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Field Journal: Floundering in Neverwinter's Foundry
Given that I'm a roleplayer, you might think that I find Neverwinter's Foundry an amazing expressive tool that I relish wholeheartedly. To that I respond with a resounding sort of! I love that it exists and seeing all the neat, even mind-blowing creations of others. Actually using it to make something of my own, though? That's pretty daunting, and I'm not talking about the interface. I am a very creative person, but there are many kinds of creativity. I've long since given up trying to be the game master in tabletop games given how painful it is for me to prepare and how I bring so much more to the table as a player. I'm the expressive sort, coming up with great ideas on the fly that make things more fun for everyone, drawing everyone's characters, that sort of thing. I'm not the constructive sort, so I have a hard time building worlds compared to inhabiting them. That might be why I had to stick a cameo from my own Trickster Rogue in the quest I designed.
Storyboard: Working without /random
Two weeks ago, you might recall, I ranted about using random rolls as a mechanic of resolution when roleplaying in MMOs. For those of you who can't be bothered to go back and read the whole thing now (which I totally understand; you probably have holiday games burning a hole in your pocket), the core point was that random rolls don't actually tie to anything for resolution and wind up coming off as an obvious and unfun kludge for the sake of random resolution. "Well, if you're so smart, why don't you come up with alternatives?" And I did. Readers also had some wonderful suggestions and feedback in the comments last week, which make the article even more worth reading, so really, go ahead and take a look at it. This week, I'm taking a look at how you're going to resolve conflicts in roleplaying without relying on what amounts to a coin flip. And as you may have expected, they're all taking tips from tabletop games.
Storyboard: You ruined your own event
You're running a roleplaying event, and it's going well. It's lively, people are having fun, characters are playing off one another well, it's ideal. So you decide to push things a little further, to take things up a little more, and the next thing you see is people mumbling excuses and leaving until you're left with one or two people who remain less as a function of fun and more as a testament to bitter determination. What in the world happened? I'll tell you what happened: You ruined your own event. This has kind of been a week for me of people ruining good stuff, which makes this week's column unintentionally apropos. A lot of roleplaying events start out great, with everyone invested and happy to be present, but they quickly dissolve when a few well-intentioned but poor choices are made by the people running the event. And while I can't chronicle every possible pitfall, I can at least talk about the most common ones that I see again and again.
Breakfast Topic: Where are the chairs?
Sometimes you receive a letter from a reader that makes you say, "Chairs? Hunh. I mean ... Hunh. Dude's got a point. Chairs." Here's the letter, in all its (ahem) upstanding passion: What do we want? CHAIRS! When do we want them? NOW! What will we eat if we don't get them? BRAINS! Take a walk through the classic capital cities of Warcraft, specifically the Horde cities. While you take this tour I have a challenge for you – count the number of chairs that you can find. This number might startle you. The specific cities of Thunderbluff, Orgimmar, and the Undercity are largely if not completely vacant of such fixtures save for two thrones. This also largely applies to the nearby cities and housing for those races. Visit the Cross Roads, visit Tarren Mill, and other smaller factional holdings and you will notice a trend of a lack of chairs. To its credit, Brill has -1- chair. In fact there is an overall lack of much in the way of viable living space for the classic races of the Horde. So what gives? More so why is this important and how might it be reflected in the coming content? Among the Horde players there is a growing concern that this lack of basic fixtures will be missing from the Horde's Garrisons if current content is any means to speculate. Since the garrisons will be Orcish in style, will the lack of basic fixtures also be reflected in the Garrison?
Storyboard: Don't fight with /random
Most of my Storyboard columns center on larger issues, providing advice in some way. This one does not. This one is purely about one of the elements of roleplaying in MMOs that I particularly dislike: using in-game random rolls to determine the outcome of actions during tense scenes (or out-of-game rolls in games that don't support /random or /roll or something similar). This is a time-honored practice in MMOs, but I've never had many nice things to say about it, to the point that I wrote an entire column about dueling without even discussing it. In practice, it makes sense, casting otherwise unresolvable situations back to the realm of tabletop gaming. What's not to like? Lots of things. Resolving conflicts with random dice rolls is unsatisfying and to be avoided at all costs. And if you want to compare it to tabletop gaming, you're making a lot of logical leaps that don't hold up under scrutiny.
Storyboard: Why am I still here?
Sometimes, the biggest problem you face isn't whether or not you can find dramatic roleplaying but whether or not your character has a reason to keep subjecting herself to it. I ran into the problem recently in Final Fantasy XIV. As a player, I enjoyed what was going on with one of the many organizations my character belongs to. The problem is that she wasn't enjoying it, and she didn't have any reason to keep subjecting herself to it. She didn't like most of these people, she didn't need money or resources from them, and she wasn't really deriving any benefit from it any longer. Obviously, I wanted her to stick around. But every so often you find yourself in situations where your character isn't happy and wants to leave... and has both reason and opportunity to do so. Two weeks ago I talked about getting someone out of your life; now it's time to talk about keeping a character in the mix.
Storyboard: Pacing and numbers in roleplaying
I attend a lot of roleplaying events. This is not a surprise to anyone, I'm sure. What also probably isn't a surprise is how many of them turn out to be slow, meandering, and generally not all that great. It's like wading through any bunch of player-generated content; you've got a lot of people who have a great idea in their heads to the point that they'll ignore signs about how badly that idea will shake out in reality. A lot of it comes down to two major issues: pacing and numbers. In some ways, this is an extension of the problem of people not playing to the medium, but it's also a problem of pacing and overall event flow. If you're not thinking about how you're pacing an event, you haven't fully thought things out, and if you aren't thinking about what that means for the people attending, you're going to wind up with a lot of bored people complaining via whispers.
Storyboard: Now I only want you gone
Roleplaying friendships are like any other sort of friendship. The person you started roleplaying with at the launch of the game may not be someone you want to keep roleplaying with through the whole of your time with the game. The question isn't whether or not this will happen; it's when it will happen and what you're going to do when you realize that you don't want to play with this person any longer. What sounds like the simplest thing in the world becomes much harder due to the simple fact that none of us likes telling someone else, "I don't want to interact with you any longer." That means you've got to read the signs and derive a lesson -- and also learn the way that your signals are going to be read, even if you don't mean it that way. So what signs do you get, what signs do you send, and what do you do?
Storyboard: Using the fourth wall for good
I don't remember much of the poetry course I took in college whilst pursuing my (ultimately useless) English degree, but I do remember my professor quite vividly. The first day of the class he stood up in front of the room and wrote a line from renowned poet Theodor Geisel: "It's fun to have fun, but you have to know how." In his case, he was leading into a discussion of the rules of rhyming schemes and such, but he also admitted that the lesson is applicable to a lot of other things. Case in point: using the fourth wall in roleplaying. MMOs lean on the fourth wall all the time, some more or less than others. But roleplaying generally steers clear of it because leaning on it too heavily can really screw with the overall roleplaying atmosphere. So let's talk a little bit about what the fourth wall is and how you can use it with care to enhance roleplaying rather than damage it.
Flameseeker Chronicles: How Guild Wars 2 can step up its roleplaying game
I'm a roleplayer at heart. My characters have backstories and relationships and hobbies and favorite foods. They have careers beyond "Necromancer" or "Guardian." They have homes and responsibilities. All of them have their own little places as supporting characters in the much larger story of Tyria. Sadly, I've never found Guild Wars 2 to be the most welcoming MMO for RP, mostly because none of the above can really be expressed well through gameplay. There's a lot of emphasis on epic stories and your character influencing the world and being a hero, but because GW2 is such a combat-focused game, it's hard not to feel as though my characters are too busy being epic to have lives outside of tireless badassery. That confuses me because so much of what ArenaNet wants to do ostensibly revolves around making the game world seem more alive, and I can't think of a better way to accomplish that than by giving players the tools to help create that feeling for ourselves.
Storyboard: Breaking game mechanics for the sake of roleplay
Sometimes your max-level character in World of Warcraft is supposed to still be a student. Sometimes your Trooper in Star Wars: The Old Republic is an expert at hand-to-hand combat with a techblade that you can't wield. Sometimes your Final Fantasy XIV is a gunsmith in a world where guns clearly exist but aren't available to players. Sometimes you've found something that the game itself is directly at odds with in your roleplaying. I'm not talking about lore; I'm talking about the game mechanics. And while I've brushed up against this before, I've never actually talked about how to deal with situations that the game mechanics explicitly forbid. You are X, and the game tells you that you cannot be X. So what do you do? I can assume you can get over the point of saying that you're something that's slightly at odds with the game mechanics, but how do you explain the fact that your character should be something that the game won't allow?
Storyboard: You are what you pretend to be
It's the day after Halloween, and that means we all take off our costumes. Or to be more accurate, we all take off the costumes that other people get to see. We're still wearing costumes just the same, except we call them our normal personalities and hope that no one notices. None of this is shocking. We all know that we present ourselves differently to different people. You don't act the same way around your boss that you do around your closest friends, you don't treat strangers like your mother, and so forth. It's part of the human condition: We put on different faces depending on whom we're dealing with at any given moment. Do your characters do the same? They should. Even if they aren't technically human, most alternative options in games still have more or less human thought patterns. So let's talk a little more about putting on a brave face for the outside world and what it says about your character as a whole.
Storyboard: This is your next character
Coming up with a new character concept is hard. Not as tough as it could be, obviously, but it's still challenging. For some people, the hardest part of roleplaying is figuring out whom to play, and once you figure that part out, the rest is just down to the execution. But coming up with a character concept requires hard work, careful consideration, and quite possibly a few blood sacrifices. Or it requires someone who wants to do a Halloween column that's more about dressing up than the usual plague of ghosts and demonic pumpkins. In today's Storyboard, I'm going to just give you your next character and make it as easy as slipping on a costume. I'm even giving you choices. I'm even making it more of a system than an outright list, so you can use it from here to eternity. It's everything you could want except for more familiarity with the game's lore.
Storyboard: What are you scared of?
I've made it pretty far into October without a single article that could be seen as remotely Halloween-themed, so I think I'm doing pretty well right here. But that's changing right now because it's time to talk about another topic that I thought I'd covered long before: fear. Unfortunately, fear is also difficult to address in a logical fashion. Fear itself isn't logical. From a logical standpoint, there is nothing serious that a spider can do to me. I'm thousands of times larger (no fat jokes please) and have access to a variety of tools; it just has eight legs and poison that's generally harmless to me. That doesn't mean I'm not scared of them, despite the fact that logic dictates that I should be more scared of seeing a bear in the woods. So I'm not going to talk about that. What I will talk about is giving your characters fears that feel real, making sure that you're afraid of things that work, and portraying those fears in a consistent way. After all, even if fear isn't logical, it certainly is understandable with a bit of effort.
Storyboard: Signing up for the team
Major organizations in a game's lore are kind of a big deal to the characters living in those games. They represent something important, after all, either in terms of intent or power. So why doesn't your character sign up with the organization of his choice and start working for it instead of just alongside it? What do you mean that there's no mechanical way to fully model that? Come on. Sure, that's a bit of a problem, but if there's one thing you've taken away from my columns other than the word "verisimilitude," it's that no problem is insurmountable. Fortunately, signing on with your in-game organization of choice isn't all that problematic, even if there isn't an actual dotted line to sign for membership. So let's talk about signing up with your local recruitment office for fame, fortune, and the occasional bit of character motivation that you can't massage in any other way.
Storyboard: Keeping your roleplaying fresh
The big problem with marriage is the same problem you have with always going to your favorite restaurant. Sure, you like the menu, and maybe it's even extensive enough that you could eat there every day for a month without having the same thing twice. But eventually it's just not going to be fresh. You've had everything on the menu, and from here on out it's just the same burgers until the end of time. And so you wind up leaving the restaurant and eating at a fast food place, and then you wind up in divorce court. You are not married to your roleplaying characters. But you're still in a situation where you're inside of this character's head at all times, and eventually you don't even need to guess what happens next. So just like a marriage, you need to keep things fresh even when you know your character inside and out. Which is trickier than it might sound, but still eminently doable. And it might even be that as long as I'm making the marriage analogy, some of the same advice applies.
Storyboard: Sharing the spotlight
We roleplayers tend to be a little... self-centered. Kind of the nature of the game, seeing as how you're creating a persona and then trying to flesh out an entire life story for that persona. It's natural that you'd want to be on the center stage a little more often. The problem here is obvious. Heck, you can see it in day-to-day life. If only one person thinks, "I'm the star," everything flows fine. If everyone thinks that, you're surrounded by a screaming cacophony of people who all think that their individual problems are more important than anyone else's problems. You have a band full of lead guitarists and no one on drums, a full team of pitchers without anyone at second base. You need to learn how to step away from the spotlight. To let someone else be important for a bit. To give up the spotlight and be the supporting cast for a while. So how and why do you do that? I'm glad you let me assume that you asked.
Storyboard: You've got to make a living
Your character does something to stay alive. No, I'm not talking about fighting off demons or flesh-eating wolves or whatever else you blunder into on a regular basis. I mean that your character either needs to construct shelter, gather food, and produce clothes himself, or he has to pay someone to do it. Yes, most games probably allow for the possibility that those wolves contain enough meat, articles of clothing, and end tables to provide all of the above. That would be a separation of mechanics and story. It's much more fun than watching most of your characters die of infections caused by mild scrapes against rusty metal. As a roleplayer, you need to think about what your character does for a living, not just because it gives you an explanation for what's going on when you aren't playing (although that certainly helps) but because what we do informs a lot of who we are as people. It's always better to show than tell, and nothing shows quite as nicely as character occupations done right.
Storyboard: Trigger-happy
Graham Chapman passed away on October 4th, 1989, leaving behind a legacy of work that included the groundbreaking Monty Python oeuvre. To avoid having his funeral service become a media circus, the five surviving members of the comedy troupe held a separate service on December 4th, two months later, memorializing their friend and fellow creator. John Cleese delivered a eulogy for Chapman, and after claiming how many people would be sad for the loss of such a creative and talented soul, said the following: "Good riddance to him, the freeloading bastard; I hope he fries." To some people, this might seem like the epitome of disrespect. To others, it's the finest possible testament to the life of a man who loved making jokes and pushing boundaries on acceptable topics. The problem is that in a roleplaying environment you can wind up pushing the boundaries without realizing it, making someone uncomfortable or broaching subjects that someone feels are beyond the pale. And you have to deal with these situations quickly before OOC inevitably creeps into what's going on.
Storyboard: Nobody wants to play with you
You want to roleplay. Oh, boy, do you ever want to roleplay. You have pages and pages of character backstory, you have your character's voice down, and you can cycle through emotes like a champ. (There's no championship for that, I know. Bear with me.) Your only problem is that when you walk into the room, everyone quietly turns away and discusses how urgently he or she needs to get to the next dungeon, and well, it's late. Bye! It's just like at prom, except this time you can't assume that people were just turned off by your decision to wear Groucho Marx glasses. So why does no one want to roleplay with you? Obviously I can't tell you exactly why people don't want to roleplay with you. There are a lot of variables that I probably don't know about. But I can at least give you some ideas about why you might be encountering some problems and how you can fix them, since you deserve the same sort of fun that everyone else is having. Sit down and let's figure it out; there's no judgment here.
