Storyboard: Of straw men and specifics

I was originally going to wrap up the initial little series of archetypes this week, but I decided to hold off for a week for a couple of reasons: first, because I don't want to just be rehashing what I said two weeks back when discussing how the series actually worked; and second, because there are a lot of smaller and assorted topics that I wanted to talk about for this week's installment of the column. We're approaching the first anniversary, after all, and that means it's a good time to start thinking about the next year.

There's also more to be said about the archetype from last week, and that's where I'm going to start off. It seems as if pretty much everyone got the joke about that column; it was meant as a parody of an archetype that's all too common in MMOs: the Mary Sue in roleplaying form, the person who can do no wrong even as the player breaks all sort of rules for no reason beyond ego. But there's a reason I went with this archetype instead of my first idea for an April Fools' Day article -- I think this archetype can actually work in a game, if played with care and with a gentle hand.

It's a man of straw

Last week's column had one important distinction from each of the other nine archetype columns (not counting the meta-discussion), and that was the fact that I only picked a single pop culture character for the side images. (The other image of Dean MacArthur was from City of Heroes.) Normally, there are two popular characters who fit the bill quite nicely, and while I probably could have found a companion for Zapp Brannigan, no one else seems to sum up the archetype so elegantly.

If you haven't watched Futurama... well, in the name of all that is holy, why the heck not? Seriously, every part of the series is available streaming from Netflix right now. That means you don't even have to be bothered with waiting for a disk in the mail. Go and watch now. You've missed something brilliant.

All right, all right, let's move on. Zapp is a character who spends most of the series stating and re-stating his absolute searing awesomeness. Despite this, every single occasion on which we see him in a position of authority ends with his making horrible choices, frequently endangering the lives of his crew members and those around him. He's an imbecilic braggart without an ounce of actual aptitude, and only his relentless self-promotion counts as any sort of real talent.

But that alone makes him a pretty compelling character for RP.

Think about it for a second. Your character knows he isn't actually half as good as anyone else in the group, and his only real talent is talking himself up -- something the Rogue is better at already. He's a drain on the group, and he knows it, but instead of admitting it, he's stuck trying to create an image and maintain it despite his total lack of useful ability. Sooner or later it's going to be clear that he just can't hack it, but until then he's got no choice but to keep up the facade.

It's a good character for a comedic or serious game, and it fits in nicely with the other archetypes as well. Even amidst all of the jokes.

Groundings

I've said more than once that my conclusion of the archetype discussions isn't a hard finale, just the end of the initial batch. If I think of further iterations, I'll happily add them on to the pile, but I don't want to continue adding more for the sake of a longer series. In terms of a quick reference guide for easy adventuring archetypes, I think I could do far worse.

That being said, one of the things I'd like to do over the next several months is move away from the more general overviews and into a look at specifics. There are a lot of worlds out there to roleplay within, and past a certain point if I'm always talking in generalities some of the meaning gets lost. Moreover, the spread makes it hard to narrow down into categories; I could talk about roleplaying an elf, certainly, but a Blood Elf is different from an Elvaan is different from a Vulcan is different from a High Elf. Trying to apply the same set of guidelines to each is asking for trouble.

More to the point, there are subtleties in roleplaying each of the above races that aren't necessarily obvious on the surface, ones that provide interesting roleplaying twists. Elvaan, for instance, are probably the most common race across Mindartia and Quon; San d'Oria was one of multiple kingdoms of this race, and their dominion spread all the way south to Bastok at one point. That can lead to some interesting roleplaying that you can't get out of the reclusive and scholarly Blood Elves, just like the Elvaan disdain doesn't line up with the casual cruelty of the Blood Elves.

So as I've done before, I'm opening the gates to feedback. I want to know what worlds my readers roleplay within and what sort of things you'd be most interested in seeing, or if indeed the idea of focusing a little more on individual worlds would even be welcome. Comments, email, and forums are all great places to discuss this, and I look forward to hearing about this one.

Next week, I'm going to wrap up the archetype discussion thread for now, and the week after that we're all hopping on board for the magical mystery tour. (Or is it the mysterious magic tour? One or the other.) Feel free to leave comments below, or send them along to eliot@massively.com.

Every Friday, Eliot Lefebvre fills a column up with excellent advice on investing money, writing award-winning novels, and being elected to public office. Then he removes all of that, and you're left with Storyboard, which focuses on roleplaying in MMOs. It won't help you get elected, but it will help you pretend you did.