Because in p&p you play with your friends and ...

2010-01-09T11:45:26.566-05:00

Because in p&p you play with your friends and even when you're immersed deeply in a story you all are physically present and thus don't have any identity crisis. In an MMO everybody looks the same, there are gazillion clones of you running around and that's all other players, who you may or may not know, perceive. Creating an identity for your character is a major goal for all of us, whether we admit it or not.

However the assumption you mention is really interesting. As a GM I never tailored any challenge to the players' abilities - in fact the only thing I usually kept in mind is not to stand them against something that they can't solve because of game mechanics (like lack of skill). The group of people I played with had a real appreciation of their character; most of the time they didn't spend XP in a way that "powered" their characters, their decisions were based on RP and character progression (err, can't say it better than this).

However all of us more or less powergame in any and all MMOs we played. That's something interesting to think about, maybe because the lack of identity, the assembly line style of content, peer pressure or the combination of these (and maybe more)...

The key with character growth is that the type of ...

2010-01-09T01:45:45.085-05:00

The key with character growth is that the type of reward also matters. If you look at pen and paper RPGs, there's an assumption that the GM will reward characters by providing future challenges -- both mechanical and roleplay based -- where their newly bought abilities (from spending xp) will be useful.

One of the interesting things to me in MMOs is how far people will go for purely cosmetic rewards that have nothing to do with anything apart from a random sense of 'that looks cool'. It would be really hard to motivate players like that in a pen and paper game, they'd be more 'why would my character care about that?'

Comments on That's a Terrible Idea: Themepark MMO Design: Optimizing Reward Distributi...

Because in p&p you play with your friends and ...

The key with character growth is that the type of ...