[MUD-Dev] Commercial value of RP

[Travis Casey]

Mike Sellers <mike at online-alchemy.com> wrote:
>At 10:01 PM 1/5/98 PST8PDT, Brandon Cline wrote:

>>Not to repeat JCL's point, but using Travis's opinion of
>>what "role-playing" is, is "that" a viable comercial pursuit?  The
>>comercial RPG games atm, seem to have the ability for "role-playing" but
>>in a competitive game, where possibly the players are paying by usage, or
>>advancing through time spent, are they going to be willing to put forth
>>the extra effort to "role-play" and/or is/will the game reward the players
>>for role-playing?  Basically, if the game can be played without
>>role-playing, how will you get the people to role-play.
>
>This is an excellent question.  If we do not construct the games and the
>game-goals (those things for which you are rewarded) to support and reward
>role-playing, then most people will not RP most of the time.  If nothing
>else, it's just too much work. :)  And then you have to ask, if you *did*
>create a game that actively rewarded actual role-playing (briefly, as
>someone else said, making decisions based on your character's views, not
>your own), would enough people want to play to make it a commercial
>possibility?


A small clarification, presuming you're talking about my definition...
I defined roleplaying as making decisions based on what you believe your
character would do in the situation if he/she was a real person in a real
world -- I didn't say anything about the character's views having to be
different from the player's.  I want to make the distinction because there
are some people who insist that you're not really roleplaying unless you
play a character that has a personality different from your own, and I'm
not one of them.  :-)  (Indeed, it's possible to roleplay yourself in a
game -- simply trying to have the character do what you would do if you
were in the character's situation.  What really distinguishes roleplaying,
IMHO, is that decisions are being made on a "what would so-and-so do"
basis instead of a "what's going to work best under these rules" basis.)

And now for a strange aside...

I've noticed that everyone in this thread but me seems to be writing
roleplaying as "role-playing".  A quick check of my library of paper
RPGs shows about a 50-50 split between "role-playing" and "roleplaying",
which the hyphen seeming to be more prevalent in older games.  A few
of the oldest games use "role playing", a couple of games seem to
switch back and forth between two forms ("role-playing" and "roleplaying",
except in the case of Chivalry & Sorcery, which switches between
"role playing" and "role-playing").  And, of course, White Wolf spells
it "storytelling."  :-)

It would be interesting to hear how different people pronounce it as
well... I articulate it as if it were one word, which seems appropriate
since I spell it that way.  Do those of you writing "role-playing" use
a pause between the two parts when speaking?
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