Your Thoughts

[ArcanaFTW]

Hi everyone,

I've recently started expanding my portfolio into games journalism, and am in the process of writing an article about the prevalence of roleplay communities in gaming - as you can imagine, this is definitely up Arelith's street, and I would love to hear some of your thoughts in regards to the subject. I would like to know about why you have an interest in roleplaying in video games, what mediums you use now and have used before and some of your favourite experiences during your time interacting with others in such a setting.

If you'd like to post either here or send me a PM, hearing your stories and experiences would really help me a lot in writing an informed and dynamic article, and I'd also love to hear from the DM or dev team about their reasons for helping maintain this roleplaying community.

Thanks,
Arcana

[Drakkenstien]

I'd say it's not very prevalent outside a few communities here and there. It's fairly heavily stigmatized in many MMOs that I've played. I think NWN is a bit of an oddball, which allows those communities to have a home in an otherwise desolate RP landscape. That's not to say that there's absolutely no RPing, but they tend to be pretty low population exceptions rather than the rule. The landscape for most MMOs doesn't really allow characters to have meaningful interaction with the server landscape.

I think the reason I keep coming back to Arelith is that it does allow some permanent changes to exist as a result of player experience and roleplay. Usually, those are semi-permanent in the form of fixtures, or other times, events bring lasting, and sometimes terrifying change, such as the Battle of Wharftown causing the complete annihilation of an entire settlement. I think that interaction between players and server is what makes Arelith and NWN sort of stand out.

[mellowbadger]

Roleplaying got quite a surge of popularity around 2015 - 2016, but not in the sense that we're used too. With games like Arma, Ark, Rust, and GTAV private servers, there were a ton of what I would say next wave RP games. They aren't the traditional style ie: NWN, MUDs, PnP, MMOs, but they do put a strong focus on character development. This became somewhat of a smallish fad on Twitch: watching people play these games and seeing these stories unfold. Even I would have a ARMA RP stream up, listening in with off and on interest as I played my games. One streamer/youtuber that built a community off this stuff is Mr. Moon, if you were curious about checking it out. It's died off quite a bit these days, but it's still much much bigger than what you would find in NWN or other MMOs.

As for NWN, I keep coming back because there just isn't another title that can mesh together RP storytelling and game mechanics like it can. Some may dislike this, but to me, it always adds a sense of randomness, that nothing is completely pre-planned. It creates a very unique drama that I've never seen replicated elsewhere.

I tried to RP in Elder Scrolls Online, but I hated how separated you were from the game world. Part of this is the nature of MMOs. Part of this is the inclusive nature of RP guilds. Everyone built their own little bubbles and demanded full control over their characters and plots, thus losing that very thing that causes me to love RP in the first place. It felt far artificial and thus completely killed my sense of immersion.

[StrykerMontgomery]

In the prime or halo 2 and 3 i played literally played thousands of custom matches rather than matchmaking. We sometimes did improv RP gtaish setting on a big city map if you did something that made you high prodile, you had to switch to red team which the cops were allowed to shoot to kill. If you actaully died via non beat down, you had to play a new character that couldn't hold same grudges or agendas. Default non shoot to kill were freen and cops were blue. "Day in the City"

[Chucky1234]

I'm waiting to see what games like World's Adrift from improbable can do for RP. They're enormous (WoW scale) persistent world games so could have a huge impact on creating RP games on a scale not seen before.