Roleplaying and the MMO
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I grew up on a staple of Avalon Hill and PC gaming and it wasn't until college that I really encountered the RPG. I'd played my share of Kings Quest, Space Quest, and Darklands but never the pen-and-paper variety which is truly the core of the genre. I was immediately transfixed. The RPG is a completely different type of game. It isn't a head-on-head contest with the person across the table like in Squad Leader or Panzer Blitz. It's cooperative. A group of gamers tackle adventures under the careful adjudicative hands of a Game Master. Even more than that, it is cooperative storytelling. Begin history-minded, I immediately began developing strong character stories and grappled with personality, emotions, and motivations. I found myself appreciating companies which facilitated this process, such as R. Talsorian's background tables and GURPS advantages and disadvantages. I think I was blessed by a handful of GMs (and fellow players) who knew how to delve into character stories and eek out the optimum amount of angst and social dilemma. Not only did we have the challenge of epic adventure, but the "fun" of grappling with character baggage.
After graduation my group scattered to the four corners of the world and my RPG days faded to fond memory. So, in 2000 when one of my old friends invited me into MMOs I was thrilled to think that RPing was back. I was wrong.
It quickly became clear to me that the MMO is not an ideal engine for roleplaying. It possesses many of the other strengths of an RPG: the appeal of playing a single character who adventures and advances in a dynamic world full of history, politics, and culture. But the core of what makes an RPG an RPG is absent.
For starters, in an MMO you can't be the hero. One of the foundational ideas of an RPG is that events swirl around you. Sure, you may start as a group of peons and you may never rise much above that, but there almost always is the sense that you can be so much more. There is the idea that if the game goes on long enough (and provided your character survives), you may just make a name for yourself. You and your fellow gamers ARE the story. MMOs, on the other hand, are played by thousands of people and you can have thousands of heroes. Sure RPGs have their stock adventure sets which thousands of people play, but they all occur in separate worlds distinctive to each group of players.
