Layonara - View Single Post - MMO Objectives Discussion

Acacea · 10-26-07, 02:37 AM

((Bedtime. Less coherent. Author wishes to avoid responsibility for contents until a respectable hour, at which point she can actually read what was typed.))

I don't know, it seems like there is a bit of defensive monstracizing over one style of play than the other, or an assumption made about what one crowd deems as ideal or not that wasn't actually spoken.

For one, I love NWN in a thousand different ways, it's still my favorite game because I think of it as more of a sub-genre than a single game. I love toolsets, I love mods, and I love restrictions that I have to hack my way around because I'm some kind of masochist. I still check the vault every day, downloaded the alpha 1.69 patch, and would play NWN Layo for as long as it was up. I still bug Dorg and Pan with "what if we did this to get around this to accomplish this?" questions. I think it still has crazy potential that Layo did not even begin to fully crack, because I've seen the modules where people have gone nuts with it, and see the potential to enter mechanically some of this stuff they want people to just automatically roleplay. I'm also looking forward to getting MotB for NWN2, and I so wish some of the stuff there could have been in NWN, but I can't run it well and at the same time it is so far as Steelwind put it, just a game and not the genre of NWN1 for me. But NWN Layo is going away regardless, so I'm thinking on the next thing.

Regarding the sims, well, I see bench RP all the time, people sitting around talking about their kids and relationship drama, great. That's fun for some people, along with the buying a house decorating it and raising RP kids in it etc. That's not what I'm talking about, but it's nice to have for us like icing is good on cake. There are those that want to advance in ways other than combat without having to kill a thing too, like master craftsmen and diplomats, and that's cool too.

So is a group that is always on the road pitting themselves against evil and telling campfire stories. I don't care. Unlike as you probably took it Chongo, the "me hit harder" crowd wasn't that much directed at some in Layo compared to the majority of those who make up many other games, as the groups that are off bashing for the most part here are at least most of the time comprised of people who want to roleplay...adventurously, which is the whole point of the game. So what? That doesn't change the fact that at least to me, monsters in a single world can't just constantly get epic-er and epic-er to oblige you. The me want hit hards of Layo are pretty silly and small time compared to other servers and MMOs where they have little else to them and are somewhat glorified.

I deleted a huge paragraph here that is an argument for another time. Suffice is to say that I very much enjoy 'adventure roleplay', have never sought to punish people just because they have good builds, and have never argued the difference between 'bashing' and 'roleplay' as if people aren't expected to roleplay adventure here, have a lot of problems encountering good examples of it, understand that we should serve as examples of it, but think that's a completely different issue. There's room for a lot of different kinds of fun, but making sense in the world remains a boundary that a lot of creativity to keep pushing back, and even with that there's going to be a point where it seems like it will just be weird.

This whole pure combat adventuring be stretched out a LONG time, though! From continent to continent, to underwater ruins, to the many planar things waiting to be incorporated, there is a long way to stretch that road of "let's just go out and see what we can take," even though I think a lot of people would like to mix it up if the options were mechanically viable. I'm just saying, for the world/planet itself, it has to end somewhere. (We have a hard, permanent level cap here and no one has hit it yet...) Does someone taking over a city in an actual, mechanical way balanced somewhere between migraine micromanagement and RP figureheads automatically equate to the sims? I don't know, the sims make for pretty crappy stories, vs the long and winding stories that these games can have, even with the relationship drama talks.

Adventure doesn't have to be JUST always finding harder monsters to kill and I think it should account for different styles of play, but nowhere in my post did I degrade the killing of monsters or the people who seek to do so. That is ALWAYS going to be a huge part of the game, no matter what. Even in the alternate advancements and PvP you're still going to end up with raids and duels and assassinations. As well, the initial post was certainly not about NWN Layo and was never intended to be, it just sort of drifted that way. I think one of NWN's problems is that there was kind of a lack of creative options in the villain aspect of the game from the start - the ultimate villain card was played immediately because it was such a big campaign. Everything after it within the world itself should be less of a big deal. Not because we want everyone to feel that way, but because of the way it was brought to us since we were all level one. Personally, I think the dragons thing was kind of predictable and not necessarily a great move, because the ultimate villain card disabled and frightened the dragon card, so those who took out the former have a hard time wetting their pants at the latter. That kind of thing has to be handled carefully, I think, and is exactly the situation in which you start getting weird issues with the 'next big fight.'

The point was not "let's get rid of the raiding and bashing part of the game for social RP!" nor "let's not ever raise any level caps so ability progression never gets better and you have no choice but to try and rule a small hamlet!"

It's more that I think it is an actual issue (or rather, several issues that are all related), a point where someone would need to come down really finely in the middle to avoid screwing it up, hence trying to give both ends of the spectrum as a problem in terms of Layo; how do you satisfy everyone that is drawn to the sort of game Layo advertises itself as?

I was bouncing ideas off of myself for a long time today and often came back to musing on how one would create such a mechanically supported system (because that whole bit about divine GM intervention is tripe as any future system that still relied on "RP powers" and paper rules is doomed to failure and needs to be wiped out, far from numbers being the evil in the lands everything must be coded and quantified and visible IN game...you can't demand that things be followed or played in a certain way, you must create it that way! Don't want spawns memorized? Move them!) that at the same time would give things for people to do that weren't in the guilds deciding to rule the Rael kingdom or something insane like that, but are still playing every day and want to keep doing things.

I came back a lot to different angles on raids and alternate reward systems, as well as PvP, but I'd be an idiot and a liar to say I have the perfect solution - if I did I would be making a lot of money and not starting a discussion thread on ideas. I'm just not sure it's quite so stupid as it is painted above to consider how something can be done - and yeah, maybe I'd just make a poor business person and it's a good thing I'm not on their team, because I see zero point in trying to compete with all the money makers in games I don't play and would be more in it to see if hey, maybe we could do something different. The standard commercial model would never be good enough for me, even if the attempt at an ideal version ended up a smaller, niche game. I guess that's why I'm broke, though?

10-26-07, 02:37 AM	#9
Acacea Gamemaster Characters Join Date: Jul 2005 Posts: 2,314 Thanks: 114 Thanked 569 Times in 279 Posts	Re: MMO Objectives Discussion - The Constantly Lifted Level Cap ((Bedtime. Less coherent. Author wishes to avoid responsibility for contents until a respectable hour, at which point she can actually read what was typed.)) I don't know, it seems like there is a bit of defensive monstracizing over one style of play than the other, or an assumption made about what one crowd deems as ideal or not that wasn't actually spoken. For one, I love NWN in a thousand different ways, it's still my favorite game because I think of it as more of a sub-genre than a single game. I love toolsets, I love mods, and I love restrictions that I have to hack my way around because I'm some kind of masochist. I still check the vault every day, downloaded the alpha 1.69 patch, and would play NWN Layo for as long as it was up. I still bug Dorg and Pan with "what if we did this to get around this to accomplish this?" questions. I think it still has crazy potential that Layo did not even begin to fully crack, because I've seen the modules where people have gone nuts with it, and see the potential to enter mechanically some of this stuff they want people to just automatically roleplay. I'm also looking forward to getting MotB for NWN2, and I so wish some of the stuff there could have been in NWN, but I can't run it well and at the same time it is so far as Steelwind put it, just a game and not the genre of NWN1 for me. But NWN Layo is going away regardless, so I'm thinking on the next thing. Regarding the sims, well, I see bench RP all the time, people sitting around talking about their kids and relationship drama, great. That's fun for some people, along with the buying a house decorating it and raising RP kids in it etc. That's not what I'm talking about, but it's nice to have for us like icing is good on cake. There are those that want to advance in ways other than combat without having to kill a thing too, like master craftsmen and diplomats, and that's cool too. So is a group that is always on the road pitting themselves against evil and telling campfire stories. I don't care. Unlike as you probably took it Chongo, the "me hit harder" crowd wasn't that much directed at some in Layo compared to the majority of those who make up many other games, as the groups that are off bashing for the most part here are at least most of the time comprised of people who want to roleplay...adventurously, which is the whole point of the game. So what? That doesn't change the fact that at least to me, monsters in a single world can't just constantly get epic-er and epic-er to oblige you. The me want hit hards of Layo are pretty silly and small time compared to other servers and MMOs where they have little else to them and are somewhat glorified. I deleted a huge paragraph here that is an argument for another time. Suffice is to say that I very much enjoy 'adventure roleplay', have never sought to punish people just because they have good builds, and have never argued the difference between 'bashing' and 'roleplay' as if people aren't expected to roleplay adventure here, have a lot of problems encountering good examples of it, understand that we should serve as examples of it, but think that's a completely different issue. There's room for a lot of different kinds of fun, but making sense in the world remains a boundary that a lot of creativity to keep pushing back, and even with that there's going to be a point where it seems like it will just be weird. This whole pure combat adventuring be stretched out a LONG time, though! From continent to continent, to underwater ruins, to the many planar things waiting to be incorporated, there is a long way to stretch that road of "let's just go out and see what we can take," even though I think a lot of people would like to mix it up if the options were mechanically viable. I'm just saying, for the world/planet itself, it has to end somewhere. (We have a hard, permanent level cap here and no one has hit it yet...) Does someone taking over a city in an actual, mechanical way balanced somewhere between migraine micromanagement and RP figureheads automatically equate to the sims? I don't know, the sims make for pretty crappy stories, vs the long and winding stories that these games can have, even with the relationship drama talks. Adventure doesn't have to be JUST always finding harder monsters to kill and I think it should account for different styles of play, but nowhere in my post did I degrade the killing of monsters or the people who seek to do so. That is ALWAYS going to be a huge part of the game, no matter what. Even in the alternate advancements and PvP you're still going to end up with raids and duels and assassinations. As well, the initial post was certainly not about NWN Layo and was never intended to be, it just sort of drifted that way. I think one of NWN's problems is that there was kind of a lack of creative options in the villain aspect of the game from the start - the ultimate villain card was played immediately because it was such a big campaign. Everything after it within the world itself should be less of a big deal. Not because we want everyone to feel that way, but because of the way it was brought to us since we were all level one. Personally, I think the dragons thing was kind of predictable and not necessarily a great move, because the ultimate villain card disabled and frightened the dragon card, so those who took out the former have a hard time wetting their pants at the latter. That kind of thing has to be handled carefully, I think, and is exactly the situation in which you start getting weird issues with the 'next big fight.' The point was not "let's get rid of the raiding and bashing part of the game for social RP!" nor "let's not ever raise any level caps so ability progression never gets better and you have no choice but to try and rule a small hamlet!" It's more that I think it is an actual issue (or rather, several issues that are all related), a point where someone would need to come down really finely in the middle to avoid screwing it up, hence trying to give both ends of the spectrum as a problem in terms of Layo; how do you satisfy everyone that is drawn to the sort of game Layo advertises itself as? I was bouncing ideas off of myself for a long time today and often came back to musing on how one would create such a mechanically supported system (because that whole bit about divine GM intervention is tripe as any future system that still relied on "RP powers" and paper rules is doomed to failure and needs to be wiped out, far from numbers being the evil in the lands everything must be coded and quantified and visible IN game...you can't demand that things be followed or played in a certain way, you must create it that way! Don't want spawns memorized? Move them!) that at the same time would give things for people to do that weren't in the guilds deciding to rule the Rael kingdom or something insane like that, but are still playing every day and want to keep doing things. I came back a lot to different angles on raids and alternate reward systems, as well as PvP, but I'd be an idiot and a liar to say I have the perfect solution - if I did I would be making a lot of money and not starting a discussion thread on ideas. I'm just not sure it's quite so stupid as it is painted above to consider how something can be done - and yeah, maybe I'd just make a poor business person and it's a good thing I'm not on their team, because I see zero point in trying to compete with all the money makers in games I don't play and would be more in it to see if hey, maybe we could do something different. The standard commercial model would never be good enough for me, even if the attempt at an ideal version ended up a smaller, niche game. I guess that's why I'm broke, though?