storyboard
Latest
Storyboard: Problem children, part the second
Creating characters is hard work. It's hard enough when you're just concerned with making a really cool melee character who can kick other melee characters up and down the block, and it gets infinitely harder when you're trying to put together something that at least looks like a three-dimensional individual at the right angle. That having been said, there are certain ideas that are just problematic, character types that might seem like a good idea when you're staring at the screen but become a really bad one as soon as you hit "create." Our last look at problem characters focused on the sort that you know you're creating at the time, the sort that sound nifty in your head but cause some serious problems in actual play. This time we're looking at the other side, the sort of thing that's far easier to notice while interacting with characters rather than while creating them. But it's still well worth keeping these types in mind so that if you start traveling down these roads, you can make a turn. On to the problem children!
Storyboard: Importance
As I write this column, I am sitting on a train to New York Comic Con, celebrating an industry that has been running for basically forever and seems to be rather steadily dying. I'm sad to say it, because I never really grew out of loving comic books, but sales that 10 years ago constituted a rather dismal failure now constitute a pretty big hit, and we're certainly not getting comics aimed at kids in most circles. (I adore Last Stand of the Wreckers, and it's a wonderful example of doing a mature comic correctly, but I feel sorry for parents who might buy it because their kid liked Transformers Animated.) That got me thinking about roleplaying, something that a lot of people see as being a fossil of the origins of MMOs. I've seen so many arguments that "RPG" no longer means any actual roleplaying is expected, and yet each one feels like reopening a wound. I think that roleplaying is important and that it's a good thing, and while its death may or may not be in the cards (I don't think we're anywhere near that), it's vital that we take a look at what is important about roleplaying and why it means so much to so many of us.
Storyboard: Brother from another series
Some players and characters are nice enough to point out to you right away that they're not actually from around here. You know the ones -- the elves with long flowing blonde hair and names that imply some variation on legs and the non-presence of same are certainly a long-standing example. Of course, the people in question are rarely roleplaying, but that doesn't change the number of elven marksmen who are all the best in the world at hitting a target, never mind the "miss" result that pops up every so often when they nock their arrows. In fiction, they're called expys, short for exported characters. They're guest stars from elsewhere, and while most roleplayers have a name that's a bit more original than some variant on Legolas, they're no less common. After all, if you're inspired by a particularly good character and want to try playing him in a given environment, why wouldn't you just pick him up and transplant him? But there are good ways to do it and bad ways, just like there are far more ways to make dull and unlikable characters than interesting ones. So follow on past the break for a look at how to make your expy fall into the "interesting homage" camp rather than the "xx_Legolas_xx" camp.
Storyboard: Winner's circle
It's time for another rant here on Storyboard, or at least an animal that's in the same general family as the dreaded rant-beast. Considering that both this column and WoW Insider's resident RP columnist Michael Gray have been covering similar ground over the past few weeks, it seems only appropriate to dip back into the well of the tools that roleplayers need, deserve, and want. And while I had considered a different column, it occurred to me that I wanted to take a very different tack this week. The past couple ranty columns have both focused on what games are getting wrong and what we deserve that we're not getting. But generally speaking, I prefer to be positive instead of negative, and amidst all of my justifiable complaints, that was getting lost. So this week, we're going to look at five games that are doing pretty well at supporting roleplayers. My list is far from exhaustive, and it doesn't include every game I'm personally involved with at the moment -- Final Fantasy XIV isn't on there, for instance -- but it is a good snapshot of who's on Team RP.
Storyboard: Problem children
Sometimes you have a character concept that just doesn't quite work. We've talked about that before, at least in the context of trying to make sure your awesome new idea doesn't wind up on your list of discarded alts. But there are also times when the concept is problematic long before you get as far as playing. There are certain archetypes and ideas that just do not work for various reasons or that (at the very least) require your square-peg character to be shoved in the roundest of holes. The loner, of course, is the classic archetype that people love to play without its ever working correctly. It's hard to have a proper loner in an environment where socializing is necessary. But there are other problem types that aren't highlighted as often, sometimes because they're not as common, and sometimes because the people who want to play these concepts get very enthusiastic about them. Here, then, are some of the major problem children among character archetypes, as well as some suggestions about how to make them work right after all.
Storyboard: Finding what I'm looking for
Two weeks ago, I made something of an impassioned plea because, while I like to roleplay quite a bit and have had wonderful experiences doing so (even in World of Warcraft, which kind of got turned into the villain of the piece), roleplaying is essentially seen as a non-entity. It's unsupported and generally ignored by development teams, and part of that is our fault for not demanding that it be made more important. So this week I'm going to talk about some minimum and fairly reasonable baselines of roleplaying features, things that already exist in many games but aren't even close to being universal. In response to one of the frequent comments from both sides, it's worth noting that yes, roleplayers are a minority. But then, so are extremely hardcore PvP players, and the people who will rush through all available endgame content in less than a week, and players who can multi-box with five different characters, and so on. The difference is that those minorities stay and grow, because they're given the tools they need. Roleplayers aren't. Sometimes by not creating the market, you're denying an audience you don't know is there, an argument so simple that articles could be (and have been) written just on that principle.
Storyboard: Lore -- what is it good for?
Over the course of the long holiday weekend, I took the opportunity to apply to a guild. (That's right -- I don't get free passes; I have to apply just like everyone else. On a related note, keep an eye out for my list of guilds that I'm not in that are also horrible.) Among the many questions on the application was one that immediately made me sit up and take notice. To summarize, the question was asking how important it was to the applicant that all RP remain grounded in the game's lore. In my mind, lore has a strange relationship with roleplayers. On the one hand, it's rare that you'll start playing in the world if the lore doesn't interest you at least somewhat -- no one wants to play in a game that doesn't feel like a remotely plausible world. (Yes, we're using "plausible" in the sense that dragons, alien invasions, and human-like robots can all be accepted. Plausibility for unreal settings is an odd concept.) Yet at the same time, the lore is its own creature, not really actively supporting roleplayers and sometimes ruling out cool stuff. How do we deal with our simultaneous friend and enemy?
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.
Storyboard: Exit, pursued by a bear
Roleplaying is not a universal activity, sadly. What happens among a group of characters winds up being canon in a very limited sense for that group of characters. Sure, you know the relationships between your fellow adventurers intimately, but you can still admit that anyone outside of your circle of roleplaying may have no idea who these people are. It's essentially a shared illusion, one that is easily broken when someone lets out the dread incantation of "sorry, guys, I'm quitting." It's bad enough when you're suddenly asked to accept the vagaries of television, trying to convince us that two clearly different actors are the same person, or that a character we've enjoyed is just "on a trip" that's lasted for the better part of two years. It's even worse than the entire illusion of events that requires you to accept that someone has gone missing from a major storyline. How do you accommodate a player leaving without too much damage to the shared illusion?
Storyboard: Say yes to the dress
You all know her as soon as you see her, and no matter what your gender, you're inherently terrified of her. She looks like a woman on screen, and everyone roleplaying with her needs to treat her as such, or the whole idea of working in a shared universe gets shot to pieces. But you also know that she's not acting like any woman you've ever met -- and that's not a good thing. You know full well that behind that catgirl with the "waist" slider turned to minimum and the "chest" slider turned to max, there is a bearded man of frightening girth. I don't understand, for the life of me, what makes playing a technically female character so appealing to certain men. Note the use of the word "technically" there -- the character's presumed genetic makeup might be oriented toward the fairer sex, but the character's not acting like a woman. And after having seen this same thing over and over again, in a fit of pique, I've decided that it's worth examining. How do you play a female character well if you're a man, or vice versa for women playing guys?
Storyboard: Lasting past level two
So you have what you are absolutely certain is a spectacular idea for a character. You spend the better part of a week planning and preparing for this new addition to your stable of alts. Then you create your character, get into the starting area, and you start going to town... and then you log off. And you never touch that character again, because every time you think about logging back in, a deep malaise takes over and you quickly switch to someone else. It's not that you didn't genuinely want to play the character. But for whatever reason, that concept that you had which was so solid turned out to be lacking a fundamental element: something to make you stick with him. It's a bad fate for a good concept, and today, we're taking a closer look at how you can try to ensure that your newest baby doesn't end up getting tossed out with the bathwater.
Storyboard: Guilding the lily
If guilds exist for any purpose in MMOs, it's providing drama for the customer support team to secretly observe and laugh about behind closed doors. (That's my suspicion, at least. I wouldn't blame them.) But as a presumably unintentional side effect of that, guilds are a great way for players to get together and bond over common interests within the game. Considering that roleplaying is one of the most group-intensive activities in any game... well, you see where I'm going here. Getting a good guild can be the difference between a consistent storyline and a few disjointed RP sessions followed by uninstalling the client. Unfortunately, if there's a magical formula for getting a guild that suits your needs perfectly in every game, I haven't yet found it. There's a process that works fairly well as a general flow, however, and while it hasn't always gotten me into the guild I wound up sticking with, it has at least pointed me in the right direction. So without further ado, this week's Storyboard is dedicated to finding you a guild. (By which I mean telling you about how to find a guild, after you click the "Read More" link. Which counts as further ado, I guess.)
Storyboard: A group effort
Roleplaying is like many other activities in MMOs -- it can't be done alone. That means that no matter how much of an antisocial player you might be for the rest of the game, you'll need a number of other people to make any roleplaying work. By extension, any longer storylines and character development require people working together with some level of consistency. You can technically have a character's development take place without the same audience, of course, but it won't mean as much to the late arrivals. Put very simply, you want a coherent overarching sequence of events that you can point to for your characters. This is going to require some level of group coordination, and group RP events are a great excuse for roleplaying bonds to form anyway, so it's fully endorsed. For this week's Storyboard, we're going to take a look at running a group event in the smoothest way possible, ranging from a simple one-off night of adventure to a long guild-wide storyline that ends with time travel. (You know the story is really getting overwrought when the time travel makes things simpler, see.)
Storyboard: The villain in me is the villain in you
I don't play any villains, and I never have. Not in their words, anyway -- they're always noble crusaders fighting against others who are sadly mistaken. Or just driven by pragmatism. Or suffering for the sins of another. They've always got a justification, a reason why the things they've done are somehow necessary. And even though I know (hopefully) that they're full of it, it makes them fascinating to play. So for today's Storyboard, I want to talk about villains in RP and how to make them work in your favor. Before we start talking in-depth, however, it's worth noting that villains do share one thing with in-character romance: they're flashpoints for drama. They're not as bad, since it's a lot easier to separate the player from the character, but they still have the potential. They're also not going to fit into every style of roleplaying, as not every group is going to be conducive to having a specific character antagonist to work around. At least for now, we're just going to take those facts as given and look into the most important part of the equation: making and playing an effective villain in the first place.
Storyboard: A man of many talents
Rejoice! After the columns of the last two weeks, the specter of relationships has been forever vanquished! (We're using "forever" in the same sense you'd see it in a comic book here. In other words, give it a month.) Diving back into the haphazard series on character creation, today we'll be taking a look at generating a character based solidly upon their abilities -- a method that seems a bit odd at first glance and almost ridiculously simple upon further consideration. Think about it for a moment. If someone asks you to describe yourself, odds are excellent that you don't start with a recounting of your personality or your history unless you're on a date. Most times, you start with what you do -- hobbies, profession, and any other pertinent diversions on the road toward the grave. It's not a real cognitive leap from being accountants, clerks, and waiters to being warriors, mages, and rogues. The big question is extrapolating backward from the ability to figure out the sort of person who would go into the profession in the first place. Because it's such a broad field, in fact, I'm going to take a look at it from three different angles.
Storyboard: Anyone else but you
Welcome back to another installment of Storyboard, and another week of discussing romantic relationships in roleplaying. If you missed last week's column, it's a helpful primer, talking both about why it's a terrible idea and why the odds are high that you're going to do it anyway. And I can't criticize on that front -- I eat at McDonald's even though I know it's bad for me, I buy new Transformers even though I know it's not the best use of my money, and I watch Persons Unknown even though I know it's only going to last one season. Still, a bad idea is only as bad as you make it. To continue my above analogy, as long as I know the whole time that the show is only going to last one season, I can enjoy the heck out of that season. (It's not Lost, but it's pretty darn good.) And while you can't fix all of the fundamental problems with roleplaying relationships, you can do a lot to make sure that the course of love runs smoothly for the players, if not the characters.
Storyboard: I only have eyes for you
Welcome back to another edition of Storyboard, wherein I'm going to tackle an issue that is very near and dear to my heart. Matter of fact, it's near and dear to almost everyone's heart, and it's a topic that I'm sure I'm either going to revisit or avoid wholeheartedly in the future, because we're stepping into an emotional minefield. Today, we're going to be talking about romantic relationships in roleplaying. Okay, now that some of the readers have run screaming from the room (which was kind of unnecessary, they could have just closed the browser), let's clarify that we are talking about romantic relationships, not anything else that could fall under the header of romance. That magical night you shared with a Mithra in Bastok Markets is an entirely different topic that I have no real interest in covering here. So we're at least into the realm of just plain emotional awkwardness, and that's for the best, as there's more than enough material there to cover for years.
Storyboard: The infinite sadness of Aunt May
For the five people who don't know the reference, Aunt May is the mother figure in Spider-Man's life. She provides him with several important functions, such as being frail, threatening death, and getting kidnapped whenever his motivation for fighting crime starts to flag. She also dated Doctor Octopus, but that was just strange. The point is that she represents one of the most important part of any character's storyline -- the people you associate with other than heavily armed mercenaries (or the local equivalent) who just provide mundane functions in your life. This doesn't just cover your ailing kidnap-bait aunt. It covers your childhood friend who decided to go into real estate instead of demon-slaying, your mother and father who still want to make sure you're wearing a coat when you abscond to the frozen wastes to slay a dragon, and the one-eyed bandit whom you've sworn to kill at the first opportunity. They're all massively important to your character's identity, but they suffer a very big problem in an MMO roleplaying environment. Even by the rather liquid standards of MMOs, these characters aren't real.
Storyboard: Getting into the scene
So, I lied. While I had originally been planning on something different for this week's column, I had a new topic more or less thrown to my doorstep from Bio Break. It's all well and good to talk about roleplaying as if everyone has been doing it since small times, but there are plenty of players with a vague curiosity who have never tried it out. For them, roleplaying is like heroin, vaguely promising a good time while always seeming dangerous, with the failures so publicly visible that... You know, I'm dropping that analogy right now before it starts looking terrifyingly appropriate. The point is that people are interested who aren't sure quite where to start. Thus, we're taking this week to put together a few things that help make it just a little easier to get into the joy of roleplay without getting bored, unintentionally stepping on toes, or winding up as the butt of everyone's in-character jokes. We can be a catty bunch. But you can get started without drama or too many issues, and it's not as bad as you might think.
Storyboard: Everybody starts somewhere
Welcome back to another edition of Storyboard! This week, and for the next couple of weeks, we're going to be talking about generating characters. It's a far cry from building characters in a pen-and-paper game, naturally -- MMOs don't tend to require you to make choices about things like specialization until you've been playing for some time, and the generation system isn't tremendously open. And we're not focused on working out the best possible stat combination in this column, anyway. We're concerned about the actual person behind the (eventual) Sword of Godslaying. So where to start? Let's just assume you're staring at a basic character creation screen and trying to figure out who you're going to be adopting as your newest persona. There are three basic starting points for developing a character that work in nearly every game, and they let you start off with a character who might not be fully realized, but certainly can feel that way. We'll look at each of them in turn today and focus on the specifics in the coming weeks.
