RP nerd thread!

[Paelos]

I think a weighted marks system might work. Like the player who only marks people once a month is weighted higher than somebody who marks daily.

[Tarami]

Why not simply make it a thumbs up-down system? Each character can give every other character a thumbs up (+1) or down (-1.) They are permanent and can be changed at will. Since such a system would track every vote cast, people can be displayed and held accountable and systematic abuse can be proven by a GM.

You can make the thumbs "expire" so that they become a blank vote (+0) after a period of time but giving each player multiple votes is unnecessary. A player that comes back after a long hiatus will thus be at neutral "RP standing."

[Stormwaltz]

Why not simply make it a thumbs up-down system? Each character can give every other character a thumbs up (+1) or down (-1.) They are permanent and can be changed at will. Since such a system would track every vote cast, people can be displayed and held accountable and systematic abuse can be proven by a GM.

You can make the thumbs "expire" so that they become a blank vote (+0) after a period of time but giving each player multiple votes is unnecessary. A player that comes back after a long hiatus will thus be at neutral "RP standing."

That's what I described (or tried to describe, anyway). Player A can give Player B a white mark or a black mark once per month. At the end of the month, the mark goes away. Player A can black mark them again, but A can never place more than one mark on B at a time.

Example: Assume 200 black marks are needed to ban a character, and a maximum of 25 black marks and 25 white marks can be accrued per day. In order to ban Player B, Player A would have to organize 199 other players to black mark them - 25 per day for eight days. This assumes no one white marks Player B in that time.

[Malakili]

systematic abuse can be proven by a GM.

I figured we would go here at some point, and thats kind of why I just say use the GMs in the first place.  Frankly, I honestly can't imagine anyone getting booted from their server NOT appealing.

[Tarami]

That's what I described (or tried to describe, anyway). Player A can give Player B a white mark or a black mark once per month. At the end of the month, the mark goes away. Player A can black mark them again, but A can never place more than one mark on B at a time.

Yeah, got you. I read it differently, terrible reading comprehension and all that.

I don't think you have to throw any throttles in, since abuse can easily be seen by GMs. GMs should then also have a tool to disable abusing accounts from voting altogether - on anyone. The system would just there as a help and general guide, not a replacement for handling customer reports.

I figured we would go here at some point, and thats kind of why I just say use the GMs in the first place.  Frankly, I honestly can't imagine anyone getting booted from their server NOT appealing.

It's a major load on GMs. Bottom line is, I guess, that ANYTHING that informs players of known trolls and power-RPers is a step in the right direction and is likely to improve the overall quality of RP. It doesn't have to be perfect and human intervention at some point is desirable, the system just has to work well enough to filter out a majority of the shit-flinging that happens in RP communities. You're pretty much always a bad RPer to someone.

[Mrbloodworth]

Is this a bad time to bring up we have a rather large RP contingent in Wurm?

[Malakili]

Bottom line is, I guess, that ANYTHING that informs players of known trolls and power-RPers is a step in the right direction and is likely to improve the overall quality of RP. It doesn't have to be perfect and human intervention at some point is desirable, the system just has to work well enough to filter out a majority of the shit-flinging that happens in RP communities. You're pretty much always a bad RPer to someone.

Heck, if you want to make it just so that there are rating theres, then fine, I've got no particular objection I suppose.  But if people can literally be kicked off the server for it, I just don't think it can possibly end well.

[Lucas]

A few years ago, I created the following topic, which I think it's somewhat related (only 1 page long, if you want to take a look):

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=10986

(in short, I fondly recall the IGM/Seer program in UO with the micro events ran by them).

While it is not feasible in larger, multiple servers games (while I think it could be in games like Fallen Earth), I still think it was the funniest and most immersive/involving (if you managed to ignore the even-destroying crowd) method of creating a nice roplaying environment.
----

For the RP crowd, character customization is quite important:

- Dyes, damnit, let me colour my damn armor pieces with a range of reasonable tones (no neon :P) whenever I want;
- Lots of so called "Social clothing": don't want to look like rambo all the time, everywhere, thanks :P

Also, mini-games, of course in the CONTEXT of that gameworld. I want to go in a inn/cantina/pub whatever and play 1 on 1 social games with other people being able to watch at the same time (let's say, in SWTOR a game of Pazaak), and forget about looting or questing for an entire night if I wish.

Oh, and don't complain :P. We are in a RP nerd thread, so let me nerd :P

Thanks, bye 

[Malakili]

and forget about looting or questing for an entire night if I wish

This is absolutely crucial, but it is partly a developer thing and partly a community thing.  It is INCREDIBLY easy to get caught up in the loot hunting game no matter how dedicated to RP you are.  Partly the developers have to make sure that they give the players enough to do besides going chasing after shinies, but you also need a community who is willing to play for other reasons.  I think it is partly this reason that RP is so hard in a game like WoW.  When your game is designed from the ground up as ultimately an item collection game not amount of inns with chairs you can sit at and tuxedo/dress craftables will make up for it.

[Xilren's Twin]

Wasn't that Raph's Metaplace? Or am I misremembering?

Heh.  That was the promise of Metaplace but the reality...let's just be kind and say it fell rather short. 
I'd settle for an updated NWN1 with an improved toolset, built from the ground up for persistant world designers, and a better DM management suite (and i agree that NWN2 was actually a step backwards.  Sadly, Bioware seems to be moving in the opposite direction considering the path from NWN1 to NWN2 to Dragon Age...).  As Koyasha is right, a good set of DM tools actually reduces the need for the sort of in depth world building that is quite frankly harder for most people.  After all, what's more effort? Writing pages of dialogue to handle a variety of player responses and situations, or controlling the NPC and just talking back to the players?  And that's just one mob.

One thing i seem to remeber from NWN1 is a sort of DM to player group matchmaking system where you could find DM's advertising running "module x" and looking for players to sign up and schedule times.  This included rating systems for both players, DMs and the modules themselves.  It was completely outsite "offical" NWN1 but i think that would be a large step closer to the pnp style rpg sessions people would lke to see.  Lets face it, most DM's did NOT create them own modules and adventures; that doesnt mean they couldnt run a fun session as DM. 

It still amazing to look back at how far the NWN1 community took that appalication, warts and all, and made it work for themselves.
At this point, if i can track down all my cd's, i may install it again and tool around the persistant worlds still out there.

[Malakili]

One thing i seem to remeber from NWN1 is a sort of DM to player group matchmaking system where you could find DM's advertising running "module x" and looking for players to sign up and schedule times.  This included rating systems for both players, DMs and the modules themselves.  It was completely outsite "offical" NWN1 but i think that would be a large step closer to the pnp style rpg sessions people would lke to see.

I was part of a group that played together twice weekly in an ongoing campaign that was run like that.  It was great fun, very different from a persistent world of course, but more like a virtual traditional D&D game.  The DM that was running it was constantly updating things and so forth to reflect what the group had done.  The game world was incredibly bare bones, and he just spawned things in as needed, if I recall correctly, which is really the only viable way to do it when you are working on a project that scale as a single person.  Still, even though most of the world seemed a little empty, it worked.

edit: I think that place was called neverwinter connections

[Redgiant]

Give a population the game tools to decide for themselves PvP alliances, factions and criminal tagging, if you want a self-policing and population-relative mechanism with no "one right answer". The game fabric itself must provide some of this.

1. Alliances. Multiple guilds can ally, and a guild or alliance can formally control a town, city or other interesting areas. This is critical for the game itself to support this, otherwise you just have a player-imposed convention (like The Venture Company server in WoW) for world PvP, which while fun certainly isn't the basis for fancier impact.

2. Voting (thumbs, marks, whatever) by characters, which add up into guild and faction character consensus, which can then be applied in lots of ways if guilds or factions control towns, cities and regions. Think of all the WoW Contested and faction mechanisms, but with player-effected impact and the ability to formally claim control like DAoC. In Outland, WoW started dabbling with some fun stuff like the Hellfire stadiums, Zangarmarsh fort control, Terrokar towers and Nagrand's Halaas. Extend that across the enitre game.

3. Real tangible penalties based on this.

- guilds can control towns, cities and even certain regions, and set the guild faction consensus of that area's NPCs to their own if desired. This creates a great dynamic to the game; every time you login, the world may have changed (or need effort to change back).
- elevate guild factions to that seens for NPC factions and their affects on the various merchant, transportation options and guard KOS rules which an area's NPCs abide by.
- increasing the aggro radius the worse a character's standing becomes with said guild or faction (the guards may run at you from 100 yards away if you are really hated, more like the aggro radius of WoW Open Beta when you were +/- 20 levels to mobs).
- increasing the guild or regional messages and their details about where a particularly bad apple is located when in your area.
- decreasing chat access for criminals.
- the Most Wanted 10 are given the honor of being mapped in real-time (like a WoW quest NPC) for retribution, or perhaps NPC bounty hunter teams are increasingly deployed at a bad apple when in the area.
- the cream of the criminal crop get their own Wanted posters and bounty rewards.
- skills such as stealth, speed and flight may be penalized when you rank as extremely hostile to the controlling guild or faction.

These are general voting and guild/faction dynamics for PvP and by extension criminality situations like RP violators (or whatever else the server population deems unfit). It is up to the player base on a given server to do something about it given the tools.

- In non-PvP, perhaps only crime factions whose standing is controlled via all the voting and such are valid for the above. These are the ones you use to punish players who are consensus bad apples relative to the world, area or town population.

- In a PvP setting, add the playable factions also as candidates for these alliance mechanisms.

[Furiously]

Erie Isle in second life has a real nice set of gm's and it seems to work well enough for them. But it has people from Second Life.

[Xilren's Twin]

That's what I described (or tried to describe, anyway). Player A can give Player B a white mark or a black mark once per month. At the end of the month, the mark goes away. Player A can black mark them again, but A can never place more than one mark on B at a time.

Example: Assume 200 black marks are needed to ban a character, and a maximum of 25 black marks and 25 white marks can be accrued per day. In order to ban Player B, Player A would have to organize 199 other players to black mark them - 25 per day for eight days. This assumes no one white marks Player B in that time.

Just like any other system, you would have to take steps to balance it to prevent not just abuse, but people gaming it.  For example, making the marks track by account rather than by character, preventing trial accounts from using it, etc etc.

I'd prefer to see a more validated system where you rate both players and dm's on scale of 1-10 but have to provite at least 2 intelligent sentences of commentary as to why and make that part of the characters public available profile on the matchmaking part.  That would require something like a community rep to review the comments, but still again, you're looking for more han just a number: "+10 this dude rocks!" it just useless as "1, he sux, we all died".  You need a little more than that.

[Simond]

Gentlemen, behold - Roleplay! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiqAFeMAbb4
(Genuine RP profile from WoW).

So you want GMs to be able to enforce that in a ruleset? Good luck. 

[Malakili]

Gentlemen, behold - Roleplay! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiqAFeMAbb4
(Genuine RP profile from WoW).

So you want GMs to be able to enforce that in a ruleset? Good luck. 

Whatever, backstories have nothing to do with anything.  Seriously, I mean, that was shitty sure, but it little to nothing to do with game mechanics supporting RP.

[Stormwaltz]

Gentlemen, behold - Roleplay! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiqAFeMAbb4
(Genuine RP profile from WoW).

"He left her, and became a Death Knight."

I'm trying to find some concordance on mechanisms that encourage people to speak and act in character. Like Mal said, character backstory has little to do with that - unless it actually has some effect on what the player does or says in the game.

We've wandered on off the enforcement angle, because it's easy to come up with tangible systems for that. But if I can reorient the conversation for a moment, does anyone have any other ideas for systems or features that can passively encourage people to behave IC, rather than punish them for going OOC?

World reactivity and persistence of decisions have been mentioned in various ways. Pulling from Sam's tale of sleeping her way to 80, do in-game mechanics for players marrying (UO) and adopting one another (LotRO) add anything?

[Malakili]

World reactivity and persistence of decisions have been mentioned in various ways. Pulling from Sam's tale of sleeping her way to 80, do in-game mechanics for players marrying (UO) and adopting one another (LotRO) add anything?

I'll use EVE as an example here.

So imagine this conversation in EVE on corp chat:

"Hey everyone, I'm in Jita at the moment, some good deals on mods here, anyone need a Mining Mindlink?"
"Ah, I could probably use one, how much are they going for"
"About 20M ISK, want me to pick one up for you?"
"Hmm, nah, can't quite afford that right now"
"Alright, I'll be back to our system in an hour, gonna let auto pilot take me home"


So, is that in character or out of character?   When player goals = character goals, there is almost no distinction in my opinion.  To me thats how you get people who don't even think about RP to act "in character."

In WoW, you character's goal is to save the town, or kill the lich king, or win the argent tournament.   Your goals for those are "finish this questline so I can level up, complete my tier 10 set, or do my dailies for today."  Its just damn hard to promote RP when there is a big gulf between character and player in terms of motivations and goals.

[WindupAtheist]

Yeah, you had the same thing in UO back when the default method for getting more armor was visiting a player blacksmith. Insert some ASCII penises and Family Guy references and "LOOL WTF ROFL LAAAG!1!!" as background chatter, though, and the effect is somewhat blunted.

Also, I can't believe you guys suggested a mechanism for letting roleplayers kick people off a server. The idea that roleplayers are more mature than your average MMO jacktard is a myth. They're usually better-spoken, but they tend to be more cliquish and petty than middle school girls.

[Malakili]

Yeah, you had the same thing in UO back when the default method for getting more armor was visiting a player blacksmith. Insert some ASCII penises and Family Guy references and "LOOL WTF ROFL LAAAG!1!!" as background chatter, though, and the effect is somewhat blunted.

Also, I can't believe you guys suggested a mechanism for letting roleplayers kick people off a server. The idea that roleplayers are more mature than your average MMO jacktard is a myth. They're usually better-spoken, but they tend to be more cliquish and petty than middle school girls.

Yeah, what I mentioned certainly doesn't stop the overtly out of character/nothing at all to do with the game unfortunately, but at least it does encourage players, when actually playing the game or talking about the game, to generally be in character without even paying any special attention to it.   

Unfortunately, stopping people from being idiots (penises, all caps yelling about what is on TV, etc) is, in my opinion, a separate issue than using game mechanics to encourage role play.  Its more of a "stop being from being asshats" issue, which may be impossible besides having very heavy handed mods.

[Stormwaltz]

Also, I can't believe you guys suggested a mechanism for letting roleplayers kick people off a server. The idea that roleplayers are more mature than your average MMO jacktard is a myth.

I suggested it, but it wasn't because I think roleplayers are more mature.

I believe a roleplaying server should be... for roleplayers (shocking, I know). I've never seen an RP server that didn't have the usual group of k3w1 d3wdz gumming up the chat channels. Though I'm too cynical too fully buy it, I also want to believe that given the proper tools, players can police themselves according to community standards. If they want to be jacktards to each other for using "thou" wrong, that's their bag, but the reason I brought it up was to give RP'ers a tool to remove non-RP'ers themselves.

[WindupAtheist]

Your RP server is going to have an organized alliance of guilds who dedicate themselves to voting away trolls and putting on events and shit, led by the usual petty power-hungry dipshits. Then another organization is going to crop up because a bunch of people are sick of listening to the first group, or somebody got caught cybering somebody else's wife, or whatever.

Then one of those groups is going to have that guy who they think is hilarious and everyone else hates, and he's going to rack up enough thumbs down votes to get thrown off the server. Sure it's because he was running around spamming "penis penis balls penis" on an alt at 3 in the morning, but he's not gonna tell anyone that. No, it was that other community that hates us and is jealous of us and is trying to bring us down! They did it!

Cue the two groups making big shows of pretending to be unable to hear/see each other and having downvote wars and generally being giant assholes.

Enforce RP on your RP servers yourself or don't bother having them. You don't even need an army of GMs to do it. You just need to make the GMs you have actually punish kewldood trolls whenever the report finally gets to them. Not ignore it, ala Blizzard.

[Numtini]

If you want a mass market game to have an RP server, charge extra for it. That'll solve 90% of your problems because nobody will cough up an extra buck unless they care about RP. Not just the kewlios, but also the people who's cousin Bill plays there, the people who like its name and think they have a right, and so on.

Add a buck to the subscription, hire an intern, and police RP. Three strikes or request and you're moved to another server.

Oh and start it two weeks after the initial release.

[Typhon]

See?  WUA understands that what Stormwatlz invented "Survivor: Online and In Character".  Want to stay on this server?  Good, how much clique can you suck?

[Lantyssa]

If you want a mass market game to have an RP server, charge extra for it. That'll solve 90% of your problems because nobody will cough up an extra buck unless they care about RP. Not just the kewlios, but also the people who's cousin Bill plays there, the people who like its name and think they have a right, and so on.

Add a buck to the subscription, hire an intern, and police RP. Three strikes or request and you're moved to another server.

Oh and start it two weeks after the initial release.

Yes please.

Preferably also not listing it as the top recommendation for "low-pop server, start your character here" that everyone sees.  I'm looking at you, WoW.

[Ghambit]

The best RP is non-intentional RP and for me, as usual, that occured in WW2O back around 2003 I believe.  It was a very VOIP-oriented game back then and if you were a bystander popping in and listening to squad chatter, you'd think you were really at War.  You get this similar feel in Eve I guess.

A big function of it is that it's obvious that "ordinary chatter" largely has no place in the game and can indeed gimp the side that's not as focused in their comms.  This creates an automatic "RP" mechanic since the RP is an integral part of the game.  Another game I could say this worked well in was ArmedAssault (in a big map on a large campaign) and a well organized Falcon4.0 campaign.  In these games, there's no room to screw around.

In a non-sim sense, of course I'd agree that SWG offered the best RP opportunities.  I remember RPing all kinds of shit in that game and most of the time these werent even organized events, just happened.  The best scenario I remember though was a citywide event to find someone's murderer (the murdered person was basically someone who'd unsubbed i think)... there were clues and informants scattered all about and you had to piece together the puzzle to find the killer.  Twas an excellent minigame.  I didnt finish it but I remember locating one informant and paying a hot purple TwiLek to dance for him so his toungue would loosen.  The reward was substantial of course and I believe you also gained a special tag/clothes as a city sheriff or something.

[Count Nerfedalot]

Just out of curiosity, how many folks' PnP role-playing included a mandate that you always speak in character and never go OOC?  I certainly never saw that outside of LARP events.  Rather a typical gaming session would generally wander back and forth between intense in-character "episodes" and "hey, pizza's here, who got the half with green olives?"  The key thing was, being a small group in a room together allowed for everyone knowing which was which, and feeling the flow as it changed.  The problem with an MMO is that the massive part guarantees that there is almost always somebody OOC at any given time disrupting the mood and distracting everyone else,  AND the lack of non-text cues makes it that much harder to get and stay in character, especially for those with less-developed role-playing skills. 

So the two main things that need to be addressed are keeping the group small (and providing a multitude of tools for self-policing) and improving/increasing the transmission and feedback mechanisms between players.  Instancing and grouping and guilds and having ignore lists and all chat channels being ignorable and user-created/moderated channels all address the first.  But the second is much much harder.  Having the world be more interactive is a small step in the right direction.  Things like being able to sit or lie on *anything*, pick up anything, break anything breakable, etc, would all help.  Stupid shit like invisible walls, getting stuck on a 1-inch barrier, being unable to push through a clump of grass, and not being able to jump over that small clump of grass all have to be eliminated.

But I think the real key to sucking people into their characters is going to be the characters themselves.  That onscreen mass of pixels needs to do what I tell it to do AND the world needs to react to it appropriately.  When I throw a punch at someone, if I hit the punch needs to hit ONSCREEN and rock them back accordingly, and NOT pass right through them. When I'm angry, my avatar needs to look angry, and I need to be able to define what that looks like, within reason, as well as control when it displays it easily. 

LOS needs to be measured from my avatar's eyes to ANY visible part of my target.  Solid things in the game need to be solid, whether they are characters and npcs or chairs or walls or whatever.  My character's arm should never pass through my hip much less the wall next to me, and the hilt of the sword on my back should not rest in the center of my skull.

Third-person perspective needs to go away, meaning peripheral vision and the sensation of touch need to somehow be translated into the UI.  And no, I don't want to actually feel the dagger slipping between my ribs, but it must somehow be made obvious on-screen that I've just been hit in the back, and I should easily be able to turn towards that attack (provided I'm not impaled on a huge spike or something ;).  EQ1 was the first and last MMO I'm aware of where it was actually possible to play in first person perspective.  That was a combination of combat being slow enough that you had time to read and react to the text telling you that you had been hit in the back, plus the audio in it truly gave you the clues you needed to realize that giant was coming up behind you, if you were paying attention.

Probably most importantly but perhaps slightly easier, if you want me to play your game in character, make your game react to me in character!  If I swing my sword around in a tavern people need to be moving out of the way and/or drawing theirs.  Automagic knowledge of everything my character has ever done, even in a closed room at the bottom of otherwise empty catacombs buried under a pyramid in the middle of an uninhabited desert, needs to be done away with.  If an npc sees me, unless they have reason to know ME by sight (wanted posters or prior encounters or something), they should react according to what they see, NOT the game's punch list of all my accomplishments/bad deeds.  That doesn't mean an orc in his fortress wouldn't attack a human on sight, but it MIGHT mean that if I talk to him in orcish he MIGHT pause his attack, even if I just killed the two guards outside his room, provided I did so silently so he had no way of KNOWING that I killed them!

But I guess you're looking for practical ideas, eh?  OK, how about this.  Take the emote system and merge it with the chat system in a thorough fashion, so that if I type something like "*glares why did you do that" my avatar actually glares at whoever I'm looking at while mouthing the words.  Bits and pieces of that have been implemented in various places, most notably second life.  But never in a game with a comprehensive set of commands that could be easily integrated with the chat.

And forget about global chat ever being very RP friendly in an MMO.  Unless you want to somehow enforce role-playing a world where hundreds of people can hear each other talking in their heads no matter how remote they are in the gameworld, and new people randomly join while others randomly exit this strange shared telepathic gestalt. 

[UnSub]

My PnP group generally just used our real names when talking about character action.

I remember watching an extremely awkward game where the GM forced players to only use character names, which saw a group of near strangers constantly have to remember who was Angmar the Dwarf as well as their real names. Having the GM doing the equivalent of, "ROLEPLAY, DAMMIT!" didn't help the game flow.

As discussed, the more closely aligned a player objective is to their character objective, the easier it is to play a character. Enforced roleplay only works in small groups where that cultural standard can be reinforced - as soon as you go bigger, you have to deal with the Hardcore ("Yea verily, fair maid. Canst thou tellst me where yon market ist?"), the Softcore ("Hey, where's the market? I need to sell some loot") and the Just Plain Odd ("My character is a dark elf who's been polymorphed into a dog - meet Rizzt Ro'Rundren").

[Xilren's Twin]

I started writing a wall-o-text on what you could do to better shoehorn RP into current games, but gave it up as a) something we've all heard before and b) irrelevent.  Pen and Paper Role playing games are about shared storytelling experiences making meaningful choices with a like minded group of people.  MMORPG's are a whole other animal; what constantly fools people into expecting one be like the other is their common heritage.  Sure, they might have similar settings and game systems, but their differences are more profound.  Personally, i would stop trying to shoehorn RP into an foreign environment rather than build a system that actually supports it from the ground up.  Course, PnP games make their money on book, module and supplement sales but beyond the initial book investment, players can create their own adventures forever more.  MMO's are 24/7 services for a flat monthly fee. Different business model, different target audiences, and way different systems designs.  Contrast and compare things like combat frequency, pace, importance, outcomes and benefits in a PnP session to a MMO.  Or non-combat activities (be they questing or not).  Or world design with things like travel time, geographic consequences, local economy, law enforcement, etc.  Or base character creation, advancement and development, and equipment vs character.  

One is like the bizzaro universe of the other.  Or Anti-matter and matter.

[Gunzwei]

The one RP story that sticks out in my mind the most was finding out in EQ2 (antonious bayle server) that freeport had a whole sex slave market that RP'ers ran. Aside from that I always enjoyed the UO events and catching a few in-character people in CoX, UO, SWG, and EQ2 which gave the game a bit more of a living quality.

SWG and UO probably had the most open RP I've seen but I think the game mechanics sort of encouraged it. For SWG I had cantina downtime, and for UO pretty much the whole loot economy was done through crafters and player towns. UO imo was largely successful at it due to the game having really no end-game and instead a persistent world with a lot of different ways to engage it. As far building a dynamic RP server I would be interested to see something like crafting skills being designated to certain roles in the game. For example PVP, PVE, and RP characters having unique crafting professions that can benefit the other two.

[Khaldun]

My favorite RP experience in an MMO was in Dark Age of Camelot, where I belonged to an RP guild on Midgard.

I played a skald whose backstory was that she'd murdered her husband and most of her male relatives at a dinner one night after getting them drunk. The reason was that she'd been forced to marry him by her cruel and politically ambitious father, who was constantly scheming for more power. She was genuinely in love with a younger man from a nearby clan and refused the marriage until her father told her that he'd have her lover killed if she didn't obey. So she gave in to spare his life. But a few months later, the husband killed the lover anyway when he happened to run across him at the crossroads. Hence the skald taking her vengeance. But her father escaped. So she was a sort of doomed, depressed figure who lived mostly for the possibility of catching up with her father and killing him. Basically, the kind of thing that happens in most Norse sagas, with a bit of a feminist twist.

So I did a lot of the "mysterious past" stuff, and played the character as bleak and fatalistic. Was really fun. When I decided to unsub many moons later, the whole guild set up a tinystory where the skald got to track down her father--we picked one of the Midgard NPCs, the boss of this fort off in the woods, and went all over the zone doing our own "quest". Eventually some other players started following us because we were talking the whole thing out, and a few players started playing as if they were the evil father's henchmen trying to stop us.

[Azazel]

That's what I described (or tried to describe, anyway). Player A can give Player B a white mark or a black mark once per month. At the end of the month, the mark goes away. Player A can black mark them again, but A can never place more than one mark on B at a time.

Example: Assume 200 black marks are needed to ban a character, and a maximum of 25 black marks and 25 white marks can be accrued per day. In order to ban Player B, Player A would have to organize 199 other players to black mark them - 25 per day for eight days. This assumes no one white marks Player B in that time.

That would be awesome. Right up until the SA Goons invade your game. It took me all of four seconds to think of thathappening, so I'm sure they'll be around the second it goes live.

[Khaldun]

World reactivity and persistence of decisions have been mentioned in various ways. Pulling from Sam's tale of sleeping her way to 80, do in-game mechanics for players marrying (UO) and adopting one another (LotRO) add anything?

I'll use EVE as an example here.

So imagine this conversation in EVE on corp chat:

"Hey everyone, I'm in Jita at the moment, some good deals on mods here, anyone need a Mining Mindlink?"
"Ah, I could probably use one, how much are they going for"
"About 20M ISK, want me to pick one up for you?"
"Hmm, nah, can't quite afford that right now"
"Alright, I'll be back to our system in an hour, gonna let auto pilot take me home"


So, is that in character or out of character?   When player goals = character goals, there is almost no distinction in my opinion.  To me thats how you get people who don't even think about RP to act "in character."

In WoW, you character's goal is to save the town, or kill the lich king, or win the argent tournament.   Your goals for those are "finish this questline so I can level up, complete my tier 10 set, or do my dailies for today."  Its just damn hard to promote RP when there is a big gulf between character and player in terms of motivations and goals.

I think this is basically spot on. But then notice that the issue really is that for RP to align with the game, the game MUST be its nature be very "world-like", open-ended, with a lot of dynamic content. There is no way to align character and objectives if your objectives are the same objectives that everyone else on server has. It isn't just "gotta finish my tier 10 set" that's the issue. It's that as I run a bunch of WoW quests, the gameworld doesn't react at ALL to the history or nature of my character. If I show up as a level 80 undead rogue in Mulgore and decide to run a quest in the lowbie village, the game treats me just as if I'm a level 1 tauren hunter. Levelling to 80 in Northrend as a Horde member, you end up helping the Apothecary fuckers to kill people at the Wrathgate, you end up invading Undercity to get the Apothecary fuckers (with no one upbraiding you for helping them get what they needed), and then a bit later you end up going all over the fucking world to help rescue a dying paladin from becoming undead--even if  you ARE undead. Forget WoW's lore: the "story" of every single character consists of near-random oscillations from cynical brutality to Jesus-like compassion, from being the lickspittle brow-beaten gofer of shitheads who aren't fit to wipe your ass to going toe-to-toe with gods (and then going back to being a gofer again).

You can never make RP in a MMO really really work until you have a dynamic world with branching choices of some kind.

[pxib]

It doesn't take much. Most of my favorite roleplaying moments come from City of Heroes because superheroes are so inherently silly that it was easy to make up backstories on the fly, and when they ran into somebody who was roleplaying they just went along with it. It was fun and easy and didn't interfere with gameplay (which was also fun and easy). Phrasing needs and interests in In-Character ways didn't get in the way of understanding what was going on. Like the EVE example, but slightly less mundane.

In Dark Age of Camelot (an item collection game, and more tactically complex and thus less RP friendly) I played a Spirit Master specifically because I liked the class backstory. They were (are?) a pet class who summoned the ghosts of those who had died in ordinary, non-combat ways so that they had another chance to die in battle and go to Valhalla. Every time you summoned a pet it would look different. When in groups with other people I would tell the other players that ghost's name and explain his or her cause of death. Then if the pet died (which happened distressingly frequently... it wasn't particularly capable, and the class kind of sucked), I would take a moment to note the happy occasion before introducing somebody new.

The number of players in my groups who would start spontaneously roleplaying their own characters' reactions (listing family members who had died in similar ways and their sincere appreciation of the important work priests of Hel do) was striking. These games are more fun when there's a story to them.

[Mrbloodworth]

Forward:Curse of Harperella

Rather cool story of how a LOTRO RP event turned into a machinima.