Jan 17
Pro Roleplaying
It went past on The Forge’s blog early this month with little commentary outside the post, but it made my eyebrows go up. Iron Realms sprang for two fulltime positions for their flagship MMOG Achaea. These aren’t developers or designers – they’re “Assistant Producers for Roleplay“.
As Assistant Producer for Roleplay, you will help to ensure the continuous flow and evolution of the roleplay and storylines within the world of Achaea, in order to promote overall game dynamism and the immersive appeal of a changing environment open to influence via interaction. Responsibilities include, but are not limited to: working with other staff and volunteers to prepare and carry out roleplay story scenarios; extemporaneous roleplayed interaction with the playerbase; assisting in the continuous development of a cohesive world background, history, and mythos; and content creation, such as writing scripts, summaries, or promotional material for roleplay events.
The hires were made from two of the ‘Gods’ they had already working on the game. They’re now working as RP facilitators. These are two positions added to a small game run by an indie developer. The idea, in and of itself, sounds awesome. Why don’t we see stuff like this in bigger games that can more obviously afford such extravagances?
The answer, of course, is right there in the comments. Cael wrote:
Thumbs up to The Forge and Achaea for their new deal. I hope it works out well for you.
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I think a lot of people see roleplaying as precisely this: drama. I was just jawing about this today, discussing the stupidity of ‘rewards’ at Gen Con roleplaying events with some friends. A lot of GMs in tabletop games consider ‘overacting’ or ‘hamming it up’ or ‘making an ass of yourself’ roleplaying. This essentially means, when the GM arrives at the gaming table with something to offer as a reward for ‘best roleplaying’, it invariably ends up in the hands of that guy. This is a common perception, though, because in the minds of a lot of gamers roleplaying != acting. The thesepian stuff they do on stage is too subtle for Trogdor the World-Slayer.
These new positions with Achaea are really excellent, but they make me regretful of the ‘RPG’ tacked on after the ‘MMO’ in descriptions of everything from World of Warcraft to Star Wars Galaxies. WoW is many things, but roleplaying? Lying ‘naked’ on a bed, with another guy, cybering via /tells in the Goldshire Inn is not roleplaying.
If bigger companies took the cue from smaller fry, I think we could start to see some very interesting things. Not with WoW, of course, there’s just too many people for that. SWG, though … there’s always been a strong RP community there. Perhaps with a little more encouragement (and some consolidated servers), we’d see even more events in Pex’s semi-regular reports. Perhaps one of the niches that will develop in the Massive industry will be ‘tooled experiences’, where the story continuity of a MUD could be brought into a commercial, graphical realm.