Comments on: [Roleplaying] Death of the Actor

By: ZombiePirate

ZombiePirate — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 10:54:32 +0000

Original SWG was great for this, there really was no progression, you got your XP from combat to buy new skill boxes for your professions but there were no real dungeons nor raid content to start with. Certain places needed more than one person to do it but they weren’t instanced and anyone could join in, grouped or not. It was a game that was made by the players and I have a lot of fond memories of that. I am part of an RP guild for TOR and I know there will be a lot of the SWG crowd transferring over to populate the world with RP.

By: Tremayne

Tremayne — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 09:02:34 +0000

I don’t think there’s really a solid dividing line between being an actor and role-playing. A good actor creates the character they play and bring more to it than the words on the script, to the extent that two different actors playing the same role can create two quite different characters. And on the flip-side, a role-player is always constrained by the setting they’re in and the others around them. I can’t just decide to roleplay a “jedi space pirate” unless I’m playing SW:ToR (and maybe not even then)… if I tried insisting I was a jedi in LotRO I wouldn’t get very far with the RP community.

Also, I would say that all of the ‘hardcore’ gamers are actually roleplayers. They’re all roleplaying brutal, arrogant, loud-mouthed sociopaths online, while I suspect they act quite differently face to face in real life

By: Melponeme_k

Melponeme_k — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 02:03:35 +0000

Interesting article.

But being an Actor is very different than RP. An actor is interested in exploring emotional boundaries and situations. There is never a time when an actor becomes another person. Acting is really a study of the human animal.

RP play is something altogether different. It reminds me more of those old adventure text games except they are free-form and written by other players.

By: SpiritusRex

SpiritusRex — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 17:55:17 +0000

Nice article.

I guess I may be overstating my maturity level today when I saw: “RPed trade markets and RPed winter pantomines and parties” and, instead, read, “RPed trade markets and RPed winter panties” and immediately had a picture in my minds eye of a stoutly dwarvish lass wearing woolies. Go figure. Kind of a RP Gone Wrong moment

By: spinks

spinks — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 16:13:16 +0000

We actually did a fair bit of RP in DaoC also. I remember even some of the hardcore guys got into the knights of the round table mindset and turned up to RP events. At that time, it wasn’t an either or.

By: theerivs

theerivs — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 16:11:38 +0000

Back in the day say in Dark Ages of Camelot or Vanilla WoW, you were part of something bigger than yourself. You were an Albion Cleric, or You were a part of a 40 man Raid crew.

Back when being hardcore meant something. Hardcore winning is very addictive.

By: We Are Wolves Among the Sheep « A High Latency Life

We Are Wolves Among the Sheep « A High Latency Life — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 15:53:42 +0000

[...] Spinks brought it to the level of Roleplaying, I don’t think thats what Wolfshead meant by his post, that role play is dead…but I do [...]

By: Telwyn

Telwyn — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 12:12:57 +0000

I and my guildmates in WoW used to roleplay more than we do now, we’ve all slowly become more progression focused I think – though also one by one more burntout on the game as well.

But we almost always RP’ed inside instances or while questing out in the world. For us RP was never scripted events or big public gatherings. We were simply giving defined personalities to the members of our group of adventurers. (I played the same way in DDO for some time as well).

I suspect given the hostility or at least lack of understanding that RP receives, even in games with dedicated RP servers, that many others may have followed suit – it’s simply less hassle to weave RP into an instanced space rather than deal with the ‘bunny-hoppers’ and griefers.The consequence may be though that their is a perceived decline of RP since it’s not so visible to the non-RPers in the major hubs/cities.

By: ArMo

ArMo — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 10:15:21 +0000

Being Actor is interesting but it requires also interesting role. Current games offer most of the time generic “kill x mobs”-type of quests and that’s not a role I find anyway interesting. So instead of having tons of generic quests, we need few interesting and epic quests to give that Actor part of the game feel of importance. But I agree with the assessment that best game probably would cater to both categories and would give player the option to choose what he/she wants to do…

By: Delurm

Delurm — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 04:07:37 +0000

Some games have changed to attract that type of playstyle – in an attempt to have competitive arenas and ranked matches. It’s understandable to a point – some of these companies pioneered ‘video game as a sport’ – the problem I think is they don’t understand why those types of games work.

If you play a chess game – your opponent could be Kasparov himself – but he doesn’t start the game with 4 queens and 2 ‘remove all checkmate conditions for free’ cards because he’s the #1 player.

Games like TF2 or SC2 or even CoD and BF2 are popular because you all start pretty much even – and skill is the biggest thing that makes you better. Even in games like CoD (MW-2) where you can upgrade your gear with ‘points’ – it’s not so overpowering or different that you are suddenly an Adonis among mortals.

MMO’s that are gear based – have this problem – a ranked Arena team will *wipe the floor* with a newbie team – even if it’s the Arena version of Kasparov playing the newbies.

On the subject of rollplaying however – I think you’ll find the more the Dev’s support this type of playstyle – the more it comes out of the dark. LoTRO has systems (in game music – that is actually played) and emotes constantly added (with some very cool animations) and many other things along with very very cool outfits that are all added purely for rollplaying – and because of the developer love you get quite a bit of rollplay that is seen around the world. I don’t honestly know of a single other game out there atm that has put as much effort into supporting the rollplaying ‘playstyle’ – WoW barely tolerates it – just look at how many new systems (housing? emotes? cosmetic ‘fluff’ gear?) that it has put out for rollplaying…. that says vollumes