a few thoughts on RPGs

[wombat_socho]

If you've had to sit through this before, feel free to walk away and read something else.
If you have more insight into how MMORPG like World of Warcraft work than I do (THIS IS NOT HARD) I would appreciate your comments.

Comments

[therevdrnye]

That depends on how (or whether) the developers decide to handle the PVP vs. PVE issue as regards personal domains, and it also depends on whether or not such domains can be owned by multiple PCs, or if PCs who have no domains can choose to be vassals or mentors to the domain holder. Those questions alone could, depending on their answers, require several man-years of programming effort to implement.

The economics of such domains will add more man-years of programming. Your holding must start at some basic point, and you will have to pony up the in-game wealth to create the initial structure. Call it your Hall, since we're discussing semi-medieval fantasy, and if you aren't wildly wealthy you are probably starting with a wooden structure. The Hall gives you a place to hold court (literally, since you're the local authority), a basic defensive structure, and a place for your starting complement of armsmen to sleep. A community theoretically springs up around this Hall, and *should* become the source of revenue and people with which you can improve your holding.

If the developers require you to personally earn all of the wealth needed to improve your domain, growth will be ridiculously slow, unless they make it ridiculously cheap. If they create a tax system to generate wealth to drive growth of the domain, it will be necessary for the player to decide how to use his taxes to improve the domain - which will make this aspect of the game anathema to some players. Remember that we're talking about a sizable number of man-years worth of programming effort to produce something which will be engrossingly interesting to less than half of all MMORPG players - possibly a *lot* less than half.

Going back to the PVP issue - to what extent will your domain be susceptible to raiding by enemy players? "Safe" zones would presumably represent the lands of established powers, so you can't build there... you end up building on the frontier of your "Kingdom", because that's where the "new" land is. So, you can be attacked... if you're out of town on a busy holiday weekend, and don't get a chance to log in, does this mean that you'll return to find that all of the stay-at-home players have raided your new domain out of existence?

Would it be necessary to set limitations on how many people can attack a domain, and how often? Is it even *reasonable* to allow people to attack the domains of any given other player? Only a few such attackers should actually be able to *reach* your domain because of theoretical geographical limitations. In EVE, it stands to reason that large numbers of combatants can cover enormous distances with relative ease, using FTL travel. In fantasy campaigns, this kind of portability should be difficult to achieve.

Finally, moving back over to economics, how much damage should a person suffer when raided? Are they subject to being raided by someone much higher level than they are, or by groups which in theory should be able to overrun them completely based on numerical superiority? Can they rely on support from "nearby" allies?

The problem is that the MMORPG starts to become a MMORTS game after al while... and that appeals to a different audience. Not exclusively so, but different.

And, off I must go to deal with other matters... I'll add a closing remark or two later.

[wombat_socho]

Moving long distances in EVE isn't as easy as it sounds, since most interstellar travel is through jumpgates, which in zero-sec space can be camped and/or bubbled, trapping ships in an interdiction field that keeps them from warping out to safety. Effectively, you can only move quickly in space where there aren't any gankers around, which is why it's a bad idea to travel alone. :)

Yeah, the economics of a medieval RPG are going to be a turnoff for some players, but you can rely on NPC seneschals to do some things for you. So I guess you'd wind up with a fusion of RPG (for the hacking and slashing, etc.) and RTS for building a barony.

[therevdrnye]

Well, I didn't *say* that it would be a *safe* trip - just that it could be done fairly rapidly. The same just shouldn't be true in a fantasy setting, at least not for mass raiding parties.

[wombat_socho]

Agreed. In fact, mass raiding parties would move slower than forces defending a castle, since raiders would need to bring supplies with them - or resort to pillage, which has its limits. Defenders operating out of a castle would have a relatively secure supply base, assuming the NPC seneschal (or PC seneschal) has been doing his job.