by Scott Roberts
May 15, 2001

"We're movin' on up,
We've finally got a piece of the pie."
— Theme from "The Jeffersons”

This week's topic is directed more towards those who don't yet play online prose games and are considering them, rather than the dedicated online text-based role-player. Those of you who already play these games will find more of interest in future columns, but for now I'm starting with the basics. What we're going to discuss is the transition from "traditional" roleplaying venues (LARPs and tabletop roleplaying games) to the multiplayer online text-based genre that future columns will focus upon.

It's probably a little self-centered of me to view the transition between LARPs or tabletop games to massively multiplayer online text-based role playing games (MMOTBRPGs? MMOTRPGs? I think I'm going to rely on the Skotos term "online prose games" instead...) as a step up. It’s also a little disingenuous, insofar as I play in several tabletop games to this day. But as you’ll see below, it’s my opinion that the best roleplaying experiences come from this genre.

The De-luxe Apartment In The Sky

My initial reasoning for proclaiming the superiority of the online prose game is presented in a small paragraph in my first column, but it bears additional exploration here. Online prose games offer more than just advantages and disadvantages in contrast with other types of games; they also have certain aspects which are completely irreproducible in other genres.

First, there’s the enhanced immersiveness that online prose games offer. Tabletop games don’t provide much immersiveness inasmuch as no matter how hard you try, it’s always going to be difficult to think of your friend Fred as a 2’3” tall halfling if he’s really a 6’4” tall system administrator. LARPs address this to some extent, but along with graphical games, they’re limited by the tools available – Fred still can’t be a convincing halfling in a LARP, and in a graphical game, he’s always going to look a great deal like one of the ten or twenty graphics of halflings that such games provide. Most text-based games let you define the appearance and mannerisms of your characters regardless of how divergent they are from your real-life appearance, with varying degrees of flexibility but always superior to other methods of doing so in different genres. You can have pouting lips, an aquiline nose, windswept hair, eyes like unto limpid pools, and you can move with catlike grace with a minimum of effort on your part.

Mannerisms and role-playing tools also enhance the immersiveness of such games far beyond that of other genres. Your body language and tone of voice can be infinitely manipulated — and convincingly so — in ways that simply don’t exist in other games. Graphical games such as EverQuest which supplement the graphical depictions of characters with text-based mannerisms and body language cause a break in immersion, because your avatar isn’t really arching an eyebrow when you pose it, and that detracts from the perceived “reality” of the world you’re playing in. LARPs allow a great deal more leeway in this matter, but if you’re not physically capable yourself of doing what you want your character to do – ballroom dance like an expert, leap the retaining wall in a single bound to chase after the fleeing orc, or even bow convincingly – you’re out of luck in terms of reproducing those in-game without resorting to clumsy mechanics and scene-breaking die rolls. In online prose games, however, your limit is only your imagination and creativity with the parser in terms of what your character can be seen to do.

Secondly, there’s the variety of roleplayers you can run into in an online prose game. Tabletop RPGs are restricted in size as a practical matter to fewer than ten people; LARPs can be significantly larger in number, but the opportunity you have to interact with more than a few folk is limited by the duration of the LARP event and its scope. In contrast, online prose games provide you with a wide variety of roleplayers of varying ability from all over the world, with no time restrictions other than your own in terms of how many of them you’ll be able to interact with. Certainly, graphical games offer the same wide variety of players, but if your goal is good roleplaying, you’ll find a lot more of it in the online prose universe than in graphical games.

Lastly, there’s some built-in quality control present in online prose games that isn’t present in other games. The barrier to entry presented by the relative difficulty of adjusting to the online prose game as opposed to the point-and-click simplicity of graphical games or the get-a-group-together-and-go social nature of tabletop and LARP games guarantees a certain level of intelligence and quality in the types of people you will encounter in online prose games. This isn’t to say that there aren’t bad eggs – there are more than enough of those, and you’ll run into them from time to time. But the difficulty of adjusting to a text-based interface and the inherent-in-the-genre pressure to learn better and different ways to manipulate the English language in order to play more effectively represents a barrier to entry that only the dedicated can overcome. Working to lower this barrier on the technical side while enabling players to robustly express themselves and enjoy the primary benefits of an online prose game is one of the things that Skotos is working to do with its interface and design technology, but it’s still not easy.

Fish Don’t Fry In The Kitchen, Beans Don’t Burn On The Grill

The first, and perhaps the hardest, step in making the transition from tabletop RPGs to online prose games is being able to make the suspension of disbelief required to immerse oneself in an online text-based environment. For many people, it’s a difficult transition, as they are used to the tone of voice and body language implicit in other forms of roleplaying games to get themselves “in character”, and for still others, the problem lies primarily in getting used to a new way of interacting with the universe.

As discussed above, online prose games require the user to acclimate him or herself to a text-based command line interface as the primary user interface to the world. Those users with experience in DOS, Unix, or similar text-based interfaces don’t tend to have much problem with this, but with the growing prevalence of graphical operating systems such folk are more and more rare as time goes on. Another source of previous experience that makes transition easier for some folks is old InfoCom text-based games. Prospective players with experience in EverQuest who are familiar with the text commands used in that game will also have little trouble adjusting to an online prose game. But all of these are a small subset of the people who could potentially very much enjoy such a game, if they got past the interface problems.

Basic interface commands differ from game to game and platform to platform even in the online prose game. There are, however, quite a few basics that can come in handy when playing online games. The ubiquitous command “help” usually contains just what it implies, assistance using commands for the novice. “who” is a command which in most games will show you what other players are online. “look” will show you the description of the entity you’re looking at, while “look” by itself will most often show you the appearance of the location you are in. “say”, or a simple quotation mark followed by whatever it is you wish to say, will give you the basics of communication — speech which is heard by all of those in your current location, considered to be in-character in most cases by those around you. Most games have a variety of different means for out-of-character communication which can prove useful to those people who want to learn how to play; the Skotos interface for Marrach, for instance, allows you to type “+assist” to get help from a staffer or to type “ooc” to ask a question out-of-character of players in the same room as you.

Most online prose games, however, are filled with players who will be eager to help you get involved in the game you’re playing in. The community as a whole tends to eagerly welcome new players who are polite and honestly curious about how to play. It takes dedication to get involved in the online prose world, and unlike a lot of games where it’s easy to just jump in and play, it’s highly recommended that you read whatever documentation, help files, or manuals are available for the game you wish to play in. But as many veterans of the online prose genre will tell you, it’s well worth it.

Now We’re Up In The Big Leagues, Gettin’ Our Turn At Bat

Next week, I’ll be discussing some of the different classifications of players who can be found in online prose games. Hero Games’ Champions rulebook has an excellent section called “Types of Champions Players” which describes the different types of players one runs into in that game; what you’ll be reading about next week is something similar, and if you’re anything like me, you’ll find reflections of yourself in one or more of the categories I present. Until next time!