Roleplaying your avatar

Very Cool thread!

 

Time is not smiling on me right now. Here's a rough cut of about a third of what I can think of on the subject ATM. I'll try to put more up and respond to others on the subject this weekend.

My RPG Beginnings-

1977, D&D boxed set released, friends had a copy, I bought my first polyhedra dice. played a few pre-made modules but mostly from DM created scenarios and storylines

1977- Star Wars. Big budget, big story sci-fi space opera returns to the silver screen. 5 years after man last walked ont he moon, George Lucas has kids looking skyward again.

1977- GDW releases Traveller, a RPG set in a vast interstellar Imperium, referred to as the Third Imperium of Man. While high tech, it's also the return of the age of sail, as communication can only go as fast as travel, and travel from the core of the Empire to the frontier takes more than a year. Most player activity takes place in the Spinward Marches, a frontier bordering the Zhodani Empire. Zhodani are also human and were encountered as the Imperium expanded into uncharted space. How humanity preceded humanity into space is part of the mystery and a large story arc in the game. In addition to the framework of the Imperium provided by the boxed sets, referees could also purchase pre-made adventures that would include a story, maps salient to the adventure, non-player character information, etc.

Other notable features:

In addition to the framework of the Imperium provided by the boxed sets, referees could also purchase pre-made adventures that would include a story, maps salient to the adventure, non-player character information, etc, and TNS bulletins in the JoTAS (see below).

JoTAS: The Journal of the Travellers Aid Society- TAS membership is a benefit players could gain through character generation or buy into. The developers' quarterly publication for Traveller was titled as the Journal of the Travellers Aid Society. One of the regular offerings in the Journal was the Travellers News Service, which was a handfull of news articles in each issue regarding goings on in the Imperium. Some of these would actually be clues for modules, humor, hints of things to come in futire game modules or expansions, or red herrings. The point here is that with TNS, readers could feel their character was connected to a universe that encompassed much more than the circle of friends that composed their band of adventurers.

　　

　
My point of the above is that the game design of Traveller was such that there was a larger framework in which the sandbox the players were in was suspended. players felt they weren't the only thing going on in the universe, there were things going on outside their immediate experience in-game. Some of these things the players could have influence on, but some weren't since they were steering elements the game developers used to make the story arc work.
Some adventures made for the Traveller RPG featured some encounters or information that did not have to be followed in a linear flow to successfully complete the adventure. These little tidbits of story were called "nuggets". These could be run across by the adventuring party at any time, and information given or items offered for sale could either be cryptic foreshadowing, an opportune moment, or a "Hey, that's what such and such was talking about!"
　
Charisma attributes- While Many RPGs have this or an equivalent attribute for characters/avatars, Entropia is completely missing this. Since NPC characters are practically nonexistant and interaction with them is generally a simply "Yes I accept" or "no, I leave now" type response, charisma would have little effect on this interaction. That being said, if NPCs ever do get fleshed out and more interactive, an avatars charisma should come into play when eliciting information, attempting to be hired by, or other interactions with NPC characters.
　
Of course I realize that Entropia Universe and Planet Calypso are not and never will be the Traveller RPG system. That being said, there's alot to learn from a game system and RPG universe that has had a following of players for over 3 decades as well as other successful RPG systems.

 

I don't think I was referring to your post actually Spawn, but you brought the "what everyone was thinking" view in indeed.

I do like your response though, Renaissance is a word and an idea I like, especially within the context of EU. Totally agreed, and that's what I mentioned in my last post, for example about the PA walls. I really like little touches like that!

 

I agree and I do the same thing with my avatar, except I am able to explore worlds and meet interesting ppl from this world. Role play can sometimes just be an extention of yourself, imo.

 

A bit of a much shorter timespan for real world RPGs for me...
1990s is when I first got in to RPGs... I fondly remember seeing Heroes Unlimited being advertised in a Marvel Comic I was reading with a friend at the time. The friend bought Heroes and Villians Unlimited shortly after that, and before long I'd bought Ninjas and Superspies and Beyond the Supernatural to suppliment that.... later my friend got Rifts, and that was an entirely different 'world' of adventure for us. The other books we had up til then were more based on the modern world settings.

Of course, I played a lot of various video games since way before the 1990s, and read many sci fi and fantasy books earlier on.

After buying a lot of other various suppliment books from http://palladiumbooks.com/ throughout my college days, I met some friends that were heavy in to Vampire the Masquarade when it first came out, so before long I was adding to my collection of RPG books, visiting the local gaming shop almost every other weekend since it was just about 3 blocks from campus. I eventually even got a theater minor in college, in part because of my interest in role playing. Being a game master can really help you want to have a desire to expand your knowledge on just about anything and everything, which can actually be great for someone in college, or around that age who's already learning a lot about the world.

I worked for the college library and would always check out huge stacks of books on a ton of different topics after folks turned in their books after their papers were done. Reading tons of reference materials about just about anything and everything like that was awesome... I was such a nerd, lol... but a nerd with a purpose.

The folks at White Wolf did their homework when it came to creating an amazing literary world as well as one that was fun to 'role play' in. The folks at Palladium did an awful job of that by creating a platform where anything could be fit in to the platform, but each character didn't really have much real character development... In the World of Darkness there are myths, superstitions, and legends that explain why various types of supernatural creatures have their powers, etc. and that can be traced back to the beginning of time. In Palliadium you just had generic stuff that didn't go in to the reasons, culture, etc. too deeply at all. Eventually, the world of darkness had to be completely re-written from the ground up for the New World of Darkness (nWOD) so that the cultural issues that caused limitations of basing the supernatural games like Vampire too much on Christian and other world religious beliefs was erased... There's only so many ways that the vampire race could be wiped out when Kain came back, and they pretty much added every possibility to that by the end of the first World of Darkness...

Right now, EU is a generic platform, much like Palliadium books set up before Rifts ever came along, and even though there is some storyline hooks the real development of the reasons for those hooks and why they are as they are have not ever been completed... Ah, the egg... Ah, the orbs... Ah, the Robot Planets of Cimi and Akbal that our avatars cannot ever really travel too yet since they don't exist...

Add in the ah, the bugs... the ones that keep coming back no matter what Mindark does because they just keep randomly adding stuff without finishing up the storylines, plots, etc. from the past, and it becomes more and more obvious that this the real potential and dramatic level that could be just is not happening because Mindark can't get past the technical difficulties they have created for themselves.

Most great Shakespeare plays happened originally with no set at all, and they were awesome like that. Many get seen daily in various ways by various audiences because many creative individuals add new twists to the develpment of the story, plot, ideas in the story, etc, and add all sorts of different things to the character and storyline with their various takes on the same old Shakespeare stories. However, if the director gets too creative and tries to create a huge block buster with tons of special effects for a Shakespeare play, and runs out of money to do it right, the audience gets pulled out of the 4th wall since they see the various problems. They see the actors that are dropping their lines. They see the piss pour sets that look like they were paint by numbers done by a kindergartner, they see the clothes that look like generic stuff that came from the local homeless shelter on the individuals that are suppossed to be royalty in the story, etc. Some of it can be overcome by suspending disbelief, but other parts of it cannot ever be overcome if the director takes too many shortcuts to stay in budget.

That's where MA is right now.... We can't go too far in to the game on the role playing level since all the damned technical problems the director (Mindark and Planet Partners) is causing by trying to make a mega-blockbuster hit and not having the staff or money to do it right is staring at us in the computer screen every time our avatars log in. We see the glitches. We see the bugs. We see the known problems reported hundreds of time that get met with cut and paste support responses. In short we see the 'B movie' that is EU and get pissed off because we paid ticket prices for a Mega-Million Dollar Blockbuster Movie. Yes, EU is free to download and play, but the vast majority do pay for this entertainment, and we are not getting enough for what we are paying because MA wants this thing to be everything to everyone instead of focusing on what they've already put together and making it great, finished, and finalized...

 

For those interested, Blog Post posted :)