Roleplaying games, paradigm and writing

Sometimes, a story sticks itself in my head and won't get out until I put it on paper. Actually, I normally forget them, not being much of a writer, but with LJ at hand, the stories get a bit more insistant. miss_next looked at 'tale of an orc' and asked if it was going to be a NaNo. I don't think it will be, but not because of a lack of words. Just thinking, I could discuss the journey back to Orgrimmar, which should be 2-3 entries (which are about 800 words each), learning mining and smithing along the way, the return to Orgrimmar and maybe some adventures in Ragefire Chasm, meeting Enhtiar (which would involve putting words in nhinx's mouth), travel across the Barrens to the Crossroads (and I think the Barrens is really the place that Anthrak will appreciate, so there will be exposition there), various adventuring there, a side trip to Thousand Needles and meeting Zebadee...

No, shortage of words isn't the problem (what I list above could easily run 5-10k words, depending on how much meat I feel like giving it). For the record, this will cover up to level 20 or 25. I'm currently level 50. The problem, as I see it, is that I wouldn't have anything to make it into a readable novel. Plot, tension, the sort of things that give books an ending.

Amusingly, this mirrors the problem I have with roleplaying games. I'm good at setting the scene and describing, but goals and tension? I can't do it. So, while part of me realizes I could subject any readers I might have to 10,000 words of the story of Anthrak, another part says, "why bother?" And, of course, there's the part of me that says, "ok, so then what?" I already have a career that I enjoy quite a bit, so why would I want to discipline myself to the path of professional writer (if I even could do it and be successful)?

This way of thinking makes for interesting RPGs, but luckily in RPGs, I have the other characters to supply the plot and tension. The most successful games I have involve players who create their own stories in the framework I have. You can also see my gaming style in the exposition. The words exist to frame the scene and the real "work" occurs in the dialogue. Which is how RPGs tend to run, especially Amber games, which was my preferred system for many years.

The "Kult" game log weighs in at 60k words, but I had a group of people (as well as a canned module) to supply the tension and movement. Without other people, the story of Anthrak feels "flat". Plus, I don't have any goals of my own for the character, he's just someone who helps me pass the evenings alone.

Of course, the whole discussion of writing and RPGs brings me to the question of a different implementation of RPGs. That is, MMORPGs, or online gaming. Everquest, World of Warcraft, Dark Ages of Camelot, Anarchy Online, and many more (those are the ones I've played). I've never really considered them roleplaying games, because the interface (typing), isn't really conducive to roleplaying. That is, most people can't type fast enough to do 'real roleplaying'. There's another reason, of course. To me, that reason has always been something I'll call "lack of a flesh and blood GM".

In a face to face game, the GM can fudge results to make it challenging enough, but not too challenging. Encounters can be controlled, monsters silently adjusted up and down to keep it fun. A computer can't do that, and for the $15 a month subscription fee, you can't get enough live GMs to keep the ratios correct (I believe a good GM can't keep more than 6 players properly engaged).

In addition, you need to code a system and turn it loose for the players to abuse, er, use.

This leads to some paradigm breaking. That is, consider the typical fantasy novel (the genre, not a novel about a fantasy). They tend to break down into two types. Solo, that is, mighty Conan versus the opposition and group (sort of an extended buddy movie). After the fellowship, group seems to be the standard. EQ is based around groups, D&D is based around groups.

Unfortunately, the first paradigm breaks occur there. By making the game group based, it's not about who you are, it's who you know. Anyone who has ever moved to a new place and tried to find gaming groups can appreciate this. EQ, in the old days, was especially bad this way since no attempt was made to balance individuals, only groups. No attempt was made, either, to balance roles in a group. So if you went into the game unaware and picked a class based on what sounded good, you could end up out in the cold for groups, in a game that required grouping to "advance".

Then, of course, there is the death penalty. That is, if your character died, you'd deal with many tribulations to recover your body with it's hard won items.

This led to a very conservative player base. If there were certain classes that were more effective than others at certain necessary roles in groups, if there was a massive penalty associated with dying (enough so that sometimes people would quit rather than try to recover a corpse), then by God, no one would leave a city until they had the exact perfect group.

Of course, you could point out that it was possible to do things with a non-optimal group and that a group that was used to working together was orders of magnitude more effective than a group that was just whoever you met to try and get something done that day.

Both of these facts were true, but irrelevant. Because the player base had been conditioned to conservatism, most people didn't bother thinking enough to try and break the rules. It was easier to spend 2 hours following the rules than think for yourself.

The other outcome is the rise of the guilds. Many people didn't have regular groups. Since you couldn't really tell if someone was going to be dependable or not by informal butt sniffing before adventuring, you needed an indicator of a player's skill. Guilds filled that role, as well as giving friends a way to congregate. By joining a guild of like minded people, you were guaranteed a group whose skill level you could count on. Of course, once the developers saw people congregating into guilds and attempting more difficult content as groups of groups (every group is limited in size), they started adding *more* difficult content and raid life was born (if this isn't how it happened, tough, this is my story).

Of course, this led to a lot of breaks with the paradigm. You remember, roleplaying?

I know parodies of MMOs written in the fantasy style abound , but I'll try a few of my own. "Pulling" in EQ was a big one. Basicially, a typical day of EQ involved planting your ass on a zone wall and waiting while the "puller" "tagged" individual monsters and led them to the group to be killed. Sure you *could* actually wander around yourself, but that was a colossal waste of time. It's ten times more difficult to keep 6 people moving in the same direction at the same time, and you would get less experience and less loot (the measure of success in games).

Well, why didn't Gandalf lead the Fellowship into the throne room into Moria and get Aragorn to "pull" the orcs? Because Galdalf isn't stupid, he'd never have the ranger pull. No, it's because it'd make terrible reading. Yet EQers would spend hours doing just that. Why? Because it was the "best" way to get loot. This shattered the paradigm, but it was unavoidable, both because of design decisions and because people are stupid.

Which is why I never saw EQ as a roleplaying game, not after my first few minutes in it.

Of course, people didn't realize that the paradigm was broken and wanted to be heroes, just like Silk and Conan (especially Conan). This led to a lot of drooling idiocy on the monk and warrior class boards which was summarized with the blithe phrase, "I want to be a shark... with laser beams shooting from my eyes".

The problem was that people who wanted to save the world sort of ignored the rest of the group they were forced to be in, who also wanted to save the world. While it would be nice to have 5 people who could sit around and applauds your skill appreciatively, it's sort of boring for the other 5 people. Which is often a problem for group activities.

In WoW, fortunately, any class can solo, so any class can be benchmarked in PvE. This means that "they said he needed a nerf, he said the needed to learn 2 play" ("cry more noob").

While WoW does, I think, a better job of not paradigm breaking, it still has problems because you don't have live GMs who can intervene realtime and make the game not suck (aka "MORE ADDS PLEASE!"). Plus WoW has really bad problems with grouping (those problems being that it's ineffective except in very specific cases) and while it's solved a lot of problems in EQ, and generally moved into paradigm and what the customers want better, it's still not perfect. But nothing I could afford will be.