Just talking with a filter, and acting like a Barbarian (whether its the cartoony grunting style, or the more philosophical Conan style where he has a purity of thought about life that takes a bit of reading to really understand). If you don’t want to be a barbarian then the games should encourage you to be a character that does fit.

Instead the game designers paradoxically seem to be catering to the min-maxers, the same crowd of people who work against the whole immersion in a game to dismantle it into a simple clicking/fps game with only one result.

I don’t role play very deeply, so I don’t write everything as a Froglok with “Thou hast” olde worldy speech (give me a filter and I will ), but I do keep to the overly honourable valiant character, so I won’t just walk in to slaughter a bunch of NPC’s just because I know I can earn some AA from them.

Having a light framework of RP added in over a game with the philosophy and standard answer that “its our world” for all the min maxers would add a lot to the game. It would be really refreshing if people picked a race because they could act the way they wanted without penalty rather then +1% to crit.

Its one thing that does endlessly tick me off about our guild hall in EQ2 (I don’t have any say over its contents), its full of pretty races – Fae and dark elves. Lore wise it makes about as much sense as a troll at a beauty pageant and is all the result of having no consequences in the world.

I’m not sure it would work all that well long-term (or at a constant threshold; variation in “puppeteer potential power” would be nice), but it would definitely be an interesting game.

Current you’d do an emote like this:

1. Click near a table
2. Select a bottle of ale
3. Goto Emotes > Actions > Food > Drink Beer
4. Watch a 5 second animation.
5. Find another action to do.

Emotes should always have worked like this:

1. Type “/me hang out in tavern”
2. Character interprets “tavern” as the nearest neighborhood tavern, goes there, and performs the “hang out” action indefinitely by sitting at tables, drinking beer, reading, etc.

Come on devs, syntactical parsing is not THAT hard, esp. if you can restrict the grammar (e.g. a [verb] in [place] construct, do [action] to [object] construct, etc)

Also, each action that the player gives has a chance of rejection – in that case, the player is not a puppeteer (as with virtually all RPGs existing) but is instead a voice in the character’s head. For example, the action “exit tavern” has a very high chance of being rejected if the character finally found a tavern after a very long time (he’ll just ignore the command), while the action “drink beer” will most likely be accepted. When he’s satisfied, he gets a substantial bonus (satisfaction) when he heads outside again.

This is probably ridiculously hard to code, but I would be immensely interested in seeing such a RPG created.

I want you to read this. Then tell me, do you really still want roleplaying in MMOs?

In pen and paper games the contructed content is modules or scenarios. The alternative, when players go off the rails, is called “winging it”.

I’ve GMed both styles and the style of content has nothing to do with how well people roleplay. I’ve seen games where people go off the rails just for attention-seeking or to be contrary leaving the GM with nothing for them to do.

Call of Cthulhu is a great example of a game that’s just very dull if people insist on avoiding scripted content. If you don’t go up to the scary house on the hill then you’re just playing a normal person doing a rather dull job in the 1920s. Unless there’s a monster on every street corner (which totally goes against the IP) there’s actually nothing to do but follow up obscure hints.

Coming back to MMOs people contrast emergent play with scripted play. This logically leads to the conclusion that if you want an interesting game you should leave stuff out (after all putting stuff in is adding rails). This then leads on logically to terribly pointless virtual worlds where it’s very hard to find fun. Some of them are about as exciting to play around with as Internet Explorer – all you’re really doing is adjusting settings.

Coming back to WoW and Disneyland (and McDonalds or what have you) people LIKE taking a ride then going off and forgetting about it. Are you claiming it’s somehow immoral to make popular games that people enjoy without being required to make a major commitment to?

Different strokes for different folks. I personally would love a deep game where everyone is in character and immersed but I don’t mind if my 9 year old godson is just blowing stuff up across the other side of the room.

http://spinksville.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/5-issues-with-roleplaying-in-mmos-why-you-cant-just-live-the-dream/