Monday, May 14, 2012

My Game, My Way

George and I had a great talk over Monday morning coffee about MMORPGs and roleplaying. We were talking about all the different MMORPGs and their online roleplaying communities. This isn't the "RPG" part of MMORPG, this is people actually roleplaying (sort of like pen and paper) inside the game and trying to get a greater experience out of the game than just the level and gear grind.

Skip this paragraph if you know what roleplaying in an MMO is like, or have done it before. Ignore for a moment that your MMO character has imperfect gear, a low level, or lousy stats. In this world, you are a new person, maybe a knight that works for the king, or a member of an evil organization in the fantasy world. Never mind that in the game, you can't actually do anything with these groups, or your character is probably kill-on-sight to the very faction you want to be a part of - this is make-believe. In the game, maybe you have an add-on or tool where you can record this, and hopefully people read it. In the best possible world, this group ha been setup by someone else, and a bunch of like-minded poeple can come together to take part in events and actually live out the fantasy of being a part of the world inside the MMO - more than just quests, gear, and stats.

So basically, groups of players are trying to make a game that doesn't support what they would dream to do in it work they way they want it to. You can guess there is a fair bit of friction and suspension of belief here, and that most to these efforts fall apart. In World of Warcraft, there are groups of players pretending to be parts of the Stormwind Guard, even though no NPC in the game recognizes them as such, they can't throw anyone in the brig, and they have no powers other than "I say I'm a guard and if you agree you have to obey." Similar groups exist for the evil group The Scarlett Crusade, and many others we have seen over the years. Even though a player aligns himself with the Scarlett Crusade, any Scarlett Crusade monster is killl-on-sight to the player, and the player could never meet and interact with the Scarlett Crusade NPCs in the game.

Players are good at making systems that don't support their ideas - support their ideas. It's a natural reaction, and pushes the boundaries of the game and what it means to play in it. Ideally, the game would evolve to support faction-play, but in most every case, it doesn't.

Which brings us to pen-and-paper games. PnP games are infinitely more adaptable than MMOs, but we still see people trying to play games with them the original game does not support too well. DnD4 is great at simulating an MMO-style dungeon romp, but it does not do realistic gritty fantasy, sci-fi worlds, or survival games all too terribly well. It is somewhat similar to the MMORPG roleplaying problem, where players become dissatisfied with the experience after some time. It is a unique intersection of these two problems:

"Game X is where the players are at."
and
"Game X doesn't support how I want to play."

It leads to interesting problems attracting players. Take the current times as an example, and a cross-section of our local hobby shops. The big player, DnD4 is on the wane, Pathfinder is taking up a lot of attention, and a hundred other games fight for players. You can probably find a niche game to fit what you want, but finding players is a problem. The 3.0 edition d20 OGL attempted to solve this problem, with a thousand games that played similarly, but each had their own rules to simulate theme and genre. There was probably a d20 game to fill your urge, and enough d20 players that would be interest in filling your table.

I am leaving out SBRPG obviously, but it is just another niche game that has trouble attracting players, so it doesn't play well in this discussion. SBRPG has its own solutions for the above problems, but it is an all-or-nothing proposition, you play and know players of SBRPG or you don't. Hopefully as SBRPG goes free-to-play, finding players will be less of a problem, so that's what we can do from our side.

Still, the above problem is a huge one for today's pen-and-paper games, if a movie comes out like Twilight, GI Joe, or The Avengers, and people are interested in playing along, what game do you direct them to? Not SBRPG because we forbid copyrighted IP (lol), but still, if people want to pick up and play something like what inspires them, where do they go?


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