role playing
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Wings Over Atreia: Shakespeare in Aion
OK, OK, maybe Shakespeare is a bit melodramatic, but the idea of taking on a role and playing it out on a stage is not a foreign idea -- even in Aion. It just so happens that this stage is not under your feet but in virtual space instead. Besides, I happen to love Shakespeare, so props to me for mentioning him in a gaming column! Now, I am the first to admit that NCsoft doesn't make it easy for a gamer to roleplay in Aion; there are scant few tools to support this style of play. But that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Despite this dearth, there is in fact a whole community comprised of legions both large and small as well as individuals. These players use personal connections and a player-created chat channel in-game as well as external tools such as the Aion Roleplayers website to bind themselves together and support the community as a whole. So what exactly is roleplay, and how viable is it in the world of Atreia? Exit stage left (past the cut) to define RP, debunk some RP myths, and explore RP in general Aion.
Neocore Games working on Paradox-published King Arthur 2
Paradox Interactive has announced that it's going to publish King Arthur 2, a sequel to the role-playing strategy game from a few years back. The title will be developed by Neocore Games, the team behind the original, and this time around introduces a dark fantasy setting for the Arthurian battles -- along with the various demons and dragons that comes with. This time around, King Arthur is known as the "Maimed King" and will face bigger battles and boss fights, while the game takes advantage of an improved camera, new animations and "an extensive tutorial." There's no release date yet, but it sounds like development is just getting underway.
Free for All: Revisiting the rules of immersion
Years ago, I found myself wanting something more out of my gaming. I never was a "typical" player; I never achieved max level or defeated the greatest enemies. After some thought, I realized that I played the same as I lived: always curious, needing to explore, willing to step into someone else's story, or wanting to create my own. I needed games to mean more than just a stat-sheet or a weekly raid schedule. I needed to feel more connected to this activity that was taking up so much of my time. Otherwise, it was just a job. At the time, I was very much into Vanguard. I still am, but my schedule has left me without enough time to play as much as I'd like. I loved how the world of Telon sucked you in with its massive landscapes and endless waters. Yes, the game has many issues, and yes, the community does as well. I wasn't going to let that stop me from writing up a series of rules -- more like guidelines -- that would almost force myself to slow down, to connect to the character I was playing, and to have fun. I've decided to re-examine and update the rules, especially because I could use them now more than ever. We'll start by breaking down the original set.
Waging WAR: Finding the sandbox
In this installment of Waging WAR, Greg takes a look at Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning from a few different angles and goes in search of the proverbial "sandbox" in a game that contains neither sand nor boxes. Somewhere along the line during my childhood, I developed a habit for playing games with nearly every game I've ever played. I can even remember a time in my early teens when I sat down with a few friends and collaborated on making our own version of battlechess. Pages of chicken-scratched rules and several dice results-tables later, and we were off and running for a solid week of the most entertaining chess matches I've ever played. Or there was that time with The Sims when I started creating experimental families and then leaving my computer on overnight and not interacting with them, just to see how successful they could be without my help. I could bore you for hours on end with examples of how I twisted the rules and made my own games from the games I've played. I suppose I can blame my penchant for metagaming on my early introduction to pen-and-paper roleplaying (i.e., D&D 1st Ed., to be specific). All I had was a sheet of paper, a handful of dice, a description of the world around me, and my imagination. By its very nature, PnP gaming is sandbox gaming. The reason I'm bringing this up now is that, until WAR, I had pretty much been able to "find the sandbox" in any MMO I was able to get my hands on. Whether it was building hardcore Dungeons & Dragons Online characters, roleplaying in City of Heroes, or achievement-chasing in World of Warcraft, I've never really been troubled with finding something to do when the grind started to wear me down. But now, with WAR, I'm finding most of my old tricks for MMO metagaming just aren't working. To read about what I've tried, and why it didn't work in WAR, follow along after the break.
Storyboard: Demands
Hello, fellow roleplayers! I'm here to yell at all of you, myself included, as well as pretty much every single company producing MMOs at the moment. If possible, I'd also like the opportunity to yell at Gary Gygax for perpetuating certain modes of play far past the point that they were healthy for roleplaying games as a genre, but these days that just seems disrespectful. (Yelling at him about Lejendary Adventure should still be fair game.) What am I so whiny about? The fact that we're now more than a decade into the existence of MMOs as a genre, and yet the most successful games out there don't give the tiniest crap about roleplayers. And yes, you might say, that's their fault for being bad hosts -- but it's also our own fault. Because while the idea of trying to roleplay has been marginalized, we've been sitting by and nodding our heads and agreeing that yes, we're not doing anything important. So it's time for a rant.
Behind the Mask: The keyboard is mightier than the text bubble
In roleplaying, everyone has his own preferences. Some people like simple, character-to-character interactions without a lot of heavy plot. Others love in-depth storylines and lots of character drama. One of the most heated preferences in roleplaying, however, is the way that characters should resolve conflict. Roleplaying is strange in that player characters get into fights about 3000 times more often than people do in real life. I'm a former US Marine, and I've been in less than a half dozen fights (including the kind involving guns) since I turned 18. On the other hand, my roleplaying characters tend to get into serious, earth-shattering battles involving guns, high-voltage electricity and psychic strangulation powers on an almost-weekly basis. Because I play Champions Online, this should be sort of an oddity. There are no playable villain characters in CO, so most characters should be do-gooding champions of love and justice. Even in comics, we rarely see heroes go up against other heroes except in strange circumstances. Isn't it a little odd that heroes would beat the heck out of each other all the time for no real reason?
Choose my Adventure: Star Wars [please wait...] Galaxies
As they say, the best laid plans of mice and men... This week, my adventure involved fighting a whole new foe that I hadn't yet encountered in my time with Star Wars Galaxies. A beast more fearsome to any MMO player than the biggest, baddest raid boss: overwrought server hamsters. But I'd note that while that particular portion of the week was very disappointing, there were some other very nice parts to this week's playtime. There simply wasn't nearly as much of it as I'd hoped for. Curious as to what this week held (aside from a surprising amount of staring at a login screen)? Come join me after the break and check out the gallery below to see where my adventures led this week! Also, there's a poll this week, offering you the chance to pick what direction I'll be doing in my upcoming adventure as a new pilot! %Gallery-97914%
Spiritual Guidance: Of lore, the forsaken and shadow priests
In addition to being the author of Wednesday's shadow priest edition of Spiritual Guidance, Fox Van Allen is an accomplished songwriter. After Dawn Moore refused to use Power Infusion on him during a lengthy raid encounter, Fox wrote the song In the Air Tonight. He mailed Dawn front-row tickets to his first concert performance, and as he reached the chorus, a bright spotlight engulfed Dawn. She cried in shame. It was awesome. Regular readers of Spiritual Guidance know that over the last month, I've been putting together a leveling guide for aspiring shadow priests. In the last installment, I made a seemingly innocuous comment about shadow priests' being able to take the talent Shadowform at level 40: We're able to make that fateful decision to forsake the light in exchange for causing more destruction more effectively. I was literally describing the game mechanics; staying in Shadowform requires you to give up the spells in the holy tab. One of our commenters, aramis, used the line as a launching pad for an interesting comment that addressed a very basic question for us shadow priests: What the heck are shadow priests supposed to be, anyway? I won't reprint the entire comment here, but it's definitely worth reading. The gist of it can be understood by reading just the first few sentences: Mr. V-A, we don't FORSAKE the light as Shadow Priests. On the contrary, we embrace it ... We accept the light as the balance of ourselves. Life is about balance: pleasure and pain; good and evil; life and death; light and shadow. Is aramis right? Follow me past the break as we explore a little bit of shadow priest lore, dip our toes into the cold waters of shadow priest roleplay, and try to solve an identity crisis that most of you probably don't even realize exists.
Hyperspace Beacon: Blaster at my side
Hey, kids, the name's Han Solo. I've been asked to step in here because I know a thing or two about smuggling. I know many of you are lookin' to jump into this line of work, and I'm going to tell you right now: it ain't gonna be easy. You gotta live by your guts, kids. You hav'ta be smooth, and you can't let crazy green Rodians get under your skin. In fact, if a Rodian does come lookin' for you, I suggest you shoot him first. It'll save you some trouble in the long run, but don't forget to pay for the mess. Maybe I should start with some of the greatest smugglers out there. That should help detour you from the insanity of this profession. Although none of 'em is as good as I am, Lando Calrissian, Dash Rendar, and even an old smuggler named Hylo Visz made their marks on history. Their lives were wrought with risky maneuvers, near-misses, and some damned good luck. So I guess if you think you've got what it takes, keep reading -- I'll meet you after the break. [Thank you to Lois van Baarle for letting us use her artwork for the main banner. You can see more of her work at Loish.net.]
EVE's Sansha live event takes an interesting turn
On the 11th of May, CCP announced that they'd be bringing live events back to EVE Online. Later that day, the first event was set in motion with the apparent leak of private CONCORD police documents into the hands of players. The documents hinted at a Sansha NPC military build-up, and suggested that Sansha's Nation was behind the reported abduction of a Ducia Foundry expedition team. Events rapidly escalated, with players breaking the news that Sansha fleets had begun attacking the populated worlds of the four empires and abducting citizens in the tens of thousands. The most worrying part was that the navies of the four empires were unable to respond in time as the Sansha fleets were using wormholes to enter their target systems. During the first few days of the event, locator agent traces on key Sansha slave actors between attacks revealed their presence in a system named 3-CE1R. This was quickly written off by many EVE players as a roleplaying inconsistency as that system is within the Jove Empire. Jove space is currently unreachable as the mysterious and technologically advanced race decided long ago to cut the stargate connections between their empire and the rest of New Eden. When random wormholes through space began spawning after the Seylinn disaster, none appeared to connect to Jove space. This led players to believe that the Jove Directorate possessed some form of control over wormhole formation, able to at least block it from occurring in their systems. Skip past the cut to read the startling revelations recently made in this epic storyline arc.
EVE blogger unveils Project Athena, a collection of fictional ship manuals
Few things impress me about EVE Online's community more than the incredible videos, artwork and fiction created by players. For the role-playing and fiction-writing communities, the game's continually-updated prime fiction acts as a canvas onto which new stories can be blended. Long-time EVE blogger Kirith Kodachi over at Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah has been an avid fiction-writer and contributor to EVE Tribune, producing several articles based on in-character technical overviews of EVE ships. Over the past two years, Kirith has been teaming up with artists and volunteer writers to collaborate on creating a more comprehensive collection of these articles. Written in the style of fictional ship manuals and presented as technical briefings interspersed with historical information, the completed project (dubbed "Project Athena") features full articles on 23 ships and their Tech 2 counterparts. Although the historical information and technical specifications have been invented by Kirith and his contributors, he's done his best to stick as closely as possible to the official EVE prime fiction. At 64 MB, the huge PDF file isn't a small download, but for role-players or fans of EVE fiction it's definitely worth a look.
EVE Evolved: Sansha abduction live event
On Tuesday, CCP announced that the Tyrannis expansion heralded the rebirth of live events in EVE Online. No sooner had the post gone live than the planned events began to seriously kick off in-game. It all began when classified CONCORD documents were inadvertently leaked to the capsuleer community. Code-named "ISHAEKA", the documents revealed that a CONCORD task-force had been monitoring recent Sansha military build-up in their home region of Stain. Since then, Sansha fleets have been spotted emerging from wormholes and abducting citizens from the colonised planets of New Eden, leading to some huge clashes with players. In this lore-packed article, I look at the story behind EVE's Sansha abduction event, how you can get involved in some of the epic battles and what could be improved in future events.
WoW.com Guest Post: Creating lore-based characters that aren't Mary Sues
Anna writes about roleplaying, healing, raiding and creative writing over at her blog, Too Many Annas. One of the most frequent criticisms leveled at any kind of roleplay or fan-written fiction is the presence of the dreaded Mary Sue. If you're not familiar with the term, a Mary Sue is a character who is overly idealized, has few or no actual flaws and functions as a wish-fulfillment or fantasy for the author. In WoW, this type of character is also frequently tied to major lore figures – the stereotypical lovechild of Thrall and Jaina (or some other such invented tie to a major character). Unfortunately, sometimes this turns into an avoidance of all lore information in an attempt to not make the character Sue-ish. In a world like Azeroth that has a lot of really well developed lore, that can result in characters who are dangerously ambiguous and don't have any connection or history. So how do you write a lore-based character without toeing the Mary Sue line?
The Road to Mordor: 10 reasons why LotRO is worth picking up over shiny new MMOs
Every Friday, The Road to Mordor brings you the latest in Lord of the Rings Online news, guides and analysis. Hey dol merry dol, Lord of the Rings Online fans! My name is Justin Olivetti, and I have the pleasure of joining you on this winding, epic road to Mordor. I play a Captain on the Gladden server, and some of my favorite activities in LotRO include wandering accidentally into signature mob camps, exterminating the local fauna in the name of Deeds, and trying to cobble together the perfect pirate costume for show. So I know that LotRO is one of the best MMORPGs out there, and you know that as well, but with all the newer MMOs bursting out of the gate on what seems like a weekly basis, how can you convince your friends, loved ones and everyone in your social network that a three-year-old title is worth giving a try if they missed it the first time around? Never fear -- I am on your side, and ready to equip you with ten terrific reasons why the lovechild of Turbine and Tolkien deserve an even greater number of folks exploring the lands of Middle-earth. So hit the jump and let's spread the word!
The roles we play, part 2
The biggest mistake game designers make is substituting in reams of text where immersive gameplay should be. Game designers aren't just responsible for creating balanced and interesting game mechanics that work.
The roles we play
To some people, the term "role-playing" conjures up images of guys with tinfoil swords and shields shouting "Lighting bolt!". Role-playing in MMOs gets a similarly polarised reception, suggesting scenes of people playing pretend and speaking to each other in Shakespearean tone. To those of us that grew up with pen-and-paper role-playing games and single-player RPGs, it might mean the opportunity to play fantastic characters like wizards and rogues. At its core, however, role-playing is something far more subtle and fundamental than we sometimes give it credit for and it underpins the entire MMO genre. In playing an MMO, we are inherently playing roles that the game's developers have created for us. But do most MMO developers really know how to create engaging gameplay for us or are they failing to immerse us in their own chosen roles? In this probative opinion piece, I delve into the roles we play in MMOs and the things developers often do wrong when designing an immersive game experience.
All the World's a Stage: Anonymosity
All the World's a Stage, and all the orcs and humans merely players. They have their stories and their characters; and one player in his time plays many roles. Roleplaying is a journey of trust you take with strangers. You may now and then start out with a group of people you know in real life, but for the most part, the people you roleplay with have no idea who you really are, or why you are sitting here at the computer. You can tell them if you want to, but most people don't ask. Roleplayers tend to keep personal details private, and don't intrude on one another's space. Besides, other roleplayers don't necessarily care that much about who you "really are" either. They're there to get to know your character, not you as a person, unless your character first makes a very good impression and they decide that they actually want to be friends as real people. Even though you respect each other as people who share the same interest, there's still a distance between you which either (or both) of you may wish to maintain. And yet, the relationship you have is one of trust. It's not at all at the same level as a best friend of course, but you still have to trust one another in a very creative sense -- you rely on each other to create interesting things for your characters to share with one another. You're not just buying a shirt from a salesperson or holding the door for a passerby -- you're exchanging behavior and language in an unpredictable and totally interconnected way. Any little surprise a stranger brings to an interaction may completely alter the whole game session and stick in your mind as one of your most memorable gaming experiences. Roleplayers have to trust other roleplayers to help make those experiences positive, even without knowing anything at all about one another. Sometimes two characters can even become very close friends, even though the real people behind them do not.
MMOrigins: The play's the thing
When it comes to my roots in MMOs, I actually have to start fairly early on with my general introduction to tech geekery. Growing up in my house was a somewhat strange affair. You see, back when computers used to take up entire rooms and ran on giant reels of tape -- later plastic key cards and paper tapes -- my father was working with them. Being part of our household meant one was essentially living with a highly technical mind that worked on and loved things like supercomputers. I experienced ideas and machines that many in the world hadn't, save in movies or on TV. It also meant that there were some pretty strange technical odds and ends floating around our home.
All the World's a Stage: We don't need no narration
All the World's a Stage, and all the orcs and humans merely players. They have their stories and their characters; and one player in his time plays many roles. Throughout my career as a roleplaying columnist on WoW.com, I've been talking about roleplaying as a way to tell stories, but last week a comment by Zombie, as well as those made by a few others on the same topic, caused me to think about roleplay stories in a new way. Perhaps what we roleplayers do isn't actually storytelling so much as it is character development through interesting and somewhat disjointed anecdotes. There's really no beginning, middle, or end to a roleplayed character in WoW. Instead, what you get is a mishmash of events and experiences, which you may then string together into a story in your mind if you like. But even if you don't, you can see that most of us don't really expect for a narrative to develop from a clear beginning, through various plot developments, and finally lead into an exciting climax. There is something else roleplayers want to get out of their experience, even if many of us have trouble articulating exactly what it is.
All the World's a Stage: Attitudes about roleplaying for the first time
All the World's a Stage, and all the orcs and humans merely players. They have their stories and their characters; and one player in his time plays many roles.We've talked before about getting started in roleplaying, as well as how to find the right group to roleplay with. But there's also another aspect the question of roleplaying for the first time, which is that inner attitude people feel towards it.I often see people leaving comments on All the World's a Stage, saying that they have some sort of story for their character inside their heads, but they don't let it out, for various reasons. Some don't feel that they have the right social space to let it out, and find it difficult to connect with others in such a way that their internal idea can actually take shape in reality. Others feel as though roleplaying isn't for them, even though they clearly seem to have the gift for it. In both cases, their roleplaying is limited to their own mind, where no one else can hear it or benefit from it at all. For every one who posts something about it on a site like this one, how many more just think about it, and never say anything to anyone?
