Predictions of the d20/gaming Industry
- Thread starter Ulrick
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RyanD said:
*The CEO of Organized Play says as he cracks his knuckles and contemplates world domination*
I'm not sure I completely follow - you mean like what Hong is talking about? Bugaboo used to have a long ongoing troll about pay to play DMing a while back and some people got rather offended at the idea - also skeptical considering that they can get a DM for free. I dunno. I suppose it depends on exactly what is being offered.
I suppose you're talking about something like the Living campaigns? I'm afraid I haven't tried it out and I don't know much about these so I can't give much input.
2WS-Steve
First Post
Long Post on MMTRPG
A massively multiplayer tabletop roleplaying game sounds like it would be a real challenge to implement well.
But since saying something would be difficult is worthless feedback and having a successful MMTRP would be such a thundering, game publisher/distributor/and retailer economy changing boon for the industry, something that would probably keep TRPGs alive for years if not decades and help to keep all the top talent in the industry we ought to make an attempt to get it right.
Anyway, here’s some of my unsolicited feedback on what you need for an MMTRPG and how you might go about it.
Desiderata
A) It cannot be “convention-only”; that’s too small a share of the market and people don’t want to have to wait around to play their character. I figure you could probably rate this feature in order of preference:
----1) I can play my character at any time I want because there’s constantly an adventure or game running somewhere that I can join. MMORPGs already got this.
----2) I can play my character with my home group and with my home GM out of one of our houses.
----3) I can play my character through sanctioned leagues at my local hobby store which runs game sessions at least once per week; even better the hobby store runs multiple sessions per week.
----4) I can play my character at the occasional convention that comes within 100 miles of me every few months or so.
B) It’s got to be fair (or at least fair enough); people in Indiana should not be complaining about those Monty Haul twinks in California. Of course, people will complain no matter what but as long as the complaints stay pretty evenly spread around you’re probably doing a good job. This feature is usually at odds with the previous desiderata. MMORPGs only need to worry about this insofar as they make sure the game engine itself remains balanced.
C) It should involve the hobby store. Retailers that make money support the industry and help keep things organized. If this works really well hobby stores might actually be able to expand their floor-space, offer more services, and become more lucrative ventures which would give them more money so they could carry a larger stock of my elegant and well-thought-out gaming books.
D) Massively Multiplayer games get a lot of their drive from a competitive undercurrent, even in games where almost everyone cooperates. In D&D we’ve already got that in the level system and magic item reward system. I don’t think any kind of player rating system would work here. My player ranking is all nice and fuzzy but what I really want is to toast things with my 18th level sorcerer and know that I’m one of the few 18th level sorcerers in the nation. MMORPGs provide all this in spades of course; there probably ought to be some turnover system so that players don’t level up and then sit on their powerful characters. Perhaps a process as simple as aging characters in the game would help solve this.
E) It’s a roleplaying game and your characters are part of a world. You want the characters to have an effect on the world and the world to have an effect on the characters. The players should be part of a story that they help design. MMORPGs lack this in spades and this is something I think can really add value to the product that you couldn’t get elsewhere.
Some Possible Solutions
The most natural structure for this kind of system strikes me as something modeled on the league play of Warhammer or M:tG. This satisfies C and probably does the best job balancing out A and B. But RPGs are different from Warhammer and M:tG, they don’t have the natural balancing point that every time you produce a winner you also produce a loser. Organized Play could help keep things from spiraling out of control by allocating rewards to League retail outlets. A retail outlet receives a fixed amount of points to allocate to its league customers based on the numbers of league members it has and how often they play. Perhaps break this down into individual sessions so a player pays a small fee for each session they play in and the shop running the league receives a point allotment from OP based on the number of player-sessions they run each month. The shop then allocates these points to the individual GMs who in turn spend those points to distribute magic items and experience. GMs could even use the point system as a guideline to help them design their scenarios. Actually, you could probably just standardize the whole thing and say a 3rd level session is typically worth X experience points and Y gold pieces in treasure. You could follow up with some flex points that you do allocate to the league running shop that they can use to provide an occasional larger reward. Since the shop has a limited number of flex points they’ll have to budget how they distribute them.
The per session award does favor gamers who play more often. But that’s already the case in MMORPGs anyway and I don’t see a feasible way to avoid it. Moreover, from a financial standpoint you *want* to favor those who play more often because they keep the game alive and they’re the ones who pay.
I’d also suggest something along the lines of an expiration date for particular characters. Perhaps each character ages a certain rate between each game session (or picks up decrepitude points, or perhaps retirement points to represent the character getting old and tired). After enough of them accrue the character retires. With flex point awards different characters might reach higher levels before enforced retirement. This impels players to start up new characters and you’ll probably even see players with multiple characters at a time at a variety of character levels. This way they can sort of drag out the usable lifespan of the higher level characters and don’t feel like they’re losing something if they decide to play a lower level character for a little while.
Prestige Points: It’s an RPG and the players should feel like they’re part of a dynamic world, one which they can influence. To allow for this you can offer another kind of reward, prestige points. These mostly come along later in the character’s career. The player can spend prestige points from a character to create a lasting effect in the game world. You’d have a standardized list of such effects, constructing a castle, creating a guild, constructing an awful dungeon, invading a small kingdom, forging an alliance, casting a great spell that transforms the terrain, strengthening the presence of a god in the world, etc. I think offering two or three tiers of prestige points would be good. At the lowest tier each particular league owner (retailer) gets some local prestige points that players can use to generate lasting effects within the local region. It’s possible that you could let league owners handle that all themselves or do a local prestige point allocation based on number of player-sessions. Then you might have two or more upper levels, perhaps a regional level where one could spend prestige to set up a new kingdom in an area of the game world. These effects get handled by a regional office covering perhaps a few states. Finally, very high level characters receive some global prestige points and can spend them for global effects (like helping a dead god return, creating a year of wild magic, or changing the shape of a nation). Other players within the same region could spend prestige points of the appropriate level to counteract these effects; this would impel players at all levels to forge alliances or at least keep them from doing things that others *really* don’t like. This should also help reduce the sting of the enforced expiration date. The character might ultimately retire but the player will be able to see the lasting effects of his character on the game world. Moreover, the player gets bragging rights on the message boards for big changes they’ve implemented. That gives them an incentive to start the process over with a new character so they can again reach high level and generate another significant effect.
[did a little edit on the formating]
A massively multiplayer tabletop roleplaying game sounds like it would be a real challenge to implement well.
But since saying something would be difficult is worthless feedback and having a successful MMTRP would be such a thundering, game publisher/distributor/and retailer economy changing boon for the industry, something that would probably keep TRPGs alive for years if not decades and help to keep all the top talent in the industry we ought to make an attempt to get it right.
Anyway, here’s some of my unsolicited feedback on what you need for an MMTRPG and how you might go about it.
Desiderata
A) It cannot be “convention-only”; that’s too small a share of the market and people don’t want to have to wait around to play their character. I figure you could probably rate this feature in order of preference:
----1) I can play my character at any time I want because there’s constantly an adventure or game running somewhere that I can join. MMORPGs already got this.
----2) I can play my character with my home group and with my home GM out of one of our houses.
----3) I can play my character through sanctioned leagues at my local hobby store which runs game sessions at least once per week; even better the hobby store runs multiple sessions per week.
----4) I can play my character at the occasional convention that comes within 100 miles of me every few months or so.
B) It’s got to be fair (or at least fair enough); people in Indiana should not be complaining about those Monty Haul twinks in California. Of course, people will complain no matter what but as long as the complaints stay pretty evenly spread around you’re probably doing a good job. This feature is usually at odds with the previous desiderata. MMORPGs only need to worry about this insofar as they make sure the game engine itself remains balanced.
C) It should involve the hobby store. Retailers that make money support the industry and help keep things organized. If this works really well hobby stores might actually be able to expand their floor-space, offer more services, and become more lucrative ventures which would give them more money so they could carry a larger stock of my elegant and well-thought-out gaming books.
D) Massively Multiplayer games get a lot of their drive from a competitive undercurrent, even in games where almost everyone cooperates. In D&D we’ve already got that in the level system and magic item reward system. I don’t think any kind of player rating system would work here. My player ranking is all nice and fuzzy but what I really want is to toast things with my 18th level sorcerer and know that I’m one of the few 18th level sorcerers in the nation. MMORPGs provide all this in spades of course; there probably ought to be some turnover system so that players don’t level up and then sit on their powerful characters. Perhaps a process as simple as aging characters in the game would help solve this.
E) It’s a roleplaying game and your characters are part of a world. You want the characters to have an effect on the world and the world to have an effect on the characters. The players should be part of a story that they help design. MMORPGs lack this in spades and this is something I think can really add value to the product that you couldn’t get elsewhere.
Some Possible Solutions
The most natural structure for this kind of system strikes me as something modeled on the league play of Warhammer or M:tG. This satisfies C and probably does the best job balancing out A and B. But RPGs are different from Warhammer and M:tG, they don’t have the natural balancing point that every time you produce a winner you also produce a loser. Organized Play could help keep things from spiraling out of control by allocating rewards to League retail outlets. A retail outlet receives a fixed amount of points to allocate to its league customers based on the numbers of league members it has and how often they play. Perhaps break this down into individual sessions so a player pays a small fee for each session they play in and the shop running the league receives a point allotment from OP based on the number of player-sessions they run each month. The shop then allocates these points to the individual GMs who in turn spend those points to distribute magic items and experience. GMs could even use the point system as a guideline to help them design their scenarios. Actually, you could probably just standardize the whole thing and say a 3rd level session is typically worth X experience points and Y gold pieces in treasure. You could follow up with some flex points that you do allocate to the league running shop that they can use to provide an occasional larger reward. Since the shop has a limited number of flex points they’ll have to budget how they distribute them.
The per session award does favor gamers who play more often. But that’s already the case in MMORPGs anyway and I don’t see a feasible way to avoid it. Moreover, from a financial standpoint you *want* to favor those who play more often because they keep the game alive and they’re the ones who pay.
I’d also suggest something along the lines of an expiration date for particular characters. Perhaps each character ages a certain rate between each game session (or picks up decrepitude points, or perhaps retirement points to represent the character getting old and tired). After enough of them accrue the character retires. With flex point awards different characters might reach higher levels before enforced retirement. This impels players to start up new characters and you’ll probably even see players with multiple characters at a time at a variety of character levels. This way they can sort of drag out the usable lifespan of the higher level characters and don’t feel like they’re losing something if they decide to play a lower level character for a little while.
Prestige Points: It’s an RPG and the players should feel like they’re part of a dynamic world, one which they can influence. To allow for this you can offer another kind of reward, prestige points. These mostly come along later in the character’s career. The player can spend prestige points from a character to create a lasting effect in the game world. You’d have a standardized list of such effects, constructing a castle, creating a guild, constructing an awful dungeon, invading a small kingdom, forging an alliance, casting a great spell that transforms the terrain, strengthening the presence of a god in the world, etc. I think offering two or three tiers of prestige points would be good. At the lowest tier each particular league owner (retailer) gets some local prestige points that players can use to generate lasting effects within the local region. It’s possible that you could let league owners handle that all themselves or do a local prestige point allocation based on number of player-sessions. Then you might have two or more upper levels, perhaps a regional level where one could spend prestige to set up a new kingdom in an area of the game world. These effects get handled by a regional office covering perhaps a few states. Finally, very high level characters receive some global prestige points and can spend them for global effects (like helping a dead god return, creating a year of wild magic, or changing the shape of a nation). Other players within the same region could spend prestige points of the appropriate level to counteract these effects; this would impel players at all levels to forge alliances or at least keep them from doing things that others *really* don’t like. This should also help reduce the sting of the enforced expiration date. The character might ultimately retire but the player will be able to see the lasting effects of his character on the game world. Moreover, the player gets bragging rights on the message boards for big changes they’ve implemented. That gives them an incentive to start the process over with a new character so they can again reach high level and generate another significant effect.
[did a little edit on the formating]
Last edited:
Mistwell
Crusty Old Meatwad
Seriously, the exponential growth in the use of acronyms on this board is just not good. It doesn't save you much time in typing. In fact, often the acronyms are longer than, or almost as long as, a single ENGLISH WORD that could be used in its place. (for example, MMORPG is, in the context of this discussion, the same as just an ONLINE GAME. That's all it is. It probably wouldn't be online if it didn't have other players playing it at the same time, and it's not a board game we are talking about. And if you think ONLINE GAME leaves some details too vague, imagine how vague it is if people have no idea what you are talking about to begin with). And, I think some people use them because they think it's cool (look at me, I know what this acronym means, I figured it out, and now I talk like the cool kids and writers of the D&D products). It's not cool.
If you're going to use an acronym, the proper way to use it is to do things like this: Massively Multi-user Online Role Playing Game ("MMORPG"). And from then on in that post you can use MMORPG. But define your acronym first, please. (Don't make me whip out my Prentice Hall HANDBOOK FOR WRITERS on you guys.)
If you're going to use an acronym, the proper way to use it is to do things like this: Massively Multi-user Online Role Playing Game ("MMORPG"). And from then on in that post you can use MMORPG. But define your acronym first, please. (Don't make me whip out my Prentice Hall HANDBOOK FOR WRITERS on you guys.)
Piratecat
Sesquipedalian
This is a RGTTTDL - a really good thread that's too damn long. It's continued here:
http://www.enworld.org/messageboards/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10348
We'll close this thread now, and archive it later.
http://www.enworld.org/messageboards/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10348
We'll close this thread now, and archive it later.
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