The Dragon's Talon

This is a response to a blog post on Gamasutra by a man named Steve Mallory, a designer I know through the ‘net who makes some good points about narrative design; read the original post here…

True authorial control… Now there is a scary phrase to use in front of your producer…

True authorial control is taking your player and asking them what they want to do today, rather than telling them what they are allowed to do.  Is that wise? (continue reading…)

Last week, we continued learning about archaic speech. It was another very patronising lesson, but you just keep coming back…

This week, we will learn a little about insults, so let’s put a nice safe break in. Only continue reading if you are sure that you want to…

(continue reading…)

Last week, we started learning about archaic speech. It was a very patronising lesson, but you seem to have come back…

Today, we will learn about oaths and curses. We will touch on religion, some slightly vulgar words and imagery that might border on violence involving sexual acts and anatomical impossibilities.

(continue reading…)

So you want to try some archaic speech in your roleplaying, be it MMOs or tabletop games? I will try to offer some help over the course of this series of articles which might help.

First of all, ask yourself if it is really a good idea. If you are playing a barbarian, you only really need to yell ‘Krom!’ a few times. On the other hand, done well with a character who justifies it, it can be a great idea. Think of Shakespeare; Romeo spoke in couplets, Hamlet too, but they had style and class. Dogberry, in contrast, was not the ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ type.

(continue reading…)

I am a man. I can’t say that I have ever really wanted to change that. It is not like I have ever gone out in women’s clothing, I have only ever passed myself off as a woman once online, but… people look at me funny when I say that I often play women in games and I am not talking Tomb Raider or Bloodrayne.

My initial reason for this was simply ugly male models in MMOs. Oh, and the fact that I experimented in the bazaar in Everquest and noticed that my female toon tended to make more money than my male one.

I never really ‘played’ a female character in Everquest, so it was D&D Online where I first toyed with joining the distaff side. The male elves looked kind of indistinct and naff, like wiry old men rather than long-lived graceful creatures. The female ones looked a little bit busty, but I put that down to Lara Croft syndrome.

For the first three levels or so, all was fine. Even my female guild-mates accepted me as a female character, but it never got strange. As the guild started to fall apart, I ended up with pick-up groups. Oh dear… Misogynists and idiots abound in any MMORPG, but they seem attracted to pick-up groups. I think anyone playing a female toon who didn’t take off their armour and dance was assumed to be a real woman, to the point where even my protestations were assumed to be playing hard-to-get. In the end, that was what killed the game for me.

But why? Why do people assume that men never play women, even to the point of flirting and inappropriate emotes? Roleplaying is all about being something you’re not, right? I mean, I am not an elf or any good at spoting and disarming potentially-dealy traps either, but people can cope with that particular issue.

I suppose the issue is that people expect you to stick to those truths that you can manage. In D&D stats, we are all level 0 commoners or maybe (in certain cases) level 1 experts with lots of ranks in profession and craft. (some of us could stat ourselves in systems like Shadowrun, but that is another article) Since they offer multiple races in most games, people won’t ever assume that an elf is played by a 120 year-old perpetually-young aesthete, but gender… gender is inviolate…

Why?

Recently, through sheer dumb luck and a POETS day, my wife and I acquired a pair of keys for Lord of the Rings Online. I had played its 14-day trial before and had fond memories of it, but I had never got around to upgrading my account to the full version.

I started downloading on Friday, I finished some time on Sunday. This is normal for us, we are lucky to get 60kB/s on our 8-Mb connection, so we just live with it. I think we might have been slightly negative-disposed toward it for this reason. I was happy to wait, because those good memories kept me going.

I finally got to play it and I started getting bored. Something just didn’t work for me. It was sort of fun, but not the exciting adventure that I remembered. I persisted, but it still wasn’t grabbing me. The abilities I had were not very intuitive, I hit them out of habit more than intent. The world was washed out and uninspiring, it lacked the immediacy and vibrancy that I had got used to.

I did it, I committed the cardinal sin; I started to compare it to World of Warcraft…

Every time I go back to an MMO, I play for a little while and then get bored or frustrated and start to crave World of Wacraft. I want to blame it on rose-tinted spectacles, but that is not it. I have left and then gone back to Everquest (one and two), Rappelz, Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies (pre and post ‘upgrade’), D&D Online and now Lord of the Rings Online. Some of them have big flaws, some have small ones, but I can come back to that later.

I keep going back to WoW and I love it every time. It is dumbed-down, it is mass market and it is cartoony. It has been enjoyed by more people than all the girls of the Moulin Rouge through history.

World of Warcraft is just not art, but I find that I still love it every time I come back. I surrender; take me back to Azeroth…

Barring the free month I received with a copy of Ultima Online, my first real experience of a modern MMO was Everquest, about a week prior to the release of the ‘Shadows of Luclin’ expansion.

The game had me enthralled; no wonder it was known to some as ‘Ever-crack’ for its ‘addictive’ nature. It was the immersion that got me, a well-defended immersion that was enforced by strict naming policies and strong encouragements. I spent much of my time with my RP tag turned on, being a Wood-Elf Ranger out in the wilderness. Later, I created a character on a roleplaying server to go that one step further.

Years passed, I moved on from Everquest to other games. I tried my best, by they didn’t grab me as Everquest once had. Cruelly though, something about these other games had ruined Everquest for me. Where once I saw miles of expansive plains and a huge game-world, now I simply saw a boring hour-long run to get from Freeport to Qeynos, or an expensive portal from the druids. I refused to use the Knowledge Portals or the Spires, perhaps out of some irrationally masochistic loyalty to the past. I only felt that sense of wonder once more; my Tier’Dal rogue betrayed Freeport and I remember the sense of wonder as I fled the city for the home of my one-time enemies.

Thought I had tried to put it off, I found myself trying World of Warcraft. I felt shamed, like a child who has learned to tie his own shoelaces, but chooses to wear shoes with velcro. No matter what I tried, I felt like a reader of the Sun newspaper; I felt soiled, but strangely comforted by the lack of effort it required.

To my shame, I was hooked. In time, I learned to find the nuances and discovered that World of Warcraft was not vacuous or low-brow unless I chose to play it that way. I learned to love the mass-market success. (I also learned to envy it, but that is another story)

I took the plunge and created a roleplaying character. I prepared for the immersive in-character experience and then saw that the world was still largely populated with ‘DaKilla’ and ‘HealU’ wherever I looked. I knew that it would not be Everquest’s approach to roleplaying, I knew it was roleplay-preferred rather than enforced, but…

I miss Everquest at times like this. I am an elistic snob, but it pains me to see names on a Roleplay server that would have been naming violations even on a non-RP Everquest server.

It is an unpopular idea in most RPGs to let a character die in any permanent sense. Many CRPGs, even ones with a save functionality, include either a resurrection spell or even an ‘unconscious’ status that the character will recover from, meaning that the party dies as one or not at all.

Tabletop RPGs even tend toward this,giving the player spells to resurrect or some special status effects that remove them from the fight and then they can heal up again afterwards.

With this in mind, the average MMO has death without any real consequence. Everquest had an experience penalty and then the infamous corpse-run, which was later downgraded to only levels 10 and above. World of Warcraft, on the other hand, mildly dents your armour and charges you a few copper pieces to get the dings hammered out.

This is with good reason; the average newbie dies a few times before they finish the starting area’s quests. Back in my EQ days, I learnt the wonders of the corpse-run before I even found out what second level felt like. (Kelethin was no kind to newbies, nor were higher-level player handing out free beer in the aforementioned tree-top city)

And yet… this attitude is not universal… Shaiya (a free MMORPG) has Ultimate mode, where your character is deleted after three minutes if a cleric does not revive you. Blizzard themselves included Iron Man Mode for online Diablo.

For most players, dying is an inconvenience; you rez’, you repair, you return to battle. Some consider even this too harsh. So why add permadeath? The answer is that death means nothing to modern players. We fight mobs beyond out level just to see if it can be done, so we lose our sense of danger, of excitement. A permadeath game keeps you cautious and makes the healer even more valuable. Permadeath makes those big kills more special. Permadeath makes you fear for your character, it makes you care if your character survives each fight…

And in my opinion, it is no bad thing to care if your character will live or die…