So I\'ve been playing PlaneShift for a couple of weeks now. It\'s my first real foray into on-line role playing, and I must say I found it more difficult than I expected. Not the game itself, but the role-playing aspect.
I haven\'t done any RPG in quite a few years. Back when I did, it was me and a bunch of friends, sitting around a table throwing funny-shaped dice around. I find on-line RPG to be different, and to me more difficult, in a several ways:
* In \"traditional\" RPG, you know who you are playing with. They are your friends, or friends of friends. You know how old they are, what gender, their physical characteristics, etc. In a MMORPG, all you have to go by is the name and appearance of the character. I have no idea whether the people I\'m interacting with are male, female, young, old, whatever. I find that to be a bit disconcerting, because I can\'t judge my companions by anything other than what I see on my computer screen.
* Along the same lines, the interaction between players is limited. In RLRPG (Real-life RPG), you have all sorts of non-verbal communication that adds to the experience. On-line, you can only simulate such things using chat commands; you have to do a lot more work to fill in the scene in your head.
* The limitations of the interface tends to detract from the role-playing experience, at least for newcomers. I\'m not referring to any specific limitations in the PlaneScape interface in particular, but rather the idea of needing to enter commands into a GUI (or text-only, for that matter) interface in general. You are fighting monsters, having a conversation, and attempting to heal your wounds, all at the same time. These actions all require use of different parts of the GUI, so they cannot be performed simultaneously. This makes for a somewhat disjointed experience.
For these reasons, and out of a general sense of newbie-ness, I have not done much inreaction with other players up to now. I have preferred to keep to myself, mainly exploring and mapping, and interacting with NPCs, trying to get my hands around that interface. I\'ve fought quite a few rats, and manages to get a level or two and be able to acquire some rudimentary equipment. But I\'ve been reluctant to get together with other players, basically for fear of making a fool of myself.
Fast forward to last evening; I was in the sewers trying to knock off a few more rats to earn some money for training. There were ac couple of people already there battling gobblers, so I was waiting to see if they would mind me taking on the small stuff, when I was asked if I wanted to join their group. I almost declined, for the reasons stated above. Then I thought, \"what the hell, this is a ROLE PLAYING game, I might as well start playing a role\".
So I joined, we fought, we chatted, we role played. We spent the better part of two hours fighting gobblers and tefusangs. I found out that I wasn\'t the greenest player in the group. I was able to offer help to some, and reeive it from others.
Hard-core role-playing fanatics might not appreciate the way we played: we didn\'t always stay in character (and didn\'t explicitly state when we were OOC), we sometimes used modern language and made references to pop culture. But sometimes we were 100% in character as well. I think a lot of that depended on who was talking at the moment; some of us were more into the role-playing and others not so much so.
But all-in-all, it was a great experience. It\'s quite a bit different from table-top role playing, but by no means is it inferior. The fact that I can play any time of the day or night, and always find someone else to interact with, is a definite attraction. I found PlaneShift to be a *good* solo adventuring game, and with the expected improvement/expansion in upcoming releases, it should become a *great* solo game. But once I took the plunge into role-playing, the game took on a whole new dimension. I\'m now hopelessly hooked!
