A full six-person fellowship adventuring in the dungeon of the Great Barrow.
Finagling our grown-up schedules and managing the physical distance between our physical selves is just plain complicated. There are jobs and meals and children to sort out. We struggle to get together and, in those three or four hours we have when all the pieces click and the game starts to hum, we so often get just a taste of the meal we looked forward to. Each of us takes a couple of fork-fulls, and before we know it there’s nothing left but crumbs.
I knew only one other player before this adventure. That didn't slow us down.
Last night, in lieu of the gaming group that had blamelessly failed to congeal again, one of my players and I played LOTRO instead. We logged on, messed with our inventories for a while, shot the shit, did the general housekeeping that comes with an MMORPG. That done, we gathered together some players (some strangers, some acquaintances), trekked across a richly textured landscape to a distant tomb, heroically bloodied and plundered the hell out of it, and then did it all again. That took about two and a half hours.
In one month, my table-top RPG group has played one time. In one night with the MMORPG, we got a group together and played twice. Why go to the trouble of playing an old-school paper RPG?
This is no new question, I know. A lot of people have (implicitly or explicitly) faced this same question and drifted into MMORPGs as a substitution for their RPG time. RPG sales numbers paint that picture pretty well. This is a kind of revelation for me, though, because my stubbornness about this used to be bullish. “RPGs are not the same,” I said. “MMORPGs are no substitute!”
But lately I’m seeing things differently. RPGs are not the same. MMORPGs can be a substitute. Substitutions don’t have to be equal or identical. They just have to be substitutes.
My faith wavers. Venturing into Middle-earth and battling the ever-loving heck out of mouthy dead men is just so easy. I worry that my time would be better spent getting better at writing stories rather than striving to cobble them together out of dice rolls.
The thing is, fighting zombies isn't the thing I like about RPGs.
This isn’t the prelude to a manifesto. I’m not giving up RPGs (not by choice, at any rate). But if I’m going to be on a sabbatical from RPGs, I’m going to milk that time for some kind of insight. If I’m going without play, I’m going to take this opportunity to think on what it means to give it up. Let’s see where this takes me.
I worry that my time would be better spent getting better at writing stories rather than striving to cobble them together out of dice rolls.
I hear you, my brother. I’ve wandered in that wilderness before, too. Maybe we all have. Between that creative frustration and the related financial frustration that runs along the lines of “RPGs as we’ve known them are a commercial dead end, and creating them will soon be less financially sustainable than making a career out of collecting cans to recycle,” I made the decision to leave gaming work behind in 2000.
That didn’t work out for me, I’m not sure if I enjoyed the wilderness, and I’m not sure if I returned from it all that much the better for having left. For me, it’s a messy and complicated question that goes far beyond the creative question of whether RPGs are worth the time for the story that you get, and whether there’s any financial sense in publishing them.
I do know that I wrote some really good stories while I was gone.
Taking bits and threads of story generated by fellow players and the dice and then making sense or even story out of them is dynamic, challenging and exciting. Creating fiction by myself is not. Hence, I am a roleplayer, not a writer.
(Games are incidental.)
At web software outfit 37signals, they’re constantly evangelizing about embracing constraints. See, for example, the passage on the subject of embracing constraints in their book/manifesto, Getting Real. That sounds a little bit like what you’re writing about, Tommi.
Now I’m going to worry about you taking screen caps whenever we play. I’ll never be able to dress my characters in powerful-yet-ugly clothing again.
Jeff;
Yes, almost exactly.
My biggest issue with using MMO games as substitutes is the flexibility of pen and paper games. I played City of Heroes for a long time, and eventually quit because I couldn’t spend the time required at the higher levels, and to be honest, I wanted to do things that weren’t really supported by the game. I can create my own stuff in a traditional RPG. I can player super heroes one week and swords and sorcery the next.
I guess when they make the oddball stuff like the Shab-al-Hiri Roach or Spirit of the Century into an MMO I will be more interested. Right now the online games still seem to be D&D with a different skin.
ME
To be sure, the MMORPG and the RPG are different beasts. Neither is an identical substitution for the other, but substitution isn’t about the two options being the same anyway, right? I mean, you don’t give up beef for tofu because they’re the same — you do it because they’re different. Or… because of circumstance.
Wait until you’ve played more than one MMOG. Eventually, you’ll find yourself killing your 7millionth A LARGE BEETLE to get to “the next level” and “just one more hour” and you’ll realize the gameplay itself isn’t fun, and everything beyond that is just Zwinky, but in 3D (i.e., an avatar supporting chat client).