@ Spinks
Sorry, but the Templars are where it’s happening. Well, ok, not necessarily like it happens for the Illuminati! But, when you’re all done partying like it’s the end of the world (oh, yea, it is the end of the world), you know us Templars will have a nice, quiet sitting room in which to recover from your sordid activities – please wipe your feet at the door.

*crosses fingers and hopes Funcom delivers a great product*

Dang, where was eithers of you when I were growin’ up and tryin’ ta nerd-pressure me friends inta gamin’ more?

And I agree with you and Spinks, there’s probably tons of RP going on that I’m missing – but it’s a personal thing for me, and I definitely feel more at home with the TSW setting!

RP-wise, there are whole spheres that I’ve never dipped into. A lot of cooperative fanfic writing groups are probably closer to MMO RP than standard tabletop games with dice and rules would be. I think the atmosphere really does favour a more cooperative style of interactive fiction than using rules and GMs to make sure everyone sticks to the theme and tows the line.

At its best, it can really bring a game to life. Walking through an in game town where there’s a PC-run market, festival or play going on is just that cool. And I do remember us putting on theatrical events in camelot.

And yes, am quite sure there are very hardcore groups with very strict rules. Also ERP friendly groups where it’s all about the cybering. So needs a bit of looking around to find the group that suits you, if it even exists.

Not really sure how it’ll work with TSW but it may well be that the modern day setting is inspiring to more people.

I think it helps that MMOs are starting to reduce the seemingly arbitrary restrictions on character customisation with respect to armour, weapons, race/class combinations. This certainly allows the player to create a character that is more suited to their tastes, and is thus easier to assume the role of.

The problem with MMOs is that they have to have a more rigid structure than Pen and Paper games. Where PnP provides a framework of rules and the imagination draws the scene, MMOs have to have each scene strictly defined. It’s much harder to say that your character is a Dragon spy in the Illuminati if the game does not provide any easy way for you to reflect that to others. As such, it’s all too easy to meta-game any given situation “I am a Dragon spy!” “No you’re not, I just checked your character sheet”, and so I imagine many people don’t role-play outside of closed circles because they can’t easily impose their world view on an already rigidly defined world.

I would certainly hope that there is scope for the various factions to cooperate; I’ve found some of the best role-playing comes from the ‘enemies working together against a common threat’ trope.

And it would give the other factions a small chance to bathe in the glorious heavenly radiant superiority of the Templars, of course.

So to be able to roleplay in this kind of setting and leave most of the min-maxing powerplaying away? I’m all for it. Also the possibility to retire a character and testament everything to a sibling character would be nice, making it possible for the character to lose their sanity, arm, leg or even life along the way.

So far the only way to roleplay a bad or evil type is to be a serial ganker, and everyone knows how good thing that is. However, if you could help the real bad guys in the game to achieve their ends… now that would be something! Or prevent them from acquiring the world domination, of course… what was I thinking…

Iä, Iä, Cthulhu fthang!

C out

I think that MMO RPing has evolved its own conventions. I’ve dabbled a bit in RP guilds in WoW and find the whole thing a bit alien to me, even coming from a RPG background. It’s really marked that you can’t easily play a bad character, and they tend to have no GM to stop the more ‘look at me’ character types (and then my character was TOTALLY possessed by a demon and had to run away from her childhood sweetheart and hide in the woods before she found out that Illidan and Maev were her parents omg omg omg.)