Role Playing with other people.
Oct. 22nd, 2008 08:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cybertrixxI've been pondering this all day.
Two things have come up on WoW recently (yes, that's right. I finally succombed to xpAIDS) which, I think, highlight a rather interesting quirk of roleplaying games, especially CRPG's. Many people have entirely different play styles and IC/OOC divide - it's one of the game's strengths that it can accomodate this (so long as you're happy to put up with an hour or two of grind here and there in between doing cool stuff) - but what happens when your enjoyment of the 'C' and 'G' parts of 'CRPG' comes into conflict with other people's 'R' and 'P'?
A World of our Own
I applaud Blizzard on their introduction of the 'Recruit-a-friend' feature. It's fantastic marketing. It lets people munch levels like popcorn, powering up with as little grind as possible, encouraging an existing player to bring a new player under their wing with an alt character and take them through the game, showing them all the cool stuff. Aware that existing players will have existing commitments, they even implemented the 'grant a level' feature which allows the new player to go off and do their own thing and then quickly bring their friend up to their level.
It's great. Playing with a friend is great. You can blast through the 'CG' parts of the game while having someone to bounce 'RP' off on the way.
RP is fab, isn't it? It's what makes the game world come to life. Take away RP, and you've got 70 (80 soon) levels of soulless grind ahead of you (interspersed with some fab instanced scripted sequences and cool looking set-pieces.)
So. What's the problem?
If you and your friend are playing through under the assumption that you'll both be doing the same quests together, exploring the same areas and roleplaying your characters while doing so, what happens when this wonderful little bubble of idealistic solitude bursts?
Roleplaying is selfish?
You're playing this roleplaying game on a roleplaying server on the assumption that you're going to roleplay - but I'm sure we're all aware that in many ways, Roleplay is inherently selfish. It doesn't care that you're trying to play with your mates. In order to play our characters, we have to (to a greater or lesser extent) forget that we're playing a game, and forget that the other people we're playing with are also playing a game. And this means that in a cooperative game like WoW, you're potentially forcing other people sit around and wait while you go off on your own to do your thing.
In LRP, we regularly run into the problem where it makes perfect sense to kill someone else IC - and you have to balance that against the fact that you're potentially ruining someone else's game. It's generally assumed that by playing, you're opening yourself up to the possiblity of getting PK'd. There's always the chance that your character might die and you won't be able to play with your mates anymore. We're prepared for it. Do we have to be similarly prepared when RP'ing in WoW?
Should we set immersion aside for the sake of others? "Don't split the goddamn party" is generally regarded as a rule to live by in tabletop. MMO's run themselves, so you can quite happily get round the most obvious limitations here - but does it take something away from the game if you roleplay with *everyone* as opposed to *your group*, meaning that you can never reliably plan anything big that isn't spur-of-the-moment?
I spent two hours the other day roleplaying with another character who turned up and started talking to me. Completely unscripted, completely IC, wonderful emergent RP. During these two hours, my recruit-a-friend buddy ended up hanging around kicking his heels and occasionally going off to kill boars. That's pretty damned lame.
Is it appropriate to effectively tell people 'sorry, I don't want to roleplay with you right now, please go away'? Does that mercilessly slaughter any hint of immersion, if everyone in the game is wandering around in their own little toggleable bubble of solitude?
When I was starting out in WoW, I used to wonder why so many people would refuse to stop and roleplay with me. Everyone always seemed so busy - always having to be somewhere or even just ignoring me entirely. I think I know why, now. Everyone's already got their own little circle of friends, their own little guild, their own little raiding team. If you step outside it, you're letting your friends down. In a team-based game where everyone has a job to do and you can't access vast areas of content without the rest of your group, it's no wonder that it can seem like nobody is roleplaying. They are - just not with you.
Next is something that randomly happened last night and which totally unneccessarily annoyed me - through absolutely no fault of the player in question. Allow me to give some background:
There's a part of the game which slowly builds up a quest chain into a climactic encounter with a certain NPC faction, with all sorts of fun scripted scenes along the way. At some point, there is a 'big reveal' when the player is supposed to finally realise what's actually going on.
As my recruit-a-friend and I were building up to do this quest, totally innocently, a fellow player who had already been through the instance in question wandered past and while RP'ing let slip a spoiler that ruins this moment of revelation, thus depriving my recruit-a-friend who had never done that quest/instance before of being able to discover it for himself.
Obviously, there was no malicious intent here. If you've completed a quest before, it barely comes to mind that other people might not have done. And if you're roleplaying your character, it seems perfectly natural to mention things that have happened to them.
Yet by doing so, we can spoil the fun for others. Tough one.
About a year ago while in one of Hellgate's auto-join general chat channels, someone let slip a colossal spoiler which ruins an awesome part of the game plot. It really, really pissed me off. I religiously avoid the 'general chat' channel in every MMO I play nowadays - but how can you filter this kind of thing out of other player's in-character speech when they're perfectly innocently roleplaying with you?
Are spoilers inappropriate even while IC? Should we have to watch what we say while in public chat to avoid inadvertantly ruining the story for other people? I'd *like* to say no. In an ideal world, we wouldn't have to worry. But I, personally, think the answer should be 'yes'. We're all playing the same game - we're just playing through it at different times.
Two things have come up on WoW recently (yes, that's right. I finally succombed to xpAIDS) which, I think, highlight a rather interesting quirk of roleplaying games, especially CRPG's. Many people have entirely different play styles and IC/OOC divide - it's one of the game's strengths that it can accomodate this (so long as you're happy to put up with an hour or two of grind here and there in between doing cool stuff) - but what happens when your enjoyment of the 'C' and 'G' parts of 'CRPG' comes into conflict with other people's 'R' and 'P'?
A World of our Own
I applaud Blizzard on their introduction of the 'Recruit-a-friend' feature. It's fantastic marketing. It lets people munch levels like popcorn, powering up with as little grind as possible, encouraging an existing player to bring a new player under their wing with an alt character and take them through the game, showing them all the cool stuff. Aware that existing players will have existing commitments, they even implemented the 'grant a level' feature which allows the new player to go off and do their own thing and then quickly bring their friend up to their level.
It's great. Playing with a friend is great. You can blast through the 'CG' parts of the game while having someone to bounce 'RP' off on the way.
RP is fab, isn't it? It's what makes the game world come to life. Take away RP, and you've got 70 (80 soon) levels of soulless grind ahead of you (interspersed with some fab instanced scripted sequences and cool looking set-pieces.)
So. What's the problem?
If you and your friend are playing through under the assumption that you'll both be doing the same quests together, exploring the same areas and roleplaying your characters while doing so, what happens when this wonderful little bubble of idealistic solitude bursts?
Roleplaying is selfish?
You're playing this roleplaying game on a roleplaying server on the assumption that you're going to roleplay - but I'm sure we're all aware that in many ways, Roleplay is inherently selfish. It doesn't care that you're trying to play with your mates. In order to play our characters, we have to (to a greater or lesser extent) forget that we're playing a game, and forget that the other people we're playing with are also playing a game. And this means that in a cooperative game like WoW, you're potentially forcing other people sit around and wait while you go off on your own to do your thing.
In LRP, we regularly run into the problem where it makes perfect sense to kill someone else IC - and you have to balance that against the fact that you're potentially ruining someone else's game. It's generally assumed that by playing, you're opening yourself up to the possiblity of getting PK'd. There's always the chance that your character might die and you won't be able to play with your mates anymore. We're prepared for it. Do we have to be similarly prepared when RP'ing in WoW?
Should we set immersion aside for the sake of others? "Don't split the goddamn party" is generally regarded as a rule to live by in tabletop. MMO's run themselves, so you can quite happily get round the most obvious limitations here - but does it take something away from the game if you roleplay with *everyone* as opposed to *your group*, meaning that you can never reliably plan anything big that isn't spur-of-the-moment?
I spent two hours the other day roleplaying with another character who turned up and started talking to me. Completely unscripted, completely IC, wonderful emergent RP. During these two hours, my recruit-a-friend buddy ended up hanging around kicking his heels and occasionally going off to kill boars. That's pretty damned lame.
Is it appropriate to effectively tell people 'sorry, I don't want to roleplay with you right now, please go away'? Does that mercilessly slaughter any hint of immersion, if everyone in the game is wandering around in their own little toggleable bubble of solitude?
When I was starting out in WoW, I used to wonder why so many people would refuse to stop and roleplay with me. Everyone always seemed so busy - always having to be somewhere or even just ignoring me entirely. I think I know why, now. Everyone's already got their own little circle of friends, their own little guild, their own little raiding team. If you step outside it, you're letting your friends down. In a team-based game where everyone has a job to do and you can't access vast areas of content without the rest of your group, it's no wonder that it can seem like nobody is roleplaying. They are - just not with you.
Next is something that randomly happened last night and which totally unneccessarily annoyed me - through absolutely no fault of the player in question. Allow me to give some background:
There's a part of the game which slowly builds up a quest chain into a climactic encounter with a certain NPC faction, with all sorts of fun scripted scenes along the way. At some point, there is a 'big reveal' when the player is supposed to finally realise what's actually going on.
As my recruit-a-friend and I were building up to do this quest, totally innocently, a fellow player who had already been through the instance in question wandered past and while RP'ing let slip a spoiler that ruins this moment of revelation, thus depriving my recruit-a-friend who had never done that quest/instance before of being able to discover it for himself.
Obviously, there was no malicious intent here. If you've completed a quest before, it barely comes to mind that other people might not have done. And if you're roleplaying your character, it seems perfectly natural to mention things that have happened to them.
Yet by doing so, we can spoil the fun for others. Tough one.
About a year ago while in one of Hellgate's auto-join general chat channels, someone let slip a colossal spoiler which ruins an awesome part of the game plot. It really, really pissed me off. I religiously avoid the 'general chat' channel in every MMO I play nowadays - but how can you filter this kind of thing out of other player's in-character speech when they're perfectly innocently roleplaying with you?
Are spoilers inappropriate even while IC? Should we have to watch what we say while in public chat to avoid inadvertantly ruining the story for other people? I'd *like* to say no. In an ideal world, we wouldn't have to worry. But I, personally, think the answer should be 'yes'. We're all playing the same game - we're just playing through it at different times.
