roleplaying-types
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Storyboard: Both sides of roleplaying
I don't mind disagreeing with someone, but I really like to know why because the why usually leads to more interesting conclusions. You won't be surprised to know that I spend a good portion of my time thinking about how the divide in roleplaying has happened. It's definitely there, and it often gets painted as a divide between newer and older players. There are people who point to Star Wars Galaxies as one of the greatest games for RP of all time, and there are those who look at it and just don't see what the big deal was. It's too much to come down purely to difference in taste. The idea has been rolling around in my head for a while, but a few discussions on the topic finally pushed me into the conclusion that what we're looking at is a split between ramblers and orienteers. We're treating two distinct hobbies as the same thing because they've got a lot of overlap, but despite what we think, that overlap is narrower than it seems at a glance.
Storyboard: If it walks like a duck...
If you play Warhammer Online, my column here is probably pretty much useless to you. The game's last roleplaying server has been shut down for quite some time now, and to be honest, the environment was never spectacular for roleplaying. You don't even have a "walk" toggle or the ability to sit comfortably in chairs -- minimal functions that even World of Warcraft manages to pick up. None of this is news. What might surprise some members of the non-Warhammer Online audience, though, is how much roleplaying is still going on. Oh, it's not the large and elaborate character ensembles that I tend to wax poetic about in Storyboard, but it's still roleplaying. And the fact of the matter is that there's a lot of roleplaying that has virtually nothing to do with our regular topic of discussion here, some of it small and some of it elaborate, all with the purpose of immersing the player in the game world. And while I focus on the subject that I know, it's worth noting that there are more things out there than just creating a bunch of characters and playing them off one another. Heck, sometimes it doesn't even involve creating characters per se.
