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Old 03-19-2003, 08:51 AM   #1
enigma@zebedee
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Looking around I have noticed that a lot of Muds say 'role playing required' or place a large amount of emphasis on role play.

Personally I play muds to have fun, and while I enjoy role playing its also nice just to hang around and chat or go visciously slay a load of poor innocent beasties.

Zebedee is a game played to have fun, and while we welcome people role-playing and would like to encourage it we certainly don't require it. If you want to develop an in-depth characterisation then go for it, but equally if you want to hang around in the pub chatting then go for it. If you would rather go fight a greater demon and then run around with his Rune-Forged Axe of Screaming Death then that works for us too...

telnet:
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For more information and a bit of good old-fashioned hack and slash.

Zebedee: Where imagination meets reality.
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Old 03-19-2003, 09:49 AM   #2
Jazuela
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Please don't take this as a slight against RP-encouraged or optional games. I'm asking purely out of ignorance.

First let me say I've played encouraged/optional games and in fact started my mudding experience on one. As I learned more and more about roleplaying, I drifted away from this type of game and toward the required type.

I understand that encouraged/optional is a great way for people new to roleplaying to learn how to play muds in general, so they can see things from both sides.

But what I don't understand, is how anyone who REALLY wants to roleplay, would want to play a game that's optional.

I mean, if I'm surrounded by people who want to just chat and not get into the atmosphere of the world, why would I want to remain there if I'm a roleplayer? What inspires a roleplayer to play a game where not everyone is roleplaying?

Granted, if you're new to RP as I said, it's a great way to get your feet wet. But once you have the hang of it, and it becomes a part of your goals with mudding, why would you want to stay if the characters around you are -not- roleplaying and in fact not even required to RP at all?

Once more I stress this is -not- meant to be a slight against Zebedee or any of the other dozens of games that "encourage" roleplay. I'm asking out of sincere interest and hope you'll take it that way.

Thanks.
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Old 03-19-2003, 11:28 AM   #3
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No offence meant, none taken.

Simply enough Zebedee gives you a chance to be much more casual about it. To be honest, if I wanted some hard core role-play then I would not go on Zeb to do it. Personally I have only limitted interest in role-playing online since I do both Live and Tabletop role-play IRL. Zebedee is a chance to play a game in which I can develop my characters personality as little or as much as I like. In which I can make friends and go adventuring with them - without having to sweat the RP side of it.

You don't need to know the background or the history, you dont need to know where your character is from. You can come on, pick up a sword (or a spell if thats more your style) and start fighting things. If you get bored of a warrior then start playing up a mage, the only restriction is not having both characters on at the same time and not helping one character with another.

Zeb is a multi-player game - and the emphasis is on everyone having fun and playing how they want to play.

Some players do no role-play at all and just come on to make friends/kill things/whatever. Others like to develop little 'character quirks' for different characters, and a few even come up with bits of background and relationships with other characters (for example characters can get married).

We encourage this since we think it adds interest to the game, but at the end of the day not everyone is interested in that side of things - and there are plenty of pure RP muds out there.
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Old 03-19-2003, 12:53 PM   #4
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Old 03-19-2003, 05:29 PM   #5
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I'd just like to point out that there's nothing - save for a public misconception - about RP-enforced environments that prevent them from having code, combat and a relaxed atmosphere. This thread is a microcausim of a common view held in the MU* community: RP-enforced games are elitist, thought-driven games that are only played by egoist intelligencia.

I've played a handful of characters in my day that are not only relaxed and grounded, but tend to promote this type of atmosphere in the roleplaying scenes they're a part of. Even when playing major, dramatic roles I tend to give my characters interesting or comical habits that serve to lighten the mood and atmosphere. An ego-centric overlord in a science fiction MUSH, for example, who has an obsession with trashy felinoid soap operas.
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Old 03-19-2003, 06:38 PM   #6
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In response to Jaezula...

Alot of time people play Encouraged/Optional MUDs because there are very few all around good Enforced MUDs. Alot have a great story and world, but no players to fill this great place. Or others have alot of enthusiastic players but the game world and commands are choppy, making exploring and playing your role in such a world not fun.

So alot of people go to Encouraged/Optional MUDs because the world is dynamic, the commands are good, and there might be alot of people. So in these places people begin to try and --change-- the world to make it a nice place to role-play, etc, by either seperating themselves from those that dont want to. Often resulting in good things, and sometimes a change in the MUDs overall policy.

Ill say that its pretty hard to get an RP-enforced MUD off the ground, not to mention the RPI's that seem to stand alone from the MUDing world as more of Games- because:
*Unless they are well staffed you cant ask questions. People go 'What is that some foreign language? blahblah.'
*Unless the game is well-documented people dont know what kind of roles they should be playing, what commands are available, where things are.

Thus the benefit of an Encouraged/Optional MUD is the ability to be able to ask questions, get responses, discover the world and then make characters that fit in it. Whereas the opposite need to be well-staffed, documented, and cant be all that off-the-wall original... unless they are willing to deal with the labor pains of getting it over the first few months of a start-up game.

Anyways... I think Im like alot of people. I have my Role-play-intesive game, then my hack and slash based ROM game that has a good bit of role-play, but wouldnt be its advertising feature.
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Old 03-19-2003, 07:07 PM   #7
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Old 03-19-2003, 07:12 PM   #8
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While we are on this topic, what exactly is the difference between optional and encouraged? And why is there a none category, do some muds actually forbid roleplay?
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Old 03-19-2003, 07:55 PM   #9
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I would say that 'encouraged' emplies that the admin would prefer a certain amount of role playing, even if limited, as apposed to people doing nothing but chatting. Optional implies a disinterest as to if someone does or not.

Personally having to be one 100% of the time, except over one channel or in certain places would drive me totally nuts. The mud where I play (or played, since it has been down for over a month) encouraged specific types of things over the main chat channel, limited ghost and guild channels to only what was appropriate and requires the expenditure of Mana to use the general chat BS channel. However, it is also relaxed enough that anything not totally OOC can sometimes get dropped into a conversation on the non BS channels. There is usually quite a bit of traffic on both the OC and OOC channels despite the restrictions. Some of it consists of people screaming about moving the discussion to BS, but... lol

At least in the case of AoD, optional + encouraged is the same as saying that the admin would like to see more interplayer communication, but have not implemented a lot of major additions to the game that promote it. The irony from what I can see is that many RP muds need to force the RP rule, because merely creating a tavern some place in the game is rarely enough to promote interaction. Though, the party room on AoD does gain gatherings on occation and the 'newbie' area east of login is always crowded to during invasions, it being the closest 'safe' area where spells actually work to use for restoring protections, healing or ressing some poor fool that died in one round against a Drow High Priestess. lol

If you build it, they won't necessarilly come and that leads to 'requiring' RP, instead of merely leting players define the level they are comfortable with. It is this discrepency between what 'should' stimulate RP and the need to enforce its use do to the incentives not working quite as intended that has made me reluctant to log onto any of those that do require it.
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Old 03-19-2003, 07:56 PM   #10
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Ill speak from a staff point of view.
I might operate an all purpose hang out MUD.
Roleplaying would be optional. Like I dont really care. Sure.
Those that do roleplay would receive no benefit for doing so,
its their choice, etc. And others wouldnt be penalized for not.

If im operating a level/skill/number based ROM type MUD...
I might want to encourage role-playing through things like
descriptions, backgrounds etc, but no real removal of OOC
channels, and most still OOC talk on even the primary say
channel. There might be those that Role-play in this type of
environment and thats good. But not everyone will. Those
that make a concious effort to enrich the world with their role
would probably be rewarded. Maybe just a pat on the back,
maybe some Imm help to develop IC quests.

Lastly I might be operating an RPI based on Diku or MUSH...
Id want to enforce roleplay. I.e. punishing those that speak
oocly, removing OOC channels, removing levels. etc. Making
characters have to rely more on playing their roles then the
other aspects of the world. (levels, equipment, stats.)

And finally there are varying degress of encouragement and
enforcement... so it probably depends on the MUD.
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Old 03-20-2003, 02:40 AM   #11
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Old 03-20-2003, 10:43 AM   #12
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Something I should say is that I have nothing about role-playing enforced muds, and I am sure there are some great ones out there. The role-playing choice is one of many choices that are made when designing a mud and the quality of code and design is not influenced by the choice.

A role playing 'none' mud might be something like one of the pk only muds out there which is basically a text based alternative to unreal tournament (although some of those do have some role playing elements - Tron for example did).

Role playing optional means the admin really don't care if you role play or not.

Role playing encouraged means that we like people to do some role play and put some life into their characters - but we don't require them to do so.

Role playing enforced I imagine most people understand :-)

The reason I started this thread is that I noticed a lot of adverts saying 'role play required', 'role playing enforced', 'character generation only takes 3 months' etc. I thought people might like to see a free mud which is active, developing, recruiting and expanding - and which is more interested in making sure that you have fun than in making sure you have read all the world history.

A couple of newbies actually commented to me recently that they were glad they had finally found a mud that didn't force a playing style on them.
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Old 03-20-2003, 11:04 AM   #13
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I'm glad to see you're getting responses in zebedee via this thread. I'm also happily surprised to see so many thoughts about the variety of RP enforcements on different games. It's certainly been enlightening.

The underlying reason I even brought it up....

I played an "encouraged" game. I wanted to be one of the people who dig into my role and my character's surroundings. But I found it impossible to do, because I'd try to interact in an IC way to this or that person, only to get an OOC response.

Example:

>You look about the room, admiring the paintings on the wall.

>Joe exclaims, "Only 44 exp to lvl!"
>Sue bounces around Joe.
>George beams happily at Joe.
>Andy says, "d00d u wanna duel after u lvl i give u a new wep"

You arch an inquisitive brow.

>Joe points at you and says, "u wanna duel"

You tell Joe, "Why would I want to do that? Don't even know you, and other than your obvious brain rot, you've done nothing offensive."

>Joe snorts and says, "its just a freekin game d00d chill"

quit


So if I WANT to try and interact in an IC way, and I'm surrounded by people who don't want to, where's my enjoyment? If I'm trying to be IC, and my envoronment doesn't support it, then how could it -be- a roleplaying game at all?

I hope this explains why I'm puzzled.
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Old 03-20-2003, 12:34 PM   #14
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You are right, its impossible (or at least very difficult) to role play with people who are not interested in at least trying. The sort of environment you describe there for example.

(Fortunately I have never seen the word 'd00d' used on Zeb though).

Generally I find that some of our players are quite happy to role play and others are more interested in finding the best weapon they can to kill things with.

Certainly I (and many other of our players) would respond positively to someone role playing.
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Old 03-20-2003, 12:39 PM   #15
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Old 03-20-2003, 03:20 PM   #16
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I know there are going to be some people that will disagree, so I'm not saying this applies to everyone and everything concerning rp-enforced muds. I have yet to play a mud that was strictly rp-enforced. I played on one that limited the OOC channel to things concerning the ooc aspect of the game and limited the use of the IC channel to PK challenges, leaving the only place to really rp being in room with people. A lot of the people that played there felt that if they could not rp on a global channel then why bother. They felt it was a waste of their time to participate if they could not be out and gaining levels at the same time. It would seem that muds that restrict a lot would be missing something in the long run. Going by that basis, it would seem to me that enforcing and restricting things would cause people to shy away from the muds that do so. I don't know of a single person out there that could log on a mud every day and know exactly what they were going to do or be in the mood to rp all the time. What do they do on these rp-enforced muds if you wish to take a few days' break or so from rp? Though it does seem to have the best interest of keeping the continuity of role-play in a game in mind, it just seems that it would take away from the quality of it. If there are muds that enforce rp out there that have at least good quality rp the majority of the time, then more power to you and your players for their thinking skills.

Currently I play on a mud that doesn't require rp, but highly encourages it. I really like the ways that the staff encpourages the rp. They put a lot of time and effort into coming up with writing contests and the such. Some even have mortals alts that they stir up quite bit of rp with. Being in a mud that doesn't make you rp all the time gives me a good bit of freedom to decide what I want to do. Of course I do put a lot into my rp, but there are days were I just like to log on and watch other people rp. I feel that not being required to contibute all the time leaves me with more motivation to participate and influences the quality of my rp when I have time to think on it. Fortunately, there are a good many people there also that care about rp, so I have yet to have problems like Jazuela has described.
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Old 03-20-2003, 06:19 PM   #17
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Old 03-20-2003, 11:14 PM   #18
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I feel much the same way, ScourgeX.   I adore good role-play, its challenge is part of its appeal.  But I do also find it very draining, and I don't usually have the energy to engage in intensive RP interaction for longer than short bursts at a time.  (Communication isn''t my forte; I'm a shy little coder geek, what can I say?)

But I've found that even on the most rigorously enforced RPI MUD I play (Armageddon), I can wander out into less populated areas and just gently interact with the gameworld and it's non-player-controlled inhabitants, which I find much less demanding, of my creativity at least.  (I tend to play hunter/ranger/scout/explorer types.)  I can still be in role, still feel like I'm inside my character's head, but I'm not faced with the intensity of having to respond quickly to my fellow players, and it's not going to matter nearly so much if I slip up and fall out of role.  I can even just zone out and fish for a while, or do something equally meditative.

The beauty of RP enforced games is that, even when I'm not engaged in dialog, I can still be inhabiting (albeit by proxy) another world.  I run much less risk of bumping into someone who will shatter the illusion, the dream, with his "d00d u dont wanna spar? u r so gay".


This is only my preference of course.  Different people are going to enjoy different levels of RP, and I think some excellent points have been made here about the utility of RP optional MUDs.  I just wanted to point out that "RP enforced" does not mean "RP only".


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Old 03-21-2003, 03:15 AM   #19
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Old 03-21-2003, 04:55 AM   #20
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I have never played an enforced roleplay MUD (or any other such online game). In my limited experience of AD&D around a table with some friends, it was hard to enforce roleplay.

How do people generally go about enforcing it, and what do you do to people who don't cooperate? Presumably you have to rely on players to report people who aren't playing along, and then you have a large reliance on the general player population to implement the roleplaying environment you would like. How on earth do you [/i]start[i] a roleplay MUD?

On Zeb it can actually be quite funny when a player stays in character - very entertaining. Especially when people know that player has other characters with which he doesn't RP.
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