MMO Roleplaying

[kayay]

Before I ever messageboard role-played I didn’t "get it". I didn’t understand how one played when you had so many people doing more or less their own thing, but then I played and it all made sense in a nonsensical way. Now the great mysteries are tabletop role-playing games, the concept of which I understand but the mechanics of which I don't --

Comments

[tongari]

my fond memories of any kind of RP in Lineage 2 are limited to being a pervy dark elf. he was a very lovable pervy dark elf though! and he had evil cousins, and lots of prey to perv at. and while in a MUD I would usually just say 'I leer in your general direction', in L2 it was always 'Ryuuku leers ..' I mean, it was not serious RP at all, I'd have been kicked off my old MUD for it. But I did not feel like using L2 for RP the way I'd gotten used to RPing quite straight-facedly in MUD. (It's also to do with the RP-inforcement of the MUD though, and the people I played with.)

In the end no matter how gorgeous an MMO is, it's not as good as something like MUD because you can't really create your 'own' character with description strings or perform an action differently from anyone else. I suppose hardcore RPers would always prefer something they had more control over. But um, looking at my xfire, I think there is a reason I love MMOs, and if not for my isp I would still be playing ZerA now (surrounded by angry Koreans and whatnot).

From a (formerly) rabid text-based rper's pov

[caliah]

This Loopy forgot to mention that even so-called free-form roleplay has its own set of rules, just as an MMO is defined by a set of rules. They both have a theme, terms of engagement (if it comes to that), and rules to ensure fair play between two parties. What limits MMORPG roleplay isn't that the game designers thought up the theme themselves (hell, as they say in creative writing, no story is ever truly original) but that your avatar can't quite satisfactorily convey what you can express with the nuances of language available to you in a written rather than graphical medium. It also takes out a lot of the work involved in imagining a scenario, and what remains is just the narrative