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Old 11-16-2010, 12:26 AM   #14
silvarilon
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Re: YART (Yet Another RPI Thread)

Heh. I made the same mistake, when I first arrived and saw the term "RPI" I assumed it could be used interchangeably with "RP Enforced"

I've, since, been schooled at length on my error.

Sure. But here we're talking more about feature sets than genres.
I think it's certainly useful to formalize the feature sets that we typically see, and record them in game databases.

I agree. I'd love to be able to search for a game using those criteria.

The two things I found was:
1 - games lied about things like this.
2 - definitions varied. Is "staff active in RP" valid if they run one event a week? Do they have to be on every day? Do they have to be *roleplaying* or is an NPC that says "Someone find my dog by fighting those orcs!" enough? For example, would it be valid for me to say my game has permanent death? The church can, and does, bring people back from the dead, but they won't do that to any criminals that have been executed, or to any people that have been excommunicated. Which means if someone stabs your character in the street, they will be resurrected, but if they get convicted (or framed!) for a crime, they get permanently killed. Making it very possible to permanently die. If I say it's not permanent death, someone looking for a risk-free game where they don't have to take those risks will be disappointed. If I say it is permanent death, people wanting the risk might enjoy it. But others might feel disappointed when they discover they can't kill off rivals by just stabbing them (and instead have to be more political)

However, you address these problems when you say...

Yup. Although that doesn't necessarily give useful data.
Don't forget... crap roleplayers on a game where they think that using the in-character names instead of the player names still think that they are roleplaying. And players specifically looking for roleplaying wouldn't stay on that game (and thus wouldn't be voting it as low-roleplaying)

What I'd be inclined to do is... get your list of criteria, and instead of having the players rate each criteria (where the zealous players can rank ALL criteria as 10) instead have them rank which criteria they feel the game displays.

So a player that is proud of the RP on their game can rank it 1st, if they are pleased with staff running events, they can rank that high. A player pleased with the combat, but not with the RP can rank them differently. That way we don't have to make distinctions between whether the RP is enforced or not. The games with good roleplay will be ranked appropriately. The games with bad roleplay would probably have their players rank things like combat higher. And as a player, I can now search for what I care to a finer degree, such as "Show me games with good roleplay, good combat, but I don't care about staff run events, and I don't care about permadeath, but I do want a game that has "serious consequences for actions" rated high."
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