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Old 04-09-2013, 10:40 PM   #32
dark acacia
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Join Date: Dec 2012
Posts: 263
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Re: LFM: skill-based game with RP

I don't think some of you understand: there are problems which are common among various games, and they detract from the credibility of the game's environment. It doesn't matter how much different a game's system or setting is from another game if both games don't do much to establish credibility, or enough to mitigate the issues which detract from the game's credibility. What I posted in the first post in this thread just happens to be what I'm looking for in a game right now, but I've played and quit from a lot of mechanically decent games.

What do I mean by credibility? It's tied to the level of immersion a player experiences while playing the game. The more believable the dangers, the more exciting the adventures, and the greater quality of character development support (not limited to immortal involvement), the more immersive the experience.

To reuse an example: in a certain game, there's an event where a god-killing beast comes to the mortal plane, and it's up to the heroes to defeat it or all existence will be destroyed. If it's just a huge pile of HP for the party to whack, that's fine; the trick is making the players believe that it's more than a pile of HP. If the immortal keeps joking around with the players on the OOC channel while he tries to figure out how to get the thing to move, there's some immersion lost. If the party includes a bunch of newbies as well as the elite highbies of the game, the newbies will likely realize that they're not going to do anything but maybe die every 2-3 rounds with no experience lost, and there's some immersion lost there.

Again, the other issues I mentioned previously are things which detract from the game's credibility. If people are logging on 3-4 hours every night to make out in the bar (or in a private room), what is there that's keeping the adventure going? If the game's politics is headed by the autocrat-of-the-month who goes around executing or jailing people at whim until he's ousted and replaced by someone else who does the same thing, to what end was this accomplished?

I'm not saying that a game has to have immortal involvement at all times, or whenever the PCs want something to do. I'm just saying that I'd like to play a game where there's more going on than farming dungeons for XP or willowy maidens sitting on old man laps or giant piles of HP set down for mindless killing.
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