Post by Morreion on Jan 21, 2011 10:48:42 GMT -5
Player Perspectives: MMORPG - Where's the RP?
Hot on the heels of last week's forum discussion about whether or not most player still role play in their games, Isabelle Parsley's latest Player Perspectives column wonders where the RP is in MMORPGs these days. Isabelle has impressive role playing credentials from back in the good old days but admits to sometimes having difficulty role playing in MMOs. Read on and then tell us about your experiences role playing (or not) in MMOs in the comments below.
As far as I'm concerned after a decade of experiencing it, massive online RP is at base nothing like tabletop RP used to be. Tabletop groups used to be static (for the most part), with people you knew or got to know and whom you saw in person every time you gathered to play. Online RP is often catch-as-catch-can with whoever you happen to run across. In fact, the most successful online RP experiences I know of involve a recreation of the static tabletop groups: people who know each other, if only online, who get together regularly, and who have had a chance to gel as a group. It's sort of like adventure-grouping: you can occasionally find some really cool PUGs, but for the most part you'll get a much smoother experience if you adventure with people you know and have worked with before...
The RP in MMORPG is definitely not a given these days, and I'm not sure it ever really was anything but a minority interest, even though most of the initial MMO players were probably gamers, at least a decade ago. There's just too much else going on in MMOs, socially and experientially, to utterly enforce a rigid separation between who's onscreen and who's in the chair directing.
There certainly is a wide separation between RPing live around a table and through a game where most of the mechanics are not concerned with RP. They are two different things in my mind, though the latter came from the former.
Hot on the heels of last week's forum discussion about whether or not most player still role play in their games, Isabelle Parsley's latest Player Perspectives column wonders where the RP is in MMORPGs these days. Isabelle has impressive role playing credentials from back in the good old days but admits to sometimes having difficulty role playing in MMOs. Read on and then tell us about your experiences role playing (or not) in MMOs in the comments below.
As far as I'm concerned after a decade of experiencing it, massive online RP is at base nothing like tabletop RP used to be. Tabletop groups used to be static (for the most part), with people you knew or got to know and whom you saw in person every time you gathered to play. Online RP is often catch-as-catch-can with whoever you happen to run across. In fact, the most successful online RP experiences I know of involve a recreation of the static tabletop groups: people who know each other, if only online, who get together regularly, and who have had a chance to gel as a group. It's sort of like adventure-grouping: you can occasionally find some really cool PUGs, but for the most part you'll get a much smoother experience if you adventure with people you know and have worked with before...
The RP in MMORPG is definitely not a given these days, and I'm not sure it ever really was anything but a minority interest, even though most of the initial MMO players were probably gamers, at least a decade ago. There's just too much else going on in MMOs, socially and experientially, to utterly enforce a rigid separation between who's onscreen and who's in the chair directing.
There certainly is a wide separation between RPing live around a table and through a game where most of the mechanics are not concerned with RP. They are two different things in my mind, though the latter came from the former.
