Posts tagged D&D
Posts tagged D&D
Now that I am thirty, I am finally coming to terms with the idea that my D&D days are over, at least until Freya can play, but they do have one enduring legacy for me as a games-designer.
I think I am burning out as a player…
Inspired by my post about playing female characters online, I got thinking about gender roles in RPGs. I don’t believe in women’s things and men’s things, but there is a tendency for people to drift toward certain stereotypes. You probably don’t think about it when you are actually playing a game, but CRPGs do give us stereotypes. Arch-mages are men with beards, clerics are dour men and dwarves if they are NPCs and women if they are PCs. Fighters are men or else women trying to prove themselves better than men, rogues are slimy men or halflings who think they are cassanova.
I played a woman in some MMOs and people used to give me stuff, both in my guild and in pick-up groups. It was never overtly ‘have this because you are a girl’, but I saw so many examples of ‘I don’t really need this, so you might as well have it’ when I was playing a female character and never saw it with male ones. Do people think that a female rogue is more in danger of having substandard equipment?
Playing Bioware’s Neverwinter Nights, the original storyline has two love interests; one is male and one is female. The female interest seemed very much an equal, but very emotional (especially for a paladin) and conflicted. The male interest was stoic and protective, resolute in spite of his troubled past.
I suppose you play to your market. Given the things I have done, the evils to my gender, while working on a game for girls, I cannot really hold it against them. When your market is projected to be mostly men and boys, you play up the wish fulfilment. When (like World of Warcraft) you reach close to equal numbers, you make sure that the genders both get some heroes and heroines.
So you want to try some archaic speech in your roleplaying, be it MMOs or tabletop games? I will try to offer some help over the course of this series of articles which might help.
Now here is a game that got me excited. It is not because it was D&D 3.5, because I think that there are better systems out there, nor even because I am a fan of Ebberron, even if I am one of the few people to remember Keith Baker’s hushed-up forays into PC gaming.
No, what got me was the feeling that everyone served a purpose and every class was true to its roots. You don’t get much more true to D&D than using the system. I played a rogue and I was suddenly not just a DPS-machine. I would see the odd idiot (Barbarian 9 times out of ten) who would declare that they had enough hit-points to ignore the traps instead of waiting the three or four seconds it took for me to disarm them, but then things like opening a door that nobody had ever seen a rogue manage before made up for it.
What killed it for me, of course, was the same thing that had made it so great; the game was balanced for groups. The same mechanic that made me useful also meant that I was nothing without at least a tank and a healer. I started out, back in beta, playing with my wife. After release, I quickly found a guild and specialised as just about the best trap-springer door-opener I could be. Life was great, but that post-beta honeymoon will always end. The guild started to fragment as people’s enthusiasm waned. I would log in some days and see no guild-mates on. One day, the guild was gone.
For a while, there were pick-up groups. I would get the odd ‘rouges suk! lol’ from people who thought that another barbarian was better than inviting a rogue, but there was enough call for me. I died a little more than average, since I was specced for rogue skills more than combat and PUG clerics don’t tend to think of healing the rogue while there is a tank to dump spells into.
I was spoilt as a D&D player, I suppose, by people who could spell ‘rogue’ and understood waiting for them to disarm traps rather than setting them off and killing everyone. The frustration became too much to bear and I left.
One day, I might go back. I think I would have to take a group with me rather than relying on strangers, but I want so badly to go back. It was everything I wanted from an MMO, D&D for the internet. I suppose I have Neverwinter Nights for that…
My name is Anthony and I play D&D. I am not a geek, not according to the geeks I know. I tried calling myself a geek, but the real geeks disowned me. I was too cool to hang out in their world. I am not alone in this. Vin Diesel plays (or played) D&D and nobody would call him a geek. Not to his face, at any rate.
So why are people so scared to just admit it? I worked with a man who made Dwayne Dibley look cool and even he looked aghast at the implication that maybe playing Neverwinter Nights meant he might like to try D&D.
The game itself has a bad press, I think. Endless generations of grognards and assorted beardies have scared away normal players until the first thing that springs to my generation’s mind is the cartoon from the ’80s. Even the other designers I work with seem never to have played D&D or seen it played. I am half-tempted to suggest it, as the management have been saying that we should host some social activities at work… Of course, I would rather play paintball or go on a Grand Union Canal pub-crawl. (apparently, the trick is to have a well-stocked bar on the barge…)
It is an unpopular idea in most RPGs to let a character die in any permanent sense. Many CRPGs, even ones with a save functionality, include either a resurrection spell or even an ‘unconscious’ status that the character will recover from, meaning that the party dies as one or not at all.
Tabletop RPGs even tend toward this,giving the player spells to resurrect or some special status effects that remove them from the fight and then they can heal up again afterwards.
With this in mind, the average MMO has death without any real consequence. Everquest had an experience penalty and then the infamous corpse-run, which was later downgraded to only levels 10 and above. World of Warcraft, on the other hand, mildly dents your armour and charges you a few copper pieces to get the dings hammered out.
This is with good reason; the average newbie dies a few times before they finish the starting area’s quests. Back in my EQ days, I learnt the wonders of the corpse-run before I even found out what second level felt like. (Kelethin was no kind to newbies, nor were higher-level player handing out free beer in the aforementioned tree-top city)
And yet… this attitude is not universal… Shaiya (a free MMORPG) has Ultimate mode, where your character is deleted after three minutes if a cleric does not revive you. Blizzard themselves included Iron Man Mode for online Diablo.
For most players, dying is an inconvenience; you rez’, you repair, you return to battle. Some consider even this too harsh. So why add permadeath? The answer is that death means nothing to modern players. We fight mobs beyond out level just to see if it can be done, so we lose our sense of danger, of excitement. A permadeath game keeps you cautious and makes the healer even more valuable. Permadeath makes those big kills more special. Permadeath makes you fear for your character, it makes you care if your character survives each fight…
And in my opinion, it is no bad thing to care if your character will live or die…
