Game mastering in MMO / LOTRO

[Archibold]

It is clear to everyone there is a big gap between Pen and Paper gaming and MMORPGs.
LOTRO by itself is extremely friendly towards roleplay - much more than many of MMOs i played in the past.

And as it is maybe case with many other MMOs it lends itself readily towards - i will call it "Opera" roleplay. One where main action is words and emotions - with perhaps imaginary event going in background. Excelent example for this would be "Children of Destiny" event. It was both greatly executed , great roleplayed , it was smooth and belivable.

But what with "Action" roleplay ? How can we bring forth events that have action elements ? Fights, puzzles, npcs ? This is a big problem.

I have experimented with this a bit in WoW.

Here is few things i came up with.

Fake NPC.
I would give piece of puzzle to a roleplayer from another guild. My players were aware he has the knowledge needed to progress trough plotline and had to acquire it. Usually the NPC player would give them quests and errands. But it was entirely up to players and him how the information (or object) would be acquired.

The object - Unfortunately this does not work in LOTRO. In wow it would be a letter because it was able to be used in inventory.

Instanced dungeons.
Using and incoporating instanced dungeons into our own plotline was also used. Instead of doing the instance quest - we would look for imaginary goal - what ever it might be ( like slaying a special monster , or examining the hidden inscription on the altair...etc )

....

Anyways , this are some ideas for how to make "action" roleplaying work in MMO -
I wonder if you guys have some tricks or ideas of your own ?

[kellidir]

Fixed Content

Well from my own experience of running online rp communities, this is a rather tricky issue. I've sat through many debates regarding IC and Game Mechanics character abilities, IC conflict and such. It is very much a mine field and you're not going to find some perfect system.

There are a number of factors to fitting RP adventures around fixed game content that can cause problems.

• There is a limited amount of instance content, events which take us out of an instance can end up with non-roleplayers basically messing it up, or some random roleplaying munchkin who suddenly goes all hero on you.
• Content level vs character level.
• How do you RP the team getting wiped?
• Game content not fitting the essence of the desired adventure.

When it comes to action and adventure for characters, I've actually found that the best action adventures have literally been run through a chat program with a very definite GM for the adventure.

NPCs

Using a fake NPC from within the kinship usually means someone has to not play the adventure or has to conveniently dissappear and reappear. We could go one step further here and simply look for other hard core RP groups and discuss a potential "NPC" swap system where say once or twice a month, we each borrow a number of people from the other group to facilitate NPC roles.

You could even take this NPC exchange one step further and pushing it to an on mass level, say for example village uprisings or bandits etc. Does anyone know what price is involved in changing a surname? e.g. Kellidir (NPC)Jolene

I know I'd be willing to do this if it helped RP on a larger scale and really enhanced things.

An example scenario could be civil unrest in bree, a civilian crowd could be gathering outside of town hall could be demanding a number of changes to how the major is running things, and in such a case the Thorns could be paid to stop the civil unrest from bursting into all out violence outside city hall. Do the thorns bully people away or do they resort to diplomacy etc?

Objects

I remember seeing some custom UI mods that were in WOW that allowed you to craft your own objects like books and stuff that could be exchanged with someone else using the same mod, and I remember it being a very good idea. I would love to see this in operation. But we may be limited to sending emails or in game mails with descriptions and object text. While this obviously isn't ideal, you don't have to own an object to emote having it.