RP nerd thread!

[WindupAtheist]

Rather than derail the WoW thread where the topic of RP came up, I figured I'd post here. Lantyssa and I can't be the only roleplayers (or former roleplayers) around here, so I'm gonna post old RP anecdotes and such in hopes of soliciting some from others. I don't care what game they're from, but you can already guess where all of mine take place.


This is from maybe 2007. Guy sitting on the bench with the bald head and red shoulders is me. Guy with the little blue health bar under him is an EA event moderator assigned to facilitate RP and hold custom events on that shard. The people around the table from him are "big shot noble" roleplayers representing the cities placed under invasion by a then-ongoing event. Crowd (half of which is off-screen here) is a mix of roleplayers and the general public.

The actual invasion event was a major EA every-shard thing, but the moderators were authorized to tailor it to each shard's community through lesser supporting events and such. The players playing nobles did a really good job of squabbling and blaming everything on one another while the "royal representative" (EA guy) facepalmed and the crowd heckled. Seeing some of the general non-roleplayers get wrapped up enough to start yelling from the crowd that they were being idiots for not teaming up against a common threat was pretty fun.

That's how I ended up on the bench. The EA guy thought my ranting from the crowd was good enough that he had me come up and wait so I could address the gathering. I forget exactly what I said, but once the whole meeting was over, the crowd basically flipped the big shots the bird and went "The hell with you guys, we'll save the day ourselves, yaa!" and went off to attack the monsters.

Which was great, because this wasn't just some "spawn monsters in town for a month until a GM turns it off" thing. The event was coded such that the monsters could be pushed back through the town (spawn points shutting off in turn if enough were killed, or reactivating if they were let off the hook) and eventually driven from the town completely once enough had been killed to spawn the boss. I think we cleared Vesper that day, I can't remember exactly.

Really some of the best "worldness" I've seen in an MMO, and one of the game's high points for me.

Anyway, I want to hear out of someone else. If you don't have any good RP stories, tell me some bad ones. That dude trying to RP a hybrid elf/demon/saiyan ninja who wouldn't stop trying to kill you with emotes. That "girl" who turned out to be a guy, and the half dozen cybernerds who had to quit the game in shame at having fought over who got to sex0r some fat old man. That shit never gets old.

I'm logged into WoW right now and some dude in Stormwind is trying to sell his "wife" for 50 silver or something. I should buy her and see if I can make her mine copper for me.

[koro]

I don't have any really big RP stories, but I'll have to say UO was the only MMO I've been able to really sit down and RP (or at least act in-character) in. There was one tavern in the urban sprawl north of Minoc I'd bounce for a lot, and it involved a lot of in-character discussions with people either trying to get in, or people who were inside and being unruly. Pre-Trammel, naturally, otherwise those interactions would have had no point.

But as far as bad RP goes? Just load up a City of Heroes trial and zone into the Pocket D on Virtue. Go up to the hero-side bar, stand there, and read local chat. It ranges from amazingly bad soap-opera drama to pretty skeezy sex talk. Funny enough, I've seen next to no people talk IC in actual teams. They're content to just /walllean in the D and spout exposition with all the other douchebags with stupid "real" names.

[Trippy]

I've met a few on Virtue that are IC even during Hami raids

[koro]

/walllean at 5 FPS.

[IainC]

We used to run events in Dark Age of Camelot, these would be scripted events that took the players from a realm on an adventure for a few hours. There'd be NPCs in one of the cities telling players about some horrible thing that was happening Right The Fuck Now, a leader character that was usually played by a GM or a volunteer and, when we had a critical mass of players milling around at the leader character, we'd set off and do the event. Scripting these events was a lot of work, we ran an event every two weeks, rotating between the realms in turn and it took about that long to write, test, debug and translate the event scripts, stuff that didn't have to be scripted was therefore preferred.

We'd been running a set of adventures that borrowed an epic dungeon from one realm and opened it up (with custom mobs and custom loot drops) to a different realm and this particular week it was the turn of Hibernia to get their realm event. We had an adventure written where an eEeEEevil wizard was introducing unnatural creatures (young griffons) into Hibernia and the druid council were upset because this was disturbing the balance in the land. There was an NPC vendor who was selling these items just outside of the main city in Hy Brasil and if you interacted with him, he'd give youa  spiel about how he was getting leant on by the Druids and had been tricked into selling these things in the first place. A chief druid (played by volunteers) showed up and told players that they needed to sort this out before too much damage was done and gave the players a flying beetle ride to the place where the evil wizard lived. This was Tuscaren Glacier, the Midgardian epic dungeon. Once inside, the players had to battle through a bunch of encounters until they reached the end boss, a huge animated suit of armour. They killed it and the wizard's assistant, a Lurikeen (played by me) appeared in the wreckage.

THis part was supposed to just be a roleplay wrap up to the event, the players would tell me off, I'd promise to be good, hand out some rewards and send them home. I played the Lurikeen as extremely untrustworthy and contradicted myself under cross examination multiple times. I gave the players every reason to mistrust me as I happily told very obvious lies about everything. The players asked me where the griffons came from and I told them the wizard bred all kinds of animals and I had decided to sell them to make some money while he was away (originally this money was to help orphans, then later in response to a different question it was to pay for a holiday for my poor, sick mother). Naturally the players asked what other animals he bred and if these were for sale. I thought a bit and then claimed that he had some dragon eggs and that I could sell them some dragons when they hatched. No they weren't hatched yet, no the players couldn't see them however if they paid for them now I'd magically be able to deliver them when they did hatch in about a month. The players asked how much so I came out with the outrageous amount of two platinum each (which was a lot of money in early SI days). The players actually formed a line to give me their money. I took a load of platinum off the players then sent them all home.
 
The next day we ran a story on the main site in the form of a wanted poster for my Lurikeen issued by the druid council of Hibernia. It listed my crimes in some detail. The players realised that they'd been defrauded and (mostly) thought it was hilarious. A fortnight later we ran a follow up event where the players had to track down my character by following some clues to find some of my associates hidden around Hibernia. Eventually they captured me and put me on trial. We had arranged for one of our volunteers to play the Druid who would be presiding and he formed a jury of players from the mob who'd captured me. Another volunteer played various defence witnesses (I edited his event character on the fly several times to give him different names and different skins), these were all variously untrustworthy and included a Firbolg (mortal enemies of the realm), a Kobold arms-dealer who was a business partner of mine and finally my mother who turned out to be even less trustworthy than me. The players wanted to execute me but Celtic Fist, the biggest Hib RvR guild at the time came down en masse and invited me into their guild. There was then a long and fully roleplayed argument between a bunch of hardcore RvR bunnies who normally had no time at all for that kind of thing and the rest of the players at my trial. CF insisted that I was subject to their protection as a member of their guild and the rest of the players argued that I was clearly a threat to Hibernia, a traitor, a thief and so forth. The event that was supposed to take about an hour ended up taking 4 hours and I had to walk home from work afterwards because I missed the last tram home. Eventually the players reached a compromise where I'd give everyone their money back and be exiled from Hibernia for ever. To date, those two weeks of roleplay on the forums and our official news page bookended by the two realm events is the best roleplay experience I've ever had in an MMO.

[WindupAtheist]

That's awesome, had no idea DAOC did stuff like that.

[Zetor]

I used to be a pretty hardcore RPer in UO and SWG. Then I got better.  

Amazingly enough, SWG had the most memorable moments, even though I was never much into Star Wars (I've only seen ep 1 and 4).

A few stories off the top of my head:

Back in the 'glory days', I played a mad-scientisty doctor in the Moenia and Coronet med centers with truckloads of speech macros (mostly about clinical trials, experimental medicine and crap). When people RP'd back (rarely), I buffed them too. Once I met a spice dealer in the med center who got the good doctor hooked on neutron pixie, which lead to some amusing situations later on. Law enforcement RPers also questioned me in a while while looking for the spicer, but Doc don't snitch, so that was that.

My guild (though I haven't joined them at that point yet) had an RP player city on the Kettemoor server called Greenmurk and we had an amateur theater troupe with a band, dancers and all, who wrote a play called "The Death of a Jedi", a sort-of reimagination of SW ep1. They had some memorable performances (mostly in Theed); however, one of the lead actors held a grudge against the main antagonist for a long while [character backstory thing]. At the last performance, the protagonist left the stage for ~5 seconds before the epic swordfighting scene, and exchanged his prop sword for a real one. The antagonist realized this too late to get away, and was incapped + got a deathblow; the play ended abruptly with everyone being stunned and the protagonist making his escape from the theater. Here is a screenshot of the pivotal moment, though it was taken with my POS pentium 2 with every single graphical slider set to minimum. Here is a pic taken during the actual swordfight with better image quality. The beauty of it all was that basically only the protagonist+antagonist knew about the setup, even the other actors were dumbfounded!


(I'll probably edit more cool-story-bro moments into this post when I remember them :p)

[Endie]

When I was in SWG a bunch of us were sitting around on the Lowca forums bemoaning how it used to be so much more fun when we were newbies blah blah declension narrative etc...

So I organised an event on the forest moon of Endor (pretty deadly location), with the premise that a bunch of us had been in a shuttle crash and had come out of it only with the ship's emergency supplies: CDFE weapons, some basic meds and the like.  We met up on the moon and had to make it from the crash location to the starport with only what we had.  It took ages, and several deaths, and everyone had stacks of black on their HAM bars due to the amount of poison in Endor, but it was pretty fun nonetheless.  A very long, tense run with a more coherent premise and storyline than Lost.

[Modern Angel]

I was an old school MUSHer in the mid-90s with people (over half severely damaged) who thought typing chat text was the highest art form in the world. When I logged onto UO and EQ the first time I thought RP was the norm in each. I was mistaken and I've never gone back. The End.

[Xuri]

When I was roleplaying a (non-combat) bard on Atlantic I participated in some of the town council meetings and other events that went on in the Yew area at the time. Was great to be part of (for a short while anyway) a roleplaying-community that actually got built up ingame through meetings and discussions and player-run events.

After Europa launched I moved there to roleplay characters of a more shady nature. Started out as a regular thief in the cities (not much RP went on there, but had some nice encounters with some players roleplaying guards), went on to educate players about the dangers of handing over all your best gear to "smiths" with "scoundrel" reputations for repairs, then turned to the highroads to waylay the people who actually still used them. It's strange how many people who don't actually hand over their boots, a few gold coins or another cheap item to you when you pop up in the middle of the road threatning them in combat-mode, but instead take off running (only to get a deadly poisoned kryss in their back). :P

Also had a blast while living in the RP-town Deepwater, with all the storylines that people came up with and ran with, the conflicts with the orcs and yew militia, trials, events like circuses, fight-clubs and grand feasts, etc.

UO's world and gameplay suited itself extremely well to roleplaying, player-run events and finding stuff to do that did not involve killing the latest "raid boss" for epic lootsz. Much better so than any other MMOG I've played since. :(

[Malakili]

The best RP events I ever did were in Neverweinter Nights for sure.  I've got boatloads of great stories, but most of my favorites involve playing on the City of Arabel server and being a part of some big on going plotlines with the noble houses in the city.  I got myself hired as a guard for one of the houses and later ended up representing the house in a duel with another player from a different house to settle a dispute between the lords.   

Of course, the thing with NWN, and with your story WUA is that there was DM intervention and specific events designed and run with the idea of RP, or at least the game world in mind.  Nowadays when you think of RP is just a bunch of people sitting around talking and never really DOING anything.  That stereotype has emerged, in my opinion, because if you want to RP in a current generation MMORPG, what you say and what you wear and pretty much the only control you have over things that actually get represented in the game world.  Everything you kill respawns, every instance you clear is immediately repopulated, and so forth.  Its just damn hard to "RP" when the game world is so static, and you just can't get that sort of dynamic game world without DM intervention.

If an RP guild could role play wanting to go clear out a system of caves and make it their new base or something, they'd be ALL OVER THAT as long as after clearing the caves, they could actually stay there and set up camp.  The best you could do now is head out there, kill a bunch of stuff and then pretend on your own private forums that you have a base there. 

Lastly, this is why I actually feel like EVE has a decent amount of RP.  Not that most of the people would call themselves RPers, but the actions of the player and the actions of the character basically line up so well most of the time that it feels very in character.  When you say something over Corp chat like "How much is X going for in Jita" and it sparks a discussion about where the best place in the galaxy is to buy or sell X, its not RP per se, but in some ways it sort of is, and its one of the reasons I get totally obsessed with that game when I play it.

[Zetor]

I think SWG was actually fairly nice for pen-and-paper-style sessions as well. We held some very in-depth ones, like:
- a timed mission taking the group of players all over the galaxy: they had to solve puzzles (both narrated by the 'DM' and from various emails / house furnishing descriptions / etc), explore an abandoned outpost, infiltrate an imperial NPC base, and finally fight their way to the middle of the 'Warren' dungeon. While doing this, we actually met some imperial players at the imperial NPC base which made the encounter that much more spicy. Oh yeah, they didn't make the timer by the end, but still everyone was happy and said "this was the most fun I ever had while failing a mission". 
- an investigative murder mystery in a multi-building estate with various clues scattered about and the killer still at large (and getting a few extra victims as the night went on). It wasn't the butler, but close enough!

Of course these all took an insane amount of setup time and not everything was possible due to the lack of actual DM powers (as bad as SWG is, it would be a lot easier to do these events now with the quest maker and world-decoration functionality). In retrospect, it would've been easier to just tell the story via a digital p&p program like openrpg or fantasy grounds, but there was a certain charm of tromping around in a "world" during the events.

[Lantyssa]

I have trouble recalling any specific events, especially this early in the morning.  Mwerevu has been my partner in crime over several games, and we love just messing around while being in character.  (Vu could probably recount endless stories.)

My favorite though had to be in CoH.  The character which ended up sticking was kind of a joke, a Tanker named Jersey Girl, based on a cow theme.  The Liberty (Cow) Bell icon was her chest emblem.  Dumb, innocent, and very sheltered by her 'villanous' father, the Mad Cow King.  She'd rail against Hero Burger in public areas while Vu tried to explain they didn't serve cow heroes for dinner.

I also played with people who asked her where in New Jersey was she from (Jersey is a breed of cow originating from the Isle of Jersey).  Seriously, I averaged at least one tell a week asking me this question.  I think only two people got it once explained.

Possibly the most interesting encounter was when Jersey hopped onto a train platform and this other 8' tall cow hero was standing there.  Except for hair and an accessory or two, they were the spitting image of one another.  We played around with that chance meeting for a while.  Her name -- Deja Moo.

[Mrbloodworth]

I think SWG was the only game I RP'd in, I don't think I have time to just sit and chat or do in game politics anymore. Does reading people their rights in APB before arresting count?  

[PalmTrees]

I don't rp myself, but playing on CoH's Virtue server recently I've have had a few people rp their chars during groups and I've played along. Nothing that slowed things down, just them making comments in character. One guy whose character had two personalities one cynical, one naive. He switched once and he did a good with it and a few people in the group went along with him when the naive persona woke up halfway through the task force.

[Koyasha]

Neverwinter Nights was the big one for me.  I played and eventually DM'ed in some persistent world and it was interesting how my character evolved from a cliche - lost girl with memory problems - into an interesting and unique character, which paved the way for another character.  I wish I could remember the details of various stories, but all I can really recall after all this time are some of the general events that happened.

What I most recall were some of the plots I DM'ed.  I remember this one-shot adventure that eventually kicked off a whole scheme going off in the background.  Made it up almost entirely off-the-cuff because it was early morning and one or two other players were on, so I wanted to give them something to do.  They started discovering people horribly butchered all over town, and traced it back to the head priest NPC of...Torm, I think it was.  Which seemed very odd cause the guy of course was good and had never shown hints of doing anything like this.  It all led to some weird maze outside town where a truly bizarre collection of monsters had suddenly sprouted.  I recall the RP as they argued about what was going on and how odd this was, until they ran into the NPC priest and started questioning him, but what he was saying didn't add up, so they were getting more suspicious until the NPC then turned into some kind of demon and attacked them.  I can't recall how I worked it out exactly but there was an odd gimmick to the fight that they had to figure out before they could beat it.  When they finally did, they suddenly woke up back in town, feeling the aftereffects of a complex psionic mind-trap.  As I recall, it was all focused around some object they had discovered in town, something I had thrown in a few days ago as something that was at the time meaningless, but I found a use for later.

Eventually the whole thing spiraled on into a long-running plot involving illithids who never actually appeared on screen, cause there were no illithid models, so they were always acting through agents or by psionically manipulating people, and boy do I wish I could remember all the details of those RP's, cause they really got interesting.  Plus the whole thing created a distinct aura of fear throughout the entire population of the game, cause everyone started questioning each others' motivations and whether or not things were real.

I really miss that PSW.  I can't recall why I quit playing, but having stopped was one of the things I regret quite a bit, to this day.

[Stormwaltz]

What features in an MMG do you find to encourage roleplay?

There was a discussion article on Massively about this last week, but the responses were largely useless ("Ventrilo voice fonts!" "toy items!").

[Mrbloodworth]

User empowering tools.

[Zetor]

Hate to keep going on about SWG, but its storyteller features and quest creator are actually pretty neat (they'd be better if they weren't grind-locked though). The huge open world of SWG along with user-placable structures and decorations also helped a lot. Too bad that the game sucks. 

Honestly, other than UO/SWG and (not very much) COH, I haven't RP'd in a MMOG; imo level-based games are RP poison (especially since most of the world in a diku is for leveling and occasional farming, nothing else). Blah blah virtual worlds vs games, etc.

fake edit: COH's Mission Architect is a great tool (player-made story arcs can be really awesome... as expected, most are terrible) and better than SWG's equivalent for actual gameplay, but it's not that useful for RP.

[Paelos]

I'd say the ability to create my own quest NPCs and stuff would have helped a lot.

The best RP I've seen was also in SWG where a guy roleplayed a former mining kingpin who lost his ass in a smuggling operation and had to rebuild from scratch. He set up a huge trading bazzar for materials in his guild's player city with all the different items laid out perfectly. I ended up working for the character as one of his mining associates, and he would stage regular events in the town for bands and contests to promote huge sales. It wasn't a big RP community, but this guy and his associates were pretty funny.

[Mrbloodworth]

Ryzom Ring:

http://www.vimeo.com/1607496

http://www.vimeo.com/1607628

http://www.vimeo.com/1607416

[Malakili]

What features in an MMG do you find to encourage roleplay?

There was a discussion article on Massively about this last week, but the responses were largely useless ("Ventrilo voice fonts!" "toy items!").

1) Ability to alter or control areas of the game world (or as Bloodworth said, user empowering tools).

2) Fewer quests, rather than more quests.  What quests there are should live up to the name quests, should take a long time, and actually be important.  

3) Ability to toggle PvP for individual players (or free for all PvP)

4) A non static game world with non static NPC factions.

5) Ability to advance in the game through non-combat means

6) Probably the biggest one, but also the least viable - Smaller server communities with actual enforced RP.  I'd prefer a lower budget game graphically, as long as it has the infrastructure to support the kind of gameplay that matters.


Along with number 6 - Its pretty hard to add RP viability as a tack on because quite frankly, a lot of the stuff that makes for great RP is easily exploitable and could ruin a game if it was flooded with non-RPers.  This is one of the reason NWN persistent world servers were so good.  You broke the rules, acted like a jerk, or just generally weren't playing in the spirit that server wanted to promote, you were just out (and this was at least somewhat offset by the fact that there were multiple big RP PW Story servers with communities that preferred different things).

[Tarami]

RP in large scale isn't going to work casually. Big LARPs barely work and the players in those are all very motivated RPers as they've spent a lot of money, time and effort on it.

To be straight, I think it's purely idealistic to think that more than 5 RPers in one place is going to consistently work out, regardless of supporting toolset. In other words, I think the best tools for RPing would let players to instance and segment the world freely, so that they can stage a small scenario easily (need an inn? Crop out a bit of land around an existing one) and invite a limited number of players. These segments can be stripped of all XP and loot and optionally mobs.

Once those tools exist, they would simplify adding other, more powerful tools, such as custom NPCs and similar things, as those tools in turn would only be able to alter the segmented area rather than the game world directly.

[Koyasha]

What features in an MMG do you find to encourage roleplay?

There was a discussion article on Massively about this last week, but the responses were largely useless ("Ventrilo voice fonts!" "toy items!").

I don't know.  As others have said, user empowering tools, but I can't see this working in a large-population game with servers of five to ten thousand people.  But if something along the lines of the NWN DM client could be made available to people it would work.

With all the instancing these days, maybe the ability to spin off your own instances as a DM, and gain complete control inside your instanced area.  Have each player get a limited number of instances as a DM, each with as much control as possible over as much as possible inside it.  I think the biggest key important factor in many ways is the ability to make a difference.  To change the world in some meaningful way, not just your character.  Whether that means building a temple to your god, killing the dragon and having it actually be dead (and thus stop raiding villages) or enacting a two-year plan to replace the king in a coup involving a copious quantity of butterscotch pudding, being able to make an actual lasting change on the world that everyone else sees and acknowledges is what makes it good.

Quests shouldn't really be automated.  Especially not available to everyone and their brother.  Infact, quests, as the mechanic we have come to experience in MMOG's are pretty out of place.  Only a few repetitive tasks make much sense for quests.  Mostly delivery type stuff that needs to be completed regularly.  But those are about the only automated quests I see being a good idea if you're trying to focus on RP.  Quests like 'kill x amount of monster x' are stupid because they don't accomplish a specific goal and don't make sense, quests that do accomplish a specific goal 'drive the goblins away from their camp at location x' can only be accomplished once if you want it to make sense - and a world that makes sense is key for actually focusing on RP, in my opinion.

But all of this is why I say I don't know about doing it in a large-population game.  Stuff like this works in a game with 50-150 players.  Maybe even up to two or three hundred.  But beyond that?  I doubt it.  What Malakili says about small communities and enforced RP is spot on.  If you're not very proactive about kicking out people who disrupt the RP or abuse the tools put in place to improve the RP, it's not going to work very well.  And since different RPers often prefer different styles, there can't even be a one-size-fits-all answer to that question, either, which is why letting the user change things is key.

Personally, I feel as though the NWN model could really have gone places.  Still could.  Set it up with a lot more server support and such, charge people a fee to have their worlds hosted on the server, including all custom content needed in order to play (see .hak files for NWN, for instance) and make the process of joining someone's world as painless as possible for the user, having the necessary content downloaded automatically.  The right revenue model for this could potentially be quite successful, I think.

[Malakili]

enacting a two-year plan to replace the king in a coup involving a copious quantity of butterscotch pudding,

I'd like to subscribe to your news letter.

[Soulflame]

Player housing
Player driven economy, where items are made, repaired, etc by the players.
PvP
Small population.
Successful characters who are not combat oriented.

[Ingmar]

I've met a few on Virtue that are IC even during Hami raids

Yeah I definitely had multiple random grouping experiences with people who never left character on Virtue. Like this one girl (?) who was roleplaying a broken robot, and *every single thing she said* was accompanied by some emote about what she was doing with her antennae.

[Sjofn]

My favorite CoX/Virtue RPer was this hero whose name I forget (started with an A ... Ascendant maybe?) who would park at a phone booth by one of the tram stations (augh, I forget which one, it's been too long since I've played) and RP talking to his agent. He was hilarious.

There was also the single time I experienced any RP in Dark Age of Camelot. We were dicking around on some RP server as Mids (I forget why, probably to play Mid with some Igraine people who were non-Mids) and wound up having a big conversation about class balance, but in the context of the game. I seem to recall our RP stranger thinking Thor must be a giant pussy if thanes were anything to go on, and Ingmar being appalled at this blasphemy.

[Tmon]

I'm not a big RPer, but my characters always have at least a skeleton background that I can play off of if someone starts roll playing at me.  About the only RP that I ever did unprompted was to start selling pies during the weekly PVP tournaments that used to be held on one of the UO shards.  I figured that every tournament needed someone selling dodgy pies.

[palmer_eldritch]

User empowering tools.

This, for me too. The ability to organise things, even very small things for very small groups of people, that give them a chance to roleplay. It could be as basic as allowing people to choose where to go for their next adventure rather than pushing them to do certain quests/dungeons in a certain order. It could be allowing them to build a tavern, hold a festival etc.

In my experience, roleplaying in games that don't allow players freedom tends to devolve into people sitting around and telling stories (badly, in my case) in between actually playing the game, and eventually fades away.
 
Players don't roleplay when they are simply doing quests pushed on them by the NPCs, no matter how well written the NPC dialogue is or how good the story written by the devs. They have to be given space to make up their own lousy stories and then to actually play out those stories, to an extent at least, rather than simply being able to talk about them in olde English.

[palmer_eldritch]

When I was roleplaying a (non-combat) bard on Atlantic I participated in some of the town council meetings and other events that went on in the Yew area at the time. Was great to be part of (for a short while anyway) a roleplaying-community that actually got built up ingame through meetings and discussions and player-run events.

After Europa launched I moved there to roleplay characters of a more shady nature. Started out as a regular thief in the cities (not much RP went on there, but had some nice encounters with some players roleplaying guards), went on to educate players about the dangers of handing over all your best gear to "smiths" with "scoundrel" reputations for repairs, then turned to the highroads to waylay the people who actually still used them. It's strange how many people who don't actually hand over their boots, a few gold coins or another cheap item to you when you pop up in the middle of the road threatning them in combat-mode, but instead take off running (only to get a deadly poisoned kryss in their back). :P

Also had a blast while living in the RP-town Deepwater, with all the storylines that people came up with and ran with, the conflicts with the orcs and yew militia, trials, events like circuses, fight-clubs and grand feasts, etc.

UO's world and gameplay suited itself extremely well to roleplaying, player-run events and finding stuff to do that did not involve killing the latest "raid boss" for epic lootsz. Much better so than any other MMOG I've played since. :(

I miss Deepwater too, and the rivalry we had with the other big roleplaying town Spiritwood, however silly it was;)

[UnSub]

My favorite CoX/Virtue RPer was this hero whose name I forget (started with an A ... Ascendant maybe?) who would park at a phone booth by one of the tram stations (augh, I forget which one, it's been too long since I've played) and RP talking to his agent. He was hilarious.

Ascendant's phone calls were very funny and made good use of CoH/V's macro program.

They are long, but I've found two below. They'd go out on the local channel, meaning you could walk in on them part way through when you went to the tram.

The devs even made an official joke of it when some NPCs respond to wrong numbers.

Possibly the most interesting encounter was when Jersey hopped onto a train platform and this other 8' tall cow hero was standing there.  Except for hair and an accessory or two, they were the spitting image of one another.  We played around with that chance meeting for a while.  Her name -- Deja Moo.

Funnily enough, one of the very first RP guilds on CoH (started during beta) took advantage of the character creator in the same way and developed the Insane Cow Posse. All cow characters with cow pun names.

[WindupAtheist]

To be straight, I think it's purely idealistic to think that more than 5 RPers in one place is going to consistently work out, regardless of supporting toolset.

Wat?


In it's heyday my RP guild would have two-dozen people on at once by itself, and that was in UO circa 2004, a game with almost no non-soloable PVE content much less raids or something to draw people together. We'd have RP/PVP fights that easily involved anywhere from thirty to fifty combatants altogether.

The things the game had that facilitated RP were...

A) Guild wars: These allowed players to dictate the nature and scope of their own conflicts. In general every RP guild would "war" every other RP guild in order to create an isolated community that was "open PVP" within itself. A bunch of adventurers could get into a giant bar fight, the guards could chase and attack troublemakers, large guilds could fight organized battles with each other, and so forth. If a guild was abusing this system, the others could just declare peace and leave them sitting there with nobody to fight.

B) Housing: This one is pretty obvious. It was always nice to be able to have your own headquarters to hang out in or for your enemies to attack, to be able to hold gatherings that weren't open to the general public, etc.

C) Fast travel: If it's going to take 15 minutes of riding and/or flying to get to where your guildmates physically are, then another 15 minutes of travel to get back to whatever you were doing, nobody is going to bother. Thus you end up with these jokes of RP guilds in WoW where they pretend hearthstones are walkie-talkies and make /g an in-character channel.

[Bunk]

What features in an MMG do you find to encourage roleplay?

How about the ability to control your appearance and look of your gear (to suite a theme) without totally gimping yourself.

I enjoyed running around UO as a cranky old Druid in a robe, with his pack of loyal Grizzlies defending him. Not something I could have replicated in WoW.

[Furiously]

I agree with Mal. Second Life has some vibrant rp communities. They also have boxing and football and combat leagues.