Thoughts about roleplaying games

[WKK Gimbal 0]

I've been playing Neverwinter Nights for about a week now and must say this is one of the best RPG I've ever played - it really kicks ass on many levels. But I've noticed some things that are stereotypical to RPG games, and really wonder why these are not yet addressed, considering the current technology.

- There is still no such thing as horses! Mounted knights simply doesn't exist! Travel from one city to the next? Walk!

- Despite that it's roleplaying, the plots only have one solution. Sure, you can approach them in countless different ways but the outcome is always the same - the world get's saved and the villains get killed. If it's an RPG, why can't I choose to JOIN the villain instead? I'd love to crush the skulls of those arrogant Helmite palladins!

- It's still not possible to use (f.x.) a rope to climb over a wall or up through a window or such things.

- You can't choose to lay down the sword and start a greengrocer shop instead of fighting. You can't seduce a rich woman and inherit her wealth when you later kill her. Simply put, there's a major lack in lifestyle choices.

- people always stand on the same streetcorner they stood on the week before. People never go home after dark or go to the pub. The people who are already at the pub will never leave (slightly more realistic). Why not have to ask around to find a person? The world is too static - it seems like everything has just been put there for the player's sake.

I know that there are things like MMORPG games. But they are far worse. It's simply 100.000 little annoying kids all running around to find a greatsword +8.

[R. Gerschwarzenge 0]

Computer RPGs are never going to be the same as PnP RPGs.

[Longinius 1]

I started working on a mod for NWN yesterday. Many of the things you brought up have to do with scripting, and with the fact that the SP campaign was very limited in its design, built to work both as a SP and MP scenario. But there are still no horses...

[Major Fubar 0]

I agree with R.G...as a D&D player of over 15 years, I don't think computer RPGs will ever match old fashioned dice rollin' games.

Not until total immersion VR anyway

[Major Fubar 0]

In fact, by definition, these games aren't actually Role Playing Games...they're very enjoyable adventure games, but no true role-playing is involved.

Unfortuantely most of my friends I used to play D&D with have other commitments now, so I don't play much any more.

Here's a link to my very first wepage, speaking of D&D: here. Very outdated now...

[Longinius 1]

"In fact, by definition, these games aren't actually Role Playing Games...they're very enjoyable adventure games, but no true role-playing is involved."

Depends on who you play with. NWN will allow you to play with a solid group of roleplayers on a password protected server. Its as close to D&D you will get I reckon, without being in the same room (until total VR immersion ofcourse). Since you can even have a GM, it takes online RPG a step further.

[WKK Gimbal 0]

Pen and paper RPGs are just too slow and cumbersome with all those rule books and dice rolls. Even a barroom fight can take hours

I'm looking forward to trying NWN with a live DM though. Now I first have to get more used to the 3rd edition rules.

The point in my first post was by the way, that most of those things *would* be possible to make in a PC RPG, it's just no one has bothered it seems.

[IsthatyouJohnWayne 0]

Yeah well do the characters in NWN have a big traumatic personal secret?

Thats the funniest cliche in Japanese role playing games (about the only ive really played for long)

The characters always have funny Haiku type of names (whatever the hell than means)

Cloud Strife

Blaze Moonshine

Song Bloodscar(son of the great psychopathic herald of Oboe)

Unusually Bearded One With The Subtle Toes

AKiku Mariyatsu ogonawa san unknowing heir of the twelth dynasty of the holy spirit teabag

and are from a small village cruelly attacked by the evil ones main henchman for no reason whatsover

And there are terrible personal secrets revealed only by bravely battling against the hordes of the evil one (to avenge your father and your village)

and reading from horribly mispelled/translated scripts

From "A Typical RPG script" site

"History: A now-peaceful world dimly remembers an ancient past where powerful forces of good battled against an evil force that sought mass destruction. The forces of good prevailed and trapped the evil, and a few centuries of prosperity and forgetfulness followed....

Now: A dark(blue?)-haired young man, Our Hero, grows up in a quaint, bucolic, picturesque farm town; of course, he's an orphan. As time progresses, he becomes aware of something about himself that is different. He has powers that no one else has. He can see things. Eventually he becomes a social outcast because he is misunderstood, and he must go traveling around the countryside in search of his true nature. Often, he is blamed for the increase in monsters in the world.

Along the way, Our Hero meets a young (blond) princess who joins up and adventures with him; she turns into the primary magic caster of the team. He'll also meet at least one unusually strong (usually male) fighter, an inventor with kooky weapons and amusing phrases, and at least one really weird character (say, a robot, a sprite, a sentient onion, a talking animal, or a feral wild boy, etc.). He also is befriended by mysterious spirits who talk to him when he's unconscious and tell him he has a special destiny to save the world.

Around this time, Our Hero finds mysterious devices that look suspiciously like teleporter pads.... However, they are not operational yet. Our Hero, to get around, must first use a ship to travel across the ocean. He still can't go everywhere until he later gets a more powerful ship. More on this later.

Our Hero inevitably winds up in the princess' (big and treasure-filled) castle and meets the king (and sometimes queen, too) at some point or other. Usually the Princess' father disapproves of what they're doing, and she winds up having to escape from the castle somehow to re-join her friends. Of course, she feels guilty for doing so, but she's sick of being a princess and just wants to be herself. Too bad the odds are good the king will somehow die before the end of the game....

At first the monsters they run into are fairly innocuous and small, but gradually the monsters get visibly larger and larger, and also more dangerous. At the same time, the scenery grows progressively harsher, changing from peaceful forests, small towns, and gentle farmlands into nastier forests, big dirty cities, and things like deserts and dungeons. Much, much later, the harsh scenery turns into sterile steel-n-concrete and other high-tech ruins.

Of course, Our Hero and his companions need strong weapons to survive. They find or buy progressively more poweful items. Strangely, Our Hero's own home town always seems to have the worst selection of weapons, and each new town he finds always seems to have something better (and more expensive) than what he already has....

Our Hero also runs up against "evil" human forces led by a misguided king of a different land. The bad king is just a pawn, though; some sinister minister or advisor is at the king's side, manipulating him. And the minister has worse connections.... This foreign king will, sometime in the future, repent of his ways, usually too late to do anything.

By now, Our Hero has also figured out how to activate the transporter pads, and can now teleport around the world. To cap off everything, he gets a flying machine (or creature) that can take him almost anywhere on the (sadly small) planet without the bother of having to travel to and from the transporters.

Our Hero also begins to catch more glimpses of the Ancient Highly Advanced Culture; he stumbles upon ancient ruins that contain electronics far beyond his own mid-tech culture. He finds the ruins of things that look suspiciously like TVs, cars, and spaceships. He begins to run into robots, and ancient magic spells are re-discovered. Our Hero might even wind up transported to a different world in a different plane of existence (or at least a different time period), where he learns about the past.

The plot begins wrapping up around this point, as Our Hero discovers that all problems stem from the actions of some Evil Ancient Entity, a creature that lives in some mechanical satellite of some sort far above the planet's surface. Our Hero has already fought and defeated a number of the Evil Enemy's henchmen and lieutenants. Now Our Hero needs to activate the mechanisms to reach the source of all the badness, the Evil Entity, deep within its cozy high-tech lair. Luckily, he has the help of the ancient environmentalist Guardian Spirits that have long protected the world (remember the spirits that had been telling him he was special in his dreams?). Along the way, he encounters an evil lieutenant or two (sometimes ones he's already defeated before), and he even converts one and saves him/her from his/her evil ways.

Finally, Our Hero reaches the Evil Entity's lair, (probably populated with very large multi-coloured hideous creatues)

because He Is Destined to do so. The Evil Entity reveals that it arrived from outer space and is now trying to make this planet fit its own ( evil ) agendas. Then it tries to entice our Hero into switching sides by pointing out Our Hero's own personal weaknesses (and those of his friends), but it fails because Our Hero still cares about his friends anyway and wants to be with them. Now Our Hero fights the Evil Entity, who actually appears to die once or twice but who always comes back stronger and meaner. Finally, Our Hero succeeds in destroying the Evil Entity for good, though not without the help of his companions, who give him the last bit of spiritual love and strength he needs to achieve the impossible for the sake of the world. One or more of them may die at this point, happy to have fulfilled their missions.

Thus, evil is vanquished again, and things are restored to their peaceful, bucolic ways. Finally, the survivors can return to living out their simple lives amidst their green trees and quaint little houses.

And there was much rejoicing."

[EveronVetsAgainstTheWar 1]

Is there a demo for this game? Are the gfx nice? After playing Dungeon Siege I was disapointed by its lack of depth. It was very stunning and beautiful, but very simple. Do you think I'd like NWN?

[Major Fubar 0]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (WKK Gimbal @ July 09 2002,15:41)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">Pen and paper RPGs are just too slow and cumbersome with all those rule books and dice rolls. Even a barroom fight can take hours  

I'm looking forward to trying NWN with a live DM though. Now I first have to get more used to the 3rd edition rules.

The point in my first post was by the way, that most of those things *would* be possible to make in a PC RPG, it's just no one has bothered it seems.<span id='postcolor'>

Gahh...ptewy..*me spits*...3rd edition...well, that seals it, no NWN for me!

[Albert Schweitzer 10]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (WKK Gimbal @ July 09 2002,12:06)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">- people always stand on the same streetcorner they stood on the week before. People never go home after dark or go to the pub. The people who are already at the pub will never leave (slightly more realistic). Why not have to ask around to find a person? The world is too static - it seems like everything has just been put there for the player's sake.<span id='postcolor'>

Oh, I remember Gothic I (Gothic 2 is coming out soon), where people had actually jobs, you would see them at work during daytime in the evening somewhere chatting with other people and at night sleeping. And on the weekends you would find them basically all at the Gladiator-theatre.

E.g hunters were actually hunting and you would find them whereever there would be a lot of wild animals to be found, if there werent any anymore (cause no respawning of animals and monsters on the whole planet ) they travelled elsewhere. The same was true for the animals, some where sleeping at night others were hunting. Gothic was the most realistic Roleplay game I ever played, but too hard to advance!

[Bosun 0]

Codemasters has an interesting online game coming out. "Dragon Empires"...five distinct kingdoms on a 500square mile island. Article in Computer Games.

[WKK Gimbal 0]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (residuum @ July 09 2002,15:47)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">Is there a demo for this game?  Are the gfx nice?  After playing Dungeon Siege I was disapointed by its lack of depth.  It was very stunning and beautiful, but very simple.  Do you think I'd like NWN?<span id='postcolor'>

The gfx in NWN are pretty much like in Dungeon Siege. I'd say that the nature graphics are a bit better in DS while the interior graphics are best in NWN. But fairly much the same standard. NWN is based on a tile-set, so the nature can look a bit too "even" in appearance, but it's of little concern to me.

I also thought DS was kinda hollow after a while. Too repetitive. NWN has an excellent story and much depth, like any Bioware game before. It's very addictive and has plenty of detective work to balance off the fighting. Unlike the Baldur's Gate series, this time you are not the son of Baal, but a henchman hired to find a cure for a plague. You can also choose to play through the campaign as an evil character - today I met a horribly evil deamon captured in a force field. The deamon offered me a gift if I would release it upon the world ... my character is a greedy asshole, so I released it

The fact that you also can play multiplayer with one player as DungeonMaster pretty much let you do whatever you like in this game. There are a zillion monsters and tilesets so it's easy to make new adventures. It only lacks horses, ropes, farmtools and stuff like that, like mentioned above  

There's no demo yet, but I personally think it's a no-brainer. It's the king of the hill RPG. I will however not be responsible if you buy it and hate it.  

[Tex -USMC- 0]

Heres a stereotype for ya: Elves. Always elves. Or at the very least folk who look uncannily like elves. Enough to make you wonder how truly creative people who are in to Fanatasy literature are...

[WKK Gimbal 0]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (Tex [uSMC] @ July 09 2002,18:52)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">Heres a stereotype for ya: Elves. Always elves. Or at the very least folk who look uncannily like elves. Enough to make you wonder how truly creative people who are in to Fanatasy literature are...<span id='postcolor'>

Yeah, elves are pretty daft. Also bad are Warcraft-type orcs ... the really cartoon-looking ones with screaming green skin and axes bigger than their bodies. I prefer Tolkien's much more sinister and crippled orcs.

But what I hate the most gotta be grumpy dwarves with red beards.

[Tex -USMC- 0]

Dwarves I like. Especially when they have large axes and a good handle on sarcasm

[Renagade 0]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (WKK Gimbal @ July 09 2002,19:00)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">But what I hate the most gotta be grumpy dwarves with red beards.<span id='postcolor'>

I guess ur not a big fan of robin cook then

Whats this games like and what`d u do in multiplayer as i haven`t a clue with rpg type games apart from the likes of shenmue??

[red oct 2]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (Albert Schweizer @ July 09 2002,16:25)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">6--></span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (WKK Gimbal @ July 09 2002,126)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">- people always stand on the same streetcorner they stood on the week before. People never go home after dark or go to the pub. The people who are already at the pub will never leave (slightly more realistic). Why not have to ask around to find a person? The world is too static - it seems like everything has just been put there for the player's sake.<span id='postcolor'>

Oh, I remember Gothic I (Gothic 2 is coming out soon), where people had actually jobs, you would see them at work during daytime in the evening somewhere chatting with other people and at night sleeping. And on the weekends you would find them basically all at the Gladiator-theatre.

E.g hunters were actually hunting and you would find them whereever there would be a lot of wild animals to be found, if there werent any anymore (cause no respawning of animals and monsters on the whole planet ) they travelled elsewhere. The same was true for the animals, some where sleeping at night others were hunting. Gothic was the most realistic Roleplay game I ever played, but too hard to advance!<span id='postcolor'>

the animals don't respawn? well don't they like, ya know, have babies? i think it would be pretty funny if they could.

and you still complaining about wciii gimble? why not at least play the game and then do your complaing so that you can have something legit to complain about?

[USSoldier11B 0]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote </td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">I've been playing Neverwinter Nights for about a week now and must say this is one of the best RPG I've ever played - it really kicks ass on many levels. But I've noticed some things that are stereotypical to RPG games, and really wonder why these are not yet addressed, considering the current technology.

- There is still no such thing as horses! Mounted knights simply doesn't exist! Travel from one city to the next? Walk!

- Despite that it's roleplaying, the plots only have one solution. Sure, you can approach them in countless different ways but the outcome is always the same - the world get's saved and the villains get killed. If it's an RPG, why can't I choose to JOIN the villain instead? I'd love to crush the skulls of those arrogant Helmite palladins!

- It's still not possible to use (f.x.) a rope to climb over a wall or up through a window or such things.

- You can't choose to lay down the sword and start a greengrocer shop instead of fighting. You can't seduce a rich woman and inherit her wealth when you later kill her. Simply put, there's a major lack in lifestyle choices.

- people always stand on the same streetcorner they stood on the week before. People never go home after dark or go to the pub. The people who are already at the pub will never leave (slightly more realistic). Why not have to ask around to find a person? The world is too static - it seems like everything has just been put there for the player's sake.

I know that there are things like MMORPG games. But they are far worse. It's simply 100.000 little annoying kids all running around to find a greatsword +8.

<span id='postcolor'>

That's why I liked Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask so much. It addresses most of the things that you stated above. To bad someone hasen't emulated that in a PC game. My favorite game ever is Ocarina of Time, next to OFP of course.

[Major Fubar 0]

I don't much care for elves (too airy-fairy)

I hate orcs depicted as comical, bumbling green skinned pig-faced jokers with unfeasibly large weapons

I like dwarves (again, if they are not portrayed as comic relief)

I like Minotaurs

I love Lizard Men

But my favourite characters to play are generally humans (usually wizards or necromancers), or, best of all, undead.

[WKK Gimbal 0]

Yeah, undead are always cool. Bioware are also very thorough at making them nasty. They are crippled and dangling and attempt to utter words like "Die, mortal" through their rotting maggotfilled throats, while using someones leg as a club

Like Fubar, I also like minotaurs alot. They're simply walking testosterone, not a single braincell.

Then there's giant insects like swordspiders, carrioncrawlers and firebeetles. Creepy and nice.

Though I don't care much for elves, I think nymphs and dryads are nifty.

We should make a list of what fantasy creatures are cool or crap.

US11B: Is Zelda only for Nintendo?

[Tex -USMC- 0]

Bring that shit on. I will cut them all to pieces with my special item: "Ma Deuce .50 Caliber Machine Gun of Unnerving Destructive Capability". I get a +10 damage modifier if I have a mount for it

[Albert Schweitzer 10]

Baldurs Gate I rocks . Baldurs gate II was even better but simply slightly different. Neverwinter Nights (just like silly warcraft III) slowly try to go from 2 dimensional to 3 dimensional. I dont really care about the graphics of roleplaying games, the maps must be cozy and the characters must be natural. I have the impression they all turn into the stereotypical japanese PS II games: lots of special effects, thunders explosions, dragons,and lots of animated hair but the stories..well ...

I want a game where ALL characters on the map are like little Tamagochis, they need to eat, can get sick, grow, die and the weather must influence their harvest. They need to go shopping, they get new chilren..... ah well stuff like that. Right now in all games they run around like Borg (StarTrek) all serving the purpose to make your game, they wait till you come along to talk to them and then they disappear or keep standing in that corner!

[Tex -USMC- 0]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (Albert Schweizer @ July 10 2002,13:24)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">I want a game where ALL characters on the map are like little Tamagochis, they need to eat, can get sick, grow, die and the weather must influence their harvest. They need to go shopping, they get new chilren..... ah well stuff like that!<span id='postcolor'>

As long as they are vulnerable to well placed rifle fire from a helo-inserted raiding party, I totally agree.

[Albert Schweitzer 10]

If helo ever appears on PC

Did you people watch the Lord of the Rings PC game trailer? Wow great graphics but from that athmosphere in the book is nothing left. Soon the book will be known as a chewing-gum flavour, a film, a computer-game, ice-cream.... but not as a terrific book by JRR Tolkien (size of the bible). Allready if you type in Lord of the Rings all you get it Sites about the film or the game! I wish they wouldnt have made this film (the same is true for the new Star-wars episode!