Telling Stories: That’s what I want
The most tragic cases of roleplaying boredom that I’ve seen are the ones that could be averted simply by letting your characters do something.
“But I do let my characters do things!” you protest, despite the fact that I’m not necessarily talking right to you at the moment. “I go to every roleplaying event! I hang out in agreed-upon hubs! I have a whole lot of backstory! I’m just bored with just sitting around and chatting!”
Exactly. Because you’re not doing anything. Because you’ve somehow mistaken presence for participation and forgotten that the key to roleplaying isn’t showing up to someone else’s event but in having your own things that need to happen. You lost sight of your characters having agency in their world and being the architects of their own fortune and (frequent) misfortune, and as a result all you’re left with is derping around in a bar waiting for someone else to act.
Challenge Accepted: Easy keeps you going
First time, yes, full challenge. Subsequent times? Thanks, I’ll just faceroll it on easy.
There are some people who are just not going to have fun with a game if it’s not a challenge. That’s a given, and it’s not a bad thing. It’s part of how games work, and it’s an important element to keep in mind. Games cannot be designed to be all easy, all of the time, or the developers would be saying that they didn’t want the money of a sizable chunk of audience members. And that would just be silly. We need to have challenges in games, things that are difficult to overcome, stuff that can’t be cleared in one or two quick moments of play.
But in the long run, it’s going to be the easy stuff that’s more beneficial for any game.
This sounds contradictory. After all, the people playing a game for the long haul, whether it’s single-player or multiplayer, are going to be the people with more practice. These are the people best suited to facing challenges, and more to the point these are the people who most likely want more challenge. How can easy content be more useful to a game on a whole than difficult things?
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy III, part 3
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
Let’s recap, shall we? When I left off, I was in a cave full of friendly vikings. My options at this point seemed fairly simple:
- Remain forever in this happy place full of vikings, which presumably would mean plenty of mead, lots of singing, fun times in general, and maybe the occasional raiding party against coastal villagers unable to put up an adequate defense. Eventually we might even reach North America!
- Go back to the whole “saving the world” bit based on some vague thread of fulminating darkness overtaking the world.
The correct option seems clear, and yet for some reason I still wound up heading back to that Light Warrior thing. What can I say? I love hanging out with vikings, sure, but I am a sucker for fulminating darkness.
There’s not a whole lot to do in the cave other than pilfer every available bit of treasure, possibly taking a slight detour back to the gnomish village to get another copy of Aero. While there’s not much else of interest here, though, the vikings do agree to give you a ship if you can quell the super-angry dragon off in the sea right now. Seems like a lark; we’ll do it.
Demo Driver 8: Rochard (#379)
I played Portal and you didn’t, you miserable hacks! Have fun shooting an invulnerable box!
Sometimes this feature can make me feel just a wee bit cynical. By its very nature, I wind up playing a lot of little indie games, and a lot of these little or single-A titles turn out to be obscure for good reason. My overall desire for games remains the same as it has ever been. Which makes me wonder if the problem is just me, or if maybe the whole indie development switch doesn’t have the legs that I want it to have, or any number of other things.
Then I play a game like Rochard and it reminds me of the best part of trying on random demos – finding a gem you never even would have looked at otherwise.
Rochard is very much in the puzzle-platformer vein, a former PSN title that migrated to Steam as well a little while back. It is also very, very charming, marrying a strong visual sense and a simple-but-enjoyable story to solid mechanics. It’s fun, and it’s the first game that I’ve had where I immediately tossed it onto my wishlist once I was done with the demo. Then, of course, I sat down to write this article. It’s what I do, after all.
Telling Stories: Enhance both experiences
Tabletop roleplaying isn’t the same as roleplaying with people online. And not just for the obvious reasons where you can’t all be sharing a pizza around a table and spend a bunch of pre-game time chattering about whether or not you enjoyed the last episode of whatever television shows are airing now. Is Game of Thrones still a thing? I don’t have cable.
But really, even beyond the obvious gaps of personal interaction, there are a lot of differences between a gathering in the real world and just roleplaying in an MMO. The systems are different, the environment is different, even the way that the games play is different. It’s a lot easier to roleplay in the middle of a dungeon when the entire world stops and starts based on what the player characters are doing, after all, compared to your average online game where the game is going to keep moving whether you like it or not.
But that’s the thing – there are some good lessons to be learned from online worlds that you can apply to your tabletop sessions. So don’t discard one out of hand! A bit of time in an online game can make your game that much better.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 