[MUD-Dev] Interesting EQ rant (very long quote)

[Travis Nixon]

J. Coleman wrote:

> I don't speak up much on this list, but I think there is a very
> fundamental difference of perception here I should address.

> While it may very well be strange to pretend that a player doesn't
> know something... you seemingly fail to take into account the fact
> that ther player's *character* *doesn't* know this information. I
> realize that there is considerable blending of the character's and
> player's perceptions, but the quest is for the character, after all.

> Why is it unreasonable to make the character learn the information,
> even if the player already knows? The player *is not* the
> character. This, in my opinion, is one of the most telling examples
> of RP vs. GoP players available. How many CRPG characters know
> anything about web boards? I'd be perfectly happy to have the
> character remember the secret password *once they know it*, but the
> character still must learn it in the first place.

But if it's even possible to read on the web that you can get the
sword by giving the widget to Joe, and that said widget always comes
from the same creature and that Joe always wants said widget, then
you've already broken fiction.  The world itself is not "roleplay
consistent" yet you expect the players to be?  That's a rather silly
expectation, don't you think?

CRPG players don't know anything about web boards.  But they know
about rumor mills.  They know that (at least in the stereotypical
fantasy world) they can find information about things like Joe's sword
from other people in the world.  Especially if Joe has already given
up a number of swords previously.  At that point, it's not a quest,
it's a service that Joe provides, and you can bet that in our virtual
fantasy world, such a service would spread across the rumor mills like
wildfire.  But I have yet to see a game that's made a decent attempt
at a grapevine, so that information goes out of game.

Unfortunately, the fact of the matter is that even if the rumor mill
existed in the game, many people would still go to websites for
repeatable quests.  Because it's easier.  When playing EQ, I used
Allakhazam's for most of my quest information.  I can justify my use
of out of game material in many ways (at least to myself) but it all
boils down to this: The gameworld itself breaks fiction and is not
internally consistent.  Why should I be?  Of course, EQ has its own
issues as well, and if you looked really hard, you could probably find
my tales of spending literal real-time weeks doing nothing but trying
to figure out how to do a particular quest, only to find at the end
that the quest was not working properly due to a bug.  Or tales of
spending countless hours and hours on another quest, only to have the
reward (at least, what I viewed as the reward) stripped from me by
another bug.  Three times.

I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that I would consider
myself a casual roleplayer.  I like roleplaying, and I try, but
frankly, when it's too hard, I don't.  When thinking about something
"in character" causes me to overlook so many obvious holes in the
fiction, I think it's too hard, and I don't stay in character.

If you don't want me as a player to go out of game to get information
that I think my character should have easy access to in-game, then you
better be providing it in-game.  Of course, even then you'll still
have people going out of game because its easier, and the only way to
solve that is by making quests unrepeatable, and therefore
unreportable except for historical or story-telling reasons.  And
unfortunately doing that requires doing things that I don't think
anybody today has the capability to do: generate enough content so
that you can have one-shot quests and activities.

So, in short, either do the impossible, wait til the impossible is
possible, or stop griping about people going out of game to get
information, because that's just not going to change.  The best you
can hope for is that "casual roleplayers" like me won't go out of
game.  And for the most part, I wouldn't.  But the GoPers are always
going to go out of game no matter what you do.

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