Telling Stories: And I’ll form the head
When you trust people, you’re usually willing to let them borrow your things. Your books, your movies, your roleplaying characters.
I’ve seen various people share their characters in the years that I’ve been roleplaying, ranging from fully shared accounts to versions of characters being controlled by multiple different players. (I’ve also seen players controlling multiple versions of the same character, but that’s a discussion for another day.) The idea is that it can form a shared experience, both players getting some of the fun of roleplaying in theory. In practice…
Look, I’m not one to say that this is something that can never work. But there are a lot of really big hurdles to climb here, ones that I don’t think are necessarily easy to surmount or even suggest a methodology. So before you even consider it, you need to really think about what you’re doing and why, especially if you’re talking about your main character and not an alt.
Telling Stories: Buddy event
I have several friends and acquaintances who are roleplayers. This is unsurprising, but it also doesn’t really mean a whole heck of a lot. There are several people who I can talk to about roleplaying but whom I have never actually roleplayed with, or if I have it’s only been in passing. Our connection via roleplaying is entirely based upon a shared hobby rather than any shared experiences, which is all right but does arguably lack a certain degree of immediacy.
I also have several friends with whom I do roleplay, and that’s a very different can of worms. I’m not talking about people like my wife, I’m talking about people who met me originally through roleplaying and we kept talking from there. Obviously, I don’t consider this to be a bad thing; I’m regularly podcasting with a friend I made via roleplaying, I talk to several of my roleplaying friends on a regular basis, this is a very welcome example of an online hobby feeding into actual friendships. But it does pose some unique challenges while at the same time offering some notable benefits.
Challenge Accepted: Selling on the challenge
Yeah, this is going to get worse before it gets better, isn’t it?
Dark Souls doesn’t beat around the bush when it comes to difficulty. You will die in this game. You will die over and over, brutally, ripped to shreds by enemies that are there for the explicit purpose of ripping you to shreds. The PC version is subtitled as the Prepare to Die Edition, a not-so-subtle reminder that when you start playing this game death comes for you on swift wings. And swift legs. And swift fins. Basically, everything is going to kill you over and over and you’re going to like it.
Is that challenging?
I’m not asking if the game is really all that hard or not, that’s for reviewers to argue over. (Or, as is more frequently the case, for forum-goers to debate with “oh, it wasn’t that hard” substituting as the gaming equivalent of explaining how many one-armed pushups you can do in an hour.) Rather, it’s a question of how challenging a game can be when its entire purpose is stated right from the start, when you walk in with a solid promise that this game will kill you over and over. Are you getting a challenge, or are you just getting what you paid for?
Telling Stories: Tomato, Tomato, Shield Bash, Arm Thrust
How many classes are there in World of Warcraft?
If you said “eleven,” then you are wrong. But you’re doing good, that’s the number listed, you’re wrong with the best intentions. If you said “thirty-four,” you are also wrong, but you are very astute, noting that the choice of specs now is functionally like choosing a class. (Albeit ones you can swap back and forth between.) If you said “seventeen” then… er… you may wish to take some issues up with your elementary school teachers, that’s not even close to anything resembling a correct answer. But thanks for coming out.
No, the correct answer is “as many as you want there to be.” And the same is true of literally any game with classes or abilities. You’re only as limited as you allow yourself to be. You see a list of options and you group characters into small cliques, assuming that everyone who possesses these same skills must be the same sort of person… but that’s you talking, not the game. Not the game at all.
Hard Project: Firefly
Find a ship, find a crew, make no money, fail, get an online petition going, make a movie, fail again, stare at the wall…
The announcement of Firefly Online way back in the day seemed like a marriage of the most obvious IP in the world to the most obvious game type. A series that’s all about heading out into the great unknown for various purposes married to a genre that loves to send you off and wandering. So when the game was released, it… well, we never got there, actually. It’s been started and stopped so many times that it resembles nothing so much as the engine room of the eponymous ship class.
Weirder still, the franchise has never had any sort of game made, not even the most basic adaptation. That’s odd, to say the least. Maybe not entirely odd given the fact that we’re talking about a franchise only in the strictest sense of the term, but you’d think the number of passionate fans would align to make at least some sort of game come out of this. And yet it’s never happened. The closest we’ve gotten are the many started and cancelled incarnations of an online game based in the universe. Why?
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 