true. I'm talking about the simple fact that my characters have minds of their own, and that's half of the entertainment value. I see something happening, I know it's going to be bad, and I find myself thinking that the best thing my character can do is keep his or her mouth shut. And then I'm hammering away at the keyboard because even though I think otherwise, he or she has a very different opinion.

Writers are familiar with the idea, of course. Characters wind up talking to you, even when you don't mean for it to happen. But it happens with roleplaying just as surely, and you wind up with a character driving in a totally different direction than you had planned, with your main-line character sitting on the side while some C-list concept takes center stage. And the funny part is that it all feels right, all the way through.

Continue Reading