It’s an internet discussion from Rampant Coyote.
- What Makes a Great RPG - The Answer?
- What Makes a Great RPG - The World
- What Makes a Great RPG - Playing a Role
- What Makes a Great RPG (Twenty-Sided)
- What Makes a Great RPG, Part II (Twenty-Sided)
- What Makes a Great RPG, Part III (Twenty-Sided)
- Of RPGs and Knowledge (Augury)
- Update 10/12/7: More posts on Great RPGs, is a round-up at Rampant Coyote
It’s a heck of a lot to read, and I’ll confess I still haven’t read it all. Midway through curiosity got the best of me.
Too impatient to read them all in order to confirm this to be so, I used FIND on the rest and it certainly seems true:
No one said, “cooperative game play”.
‘Course they’re talking about video game RPGs there, and most of those are single player.
But they’re also talking about great RPGs, and cooperative play is surely at least worthy of a nomination.
Though, it’s not what I’d put at the top of my list.
Going back to table-top RPGs here, or belly-top for you Otters out there:
Prior to RPGs, games generally meant last-man-standing win-oriented PvP. Some offered “realm vs. realm” in which, certainly, there were heaps of cooperative play, but all of those were likewise win-oriented. We called them sports, and played them outdoors.
This was back when we had an ozone layer, you understand.
The goal of all games was to win, and winning was the entertaining thing about them, despite how many times you heard, “It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game…”
If you didn’t know that was bullshit, you must not have lost very often.
Anyway, the great innovation of RPGs was neither cooperative play, nor even role-playing.
It was entertainment-oriented game play.
Cooperative game play was just sort of a prerequisite for that. Indeed, tabletop RPGing isn’t even entirely cooperative: there’s a game master opposing the players, after all.
Nevertheless, the goal of the game is to be entertained.
The players are all in pursuit of that goal, and even the game master’s job providing opposition takes a back-seat to it.
It’s interesting, now, how RPGs have changed, adapting to the video game environment.
There’s the “roll playing” versus “role playing” issue. I hear it mostly as a complaint about MMORPG players. To be honest we rarely role-played much more than that in table-top games. Ventrillo guild chat sounds like almost any random table of D&D nerds to me.
If you had a private game with great RP, you probably won’t find that again in a CRPG until you once more have a private game, which is getting easier and easier to do.
Then there was the single-player thing. On PCs, it seems to be clearing-up, and console RPGs can’t be far behind now that they’re all online.
There’s cooperative game play. It came along with multi-player as the default, but sometimes as though developers only knew it was a part of RPGs, if not exactly why.
But none of that was the real innovation behind RPGs anyway.
Entertainment-oriented game play was the thing.
Did that even make the transition to multi-player video game RPGs, or is my imagination posing as memory, again?
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2 Comments
I’m not sure exactly what you are saying.
When we played Pen & Paper games, we’d roleplay whenever the characters had to talk to somebody, but if none of us could come up with something comedic about the situation, we’d default to a campy over-the-top style, ’cause that was always worth a cheap laugh.
So for us, roleplaying was mostly about laughing, it was comedic relief, and a game provided a lot of entertainment if it provided a series of potentially comedic situtations where we would think up funny bits.
When I think of “serious” roleplayers, I think of guys who are serious about acting and creative writing, more than just “acting out” and thinking up stuff that’ll make your buddies laugh.
They’d like to be provided with a series of more serious situations that’d allow them to show their chops as actors and writers or something.
And then there’s the number cruncher guys, that want to be provided to with a series of mathematical problems amd situations, and they also compete with each other and help each other to come up with the best solutions, just like the serious roleplayers compete and help each other act better, and the comedic guys compete and feed off each other.
Not that we can’t be more than one of things, heh, I’m just dividing up the different kinds of stuff you’d have to provide as entertainment.
As far as games being about Entertainment, and story, and stuff like that, compared to winning and losing, I think that EQ and WoW and those kinda games are actually pretty Entertaining and story oriented, zone by zone and dungeon by dungeon, although the folks playing it can choose to ignore it if they want and look at it in a more abstract mathematical Roll Player way too.
The do provide a series of situations for comedic relief folks, serious actors and writers, and number crunchers, whether they’re PvP or PvE focused.
Mebbe they ain’t that good, and maybe they’re easily obscured by the people yer playing it with, or mebbe its just that they aren’t selecting a particular segment of those three crowds, and so they make everybody do a mixture of stuff, even if they don’t really want to do number crunching crap or whatever, but that’s pretty much always how it was, too.
And usually the older you get, the more crusty you get, and the less you notice the details, y’know?
‘Cause you recognize the pattern right off the bat, and you don’t need to pay attention to all the details anymore to figure things out.
And in that fashion, while you sorta learn how to summarize everything you see to be more effective, and you start trending toward seeing everything in an abstract and amthematical way and being a number cruncher, instead of a roleplayer and stuff, I think.
Oh whatever, what do I care, I can make jokes about the meta game and abstract mathematical situations, so us comedic relief guys are never really starved for entertainment ammo, we can pick SOMETHING up off the ground and beat somebody else over the head with it just as well on any level of the multiverse ahaha.
Ole Bald Angus the Monk said:
Mostly just the same, here. Well… but there was only about a 50/50 chance at best that anyone would speak as their character, versus going the old, “I tell the NPC whatever, whatever”-route.
I do more role-playing in my head than aloud regardless of the format (maybe even more for CRPGs than table-top, playing them solo- more often).
But anyway, yeh, tabletop: The only sin was in missing an opportunity for comedy, really.
But that’s kind of what I mean: we weren’t playing to win, to roleplay, to character-build, to solve mysteries, to unravel the plot, or any of the other stuff which sometimes happened: the point of the entire affair was just to have fun. Or “to be entertained” with a natural secondary goal arising, “to be entertaining”.
And though the point of playing sports or other games might also be “to have fun” for some people, I think it’s quite a bit different in that the fun is mostly predicated on winning. Sometimes coming close to winning is good enough too, but that only goes so far.
I guess the more casual the game, the more distant from winning you can be and still have fun… Even then, though, if the Smiths always lose to the Joneses, there’s a good chance Uno-night is gonna become Hearts night sooner or later.
But with RPGs there’s just no such thing as “winning” or “losing” to begin with.
MMORPGs do that pretty well - and get criticized for it from a lot of folk for being games you just show-up and put in your time to “win” - but more and more it seems only up to the “end-game” switcharoo.
The raiding game seems a lot more like a traditional game-game to me, to say nothing of MMOs in which PvP is the end-game.
They may still deliver every other element that an RPG is supposed to deliver, but there’s a shift from entertainment being the goal, to it being a reward for winning.
If that’s the case, the criticism shouldn’t be for MMO’s lack of innovation in terms of delivering more end-game variations than the two the industry has come up with so far, but more that MMO’s have failed to deliver any end-game activity.
They’re just bolting-on a game end-cap to an RPG ’cause they couldn’t think of an RPG end-cap.
RPGs not having been designed for that, and all.
To be true to their roots, I guess what ought to happen is one day you try to login, and a message tells you the server’s new girlfriend is taking all his time so he doesn’t have an adventure ready, she doesn’t want you over again anyway, so hey, let’s try for next week, ’cause she’s planning a shopping-day around checking-out the new candle store outlet… The server figures he can prep something during his lunch break at work, and surely she won’t make him go with here for that.