MMORPGs

[rowyn]

I ordered Guild Wars a couple of weeks ago from Amazon.com, and it finally showed up on Friday evening. Lut and I only played for a couple of hours over the weekend.

I made up a healer, which should surprise no one familiar with my MMORPG play style. I like the play style of support classes, as a rule. I like being the one to keep everybody else from getting killed. And I don't like chasing critters around; one of the advantages of being a healer is that generally your targets are not trying to evade you. ;)

It went okay. I picked a secondary profession more or less at random, after Lut told me that I could always switch it later (granted, much later) if I wanted to. ("Ranger? Ranger sounds all right. Oh, hey, I get a cat! Do any of the other classes get cats?" "No." "Then I'll stick with ranger.")

The interface was giving me some trouble. Lut can switch from first to third person view via scrollwheel, but my trackball has no scrollwheel and bizarrely the options settings don't list a toggle for viewpoint switch, anywhere. More annoyingly, I found my wrists hurting very soon after I started playing -- maybe 30 minutes or so into each session. This is particularly odd given that I can play Puzzle Pirates, which involves lots of quick repetitive motions, for several consecutive hours without ill consequences. I don't know why; it may be because the commands in Puzzle Pirates are concetrated over such a small area. For most puzzles, my hand stays in the same place covering a handful of buttons. One thing I did notice was that I was doing a lot of right-click-and-hold with my right pinky while mousing in Guild Wars, a motion not required in other games and which aggravated my hand a lot. It's not actually required in GW, either -- I just need to get into the habit of using the keyboard to change direction instead of the mouse.

Lut suggested, half-jokingly, that it was psychosomatic: "Oh no! Not another leveling game! How can I get out of this? I know, pain, he'll buy that excuse." I gotta admit it's hard to argue with that notion, as my feelings while playing Guild Wars were much closer to those of the grind of Diablo 2 or Dungeon Siege than my excitement over EverQuest, or even BatMUD. I don't think I've played a levelling game that I was really enthusiastic about since JumpGate, and my enthusiasm for JumpGate waned after a couple of months. As opposed to EQ, which hooked me for three years.

This morning, I was emailing koogrr about his WoW characters. I realized, as I was writing him, that I had a surprisingly good grasp of the personalities behind his WoW PCs. Some of it that was because Koogrr's told me about his backstory for the characters. But a lot of it wasn't him telling me "The character thinks like this" but rather "And here's what my character did when I was playing today." A picture of the character's personality emerged from those anecdotes -- and of a character whose personality was distinct from Koogrr's own.

It occured to me that I'll also get a similar sense of personality from Lut's characters. Even if we're not actually RPing, there's still a certain amount of 'And here's what this one is like' attached.

With my own characters, I'll have a sense of who they are, but it's often been(a) not a character I really thought was interesting to be, (b) a personality at odds with the character's actions, or (c) both. Mystdark, my cleric in EQ, was both.

Now, I do like being the healer, not only from a social (everyone likes a healer) but from a playstyle perspective: I actually enjoy watching health bars and healing more than clicking on enemy targets and blasting. But the personality traits that I reflexively associate with "healer" -- calm, pacificistic, gentle, shy, reserved -- don't resonate with me as "fun to play", and they don't fit with the theme of typical MMORPGs ("let's go kill stuff and loot!")

Of course, being the healer doesn't mean I have to have the personality traits my mind automatically assigns the type. A plausible character could have any number of reasons for picking the profession. And it strikes me that I might enjoy Guild Wars more if I made my character with a personality that I thought of as cool and interesting, the same way Johanu and Stormghost and other MMORPG characters have caught my interest. Even my CoH characters were more successful from that perspective -- Tabitha and Kasadya & Asmedaj all had a nice feel to them.

That being the case, what I should do is figure out a personality that (a) catches my interest, (b) makes sense with the profession of healer (and thereby suits my playstyle) and (c) makes sense in the context of what I'm doing (killing lots of stuff for loot).

Hmm.

Comments

[ysengrin.livejournal.com]

Once you start the storyline by leaving 'pretty' Ascalon, Guild Wars is less like Diablo II. If you follow the story arc, you'll advance in levels without having to play to level.

Once you hit the level cap (about halfway through the story), it's more tactics and strategy rather than getting more levels and brute forcing your way through.

Once you're through the story arc, your choices are limited to repeating parts you liked (helping newer characters through), starting completely over with a new character, or beating on each other in the arenas - which is great if that's what you like, but it's decidedly non-social except for the small group you're playing with.

I play 4-5 hours a week, and have since release. I'm still having fun with it.

For easy of play, I use a Nostromo pad and the mouse, and rarely have to move my hand to the keyboard.

[ysengrin.livejournal.com]

"Ease of play" that is. I need more coffee.

Spoiler free, please

[ltwarhound.livejournal.com]

I haven't told her much if anything about the backstory in Guild Wars, leaving it for her to find out during play.

So, please don't cover the story. But do feel free to cover anything else.

And no, Ysengrin, this isn't aimed at your post, no problem there.

Re: Spoiler free, please

[ysengrin.livejournal.com]

I had one of the plot twists spoiled for me, so I try to be careful :)

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Heh. You make me think of my problems I have when trying to come up with an idea for a character for a campaign, on the rare occasion that I play.

In the stereotypical campaign, what I'd LIKE to be playing is a healer. But I also want to be a paladin. What I REALLY want to be is someone who gets to be chivalrous, a "knight in shining armor", except that I'm really not interested in bashing in skulls or lopping off heads. In fact, in Star Wars, I typically play a character who keeps his blaster set for "stun", or in AD&D, who has weapons that cause "Subdual" damage. I have annoyed multiple playing groups in multiple campaigns in the past for having the audacity to actually take PRISONERS, thus saddling the group with un-fun moral considerations, and murking up the white-hat-vs.-black-hat video game mentality that everyone really wanted for a properly good time.

In the end, I typically end up playing some character who's just a joke, since, well, that just seems to be the way things go for local RPG groups when someone else is GMing. Alas!

In World of Warcraft, Priest is definitely the way for me to go. I have two characters on Azgol-Nerub ... and they're BOTH 41st-level Priests! (Why do I have two Priests? Uhm ... very good question. I wonder if I could have gotten to level 50 by now if I'd just been playing one, eh?)

[rowyn]

Part of the problem is that when I think "roleplay", the kinds of characters I want to play are not going to go out and hack-and-slash.

It's not even that I want to be a noble hero type who doesn't slaughter indiscriminately -- it's more like "I don't want to make someone whose life is about fighting". Kia is a good example of the kind of protagonist/PC I gravitate towards nowadays: extremely good at her field, with a life that revolves around making things for society. About "building a better world", not defending the current one, or going out and carving people up because they're in the way of your vision.

I'm not a pacifist, personally. I don't think soldiering is inherently wrong. There are many causes worth fighting and dying for, and I don't mean to slam people who choose that path in RL, or even those who like it in games. It's just that it doesn't interest me so much as the idea of "What kind of adventures would people who don't fight have?"

It may be a matter of over-exposure. I love fantasy and sf, but so much fantasy and sf is about ACTION! and DANGER! Which means FIGHTING! and WAR! and DEATH!

And I find myself thinking "Can't we tell a story about creating and building, about peaceful competition and cooperation that doesn't revolve around X fighting Y? Whenever you've got a war, whichever side wins, the combined capabilities of both is going to be less than it would've been if they could have put their resources toward a peaceful goal instead.

So I just want something more optimistic.

I'm told "A Tale Told in the Desert" was an MMORPG along those lines; kinda sorry I never tried it, but Lut wasn't interested in that one.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

I suppose it's because, in order for the story to be compelling to the players - and to meet the "game" requirement - there has to be some sort of competition. And "fighting bad guys" is one of the easiest ways to meet that requirement, especially when such a large part of most RPGs is devoted toward the combat section.

For me, my favorite element of being in an RPG (a traditional RPG, even) would be "discovering more of the backstory" and "exploring the game world" (or dungeon layout). But, being a GM trying to satisfy requirements like that can be rather challenging: If I try to run a character-oriented campaign, it can be rather intimidating to try to do a good job of making sure that the expanding cast of NPCs doesn't just melt into the background - that they don't cease to live/exist once the spotlight is off of them. (What has X been doing in the background while the PCs have been off doing Y?)

I think I'd be rather intimidated even more if I were to try to come up with a campaign wherein the story SHALL NOT involve any fighting or life-or-death situations.

I could fairly easily come up with a plot involving, say, the exploration of a puzzle-filled wizard's tower of wonders - and I'm fairly sure I've done that before, a few times - and I could leave out the obligatory animated objects that attack the heroes. Or, I could have an adventure where the PCs are stranded on a crippled starship that is in a decaying orbit, and they need to get OFF the ship before it's too late.

A game about "peaceful competition and cooperation", however, would probably need a proper framework, since a lot of the competition/cooperation element would fall in the domain of things that are usually hand-waved by a DM in a typical hack-and-slash campaign. Do the players resolve problems simply by making a good speech and sounding good, in order to smooth things over, possibly accompanied by good "persuasion" rolls? If it's a game where "good resource management" is involved, the RPG might need a good framework of rules to handle whatever it is that the players do in greater detail than the typical RPG bothers with.

In other words, if most of the "action" is going to be spent on manufacturing and trading goods, then there should probably be some data and rules set out ahead of time to handle how the markets are going to work in the various places where the merchant/entrepreneur PCs are going to be operating. The PCs can't very well make intelligent decisions on the central "game point" if the DM is just making it up as he goes along, and keeping the PCs in the dark - or if it ultimately is just a process of lucky arbitrary die rolls of the "Profession: Merchant" skill. I guess if I were to run a campaign like that, I'd probably want to look into various board games that touch on the topic (though probably something a bit more complex than "Settlers of Cataan").

Hmm. For some reason I think of a lot of the "shoujo anime" that Gwendel picks up as fansubs: Japanese high school students, various in-school rivalries, though sometimes the "bad guy" rival ends up becoming a friend/ally by the end of the series. Magic powers and cute talking animal sidekicks are optional, but their inclusion is usually accompanied by some potentially life-threatening situation that the heroine must deal with. (I.e., must capture all these magic spirits let loose by magic cards before they hurt anybody. People may never die on-camera in the series - at least not until the last 6 episodes when the mood becomes dark and brooding in time for the climactic conclusion - but there's always the POTENTIAL for it if the heroine weren't so lucky and/or competent.)

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Druids in WoW actually make for a nice blend character. We're capable of being primary healers, but we can also change to bear form and tank stuff, or cat form and do some damage. And hey. Cats. Photogenic! };)

I've successfully 'main tanked' (been sole tank) for a number of level 60 instances, and I've had a lot of fun being the main damager as well, when healing has been sufficiently covered. I don't feel like I could do that with a priest... The only variation that would work there is going from healer to nuker.

As for a personality type... What about a 'crusader of the light' sort of personality?

[koogrr.livejournal.com]

Your revelations were very cool, especially as I had only vague backstory ideas for my two characters. Of course, their choice of profession does somewhat determine how they act. Still, I must agree that things seem a lot more clinical with Johanu ("I'll send my minion").

I suppose the most intersting healer I've run across was Fall-From-Grace, from Planescape:Torment (Well, as interesting as Paenitia). Grace was a member of the Sensates, which were a Sigil faction that believed life was meant to be full, and over-ful of experiences. They'd go out, find out as much as they could, and memory-record the experiences to share with other people. As Grace was also a Succubus, this suggested she had a lot of apetite for experiences.

[krud42.livejournal.com]

You played "City of Heroes"? How'd I miss that?

(Shows how rarely I come here, I'm sorry to admit. Or maybe I just forgot you played it...)

I stopped playing after a few months of it. I had fun, but it got repetitive for me. I've been looking longingly at "Guild Wars" at the store, though. Is broadband a necessity? (For point of reference, I could play "City of Heroes" over dial-up with very few hiccups. I haven't managed to find a demo of Guild Wars, though.)

I don't mind playing healers in regular roleplaying games, but on MMORPG's I find myself being more of a tool (in the non-figurative sense) for people, and less of a participant. That was especially true in CoH. As a fighter, you had a choice of what to do, but as a healer, if you deviated from what was expected, people quickly got annoyed. (Not that I wouldn't heal people, but... eh, long story, and notes aren't the place for it.) As for calm, gentle, and pacifistic, you obviously never met my half-orc healer, Eric the Angry Cleric. ';P