Thoughts about RP in cRPG. Sharing Russian Warband community experience.
Hey everyone. I was staying late tonight, when i suddendly stumbled on some old pals from ol' good times when cRPG was still a small rpg mode with html website and black armor ever ugly Gnjus running around and killing people ... but that's not the point. It has nothing to do with cRPG - what i am suggesting is to conduct an live voice RP event.
As a matter of fact the Russian Warband community back in 2010 had already succeeded in running several RP events with a small group of players (~15-20). As time was passing we developed a loyal player base and were able to enjoy ourselves for two months. Two months of scrutinizing, hard work and efforts to adjust somewhat limited Warband engine to our RP needs. Unfortunately the progression stopped and no additional attempts were made.
So how did we do that? First, we put up a theme recruiting players willing to roleplay and strictly abide by rules. Then we start distributing roles and giving out the plot. After that we made sure the TS server is up. After all preparations were done, we actually roleplayed for 2-3 hours. All narration and dialogues were actually live read - everyone sticked to their role (peasant, lord, for example - i was a blacksmith) and did what their characters would have done in real life situation. It was a huge fan. The feeling of contribution and taking part in such a nice and creative thing was quite rewarding.
Not to mention that the outcome of the game was literally unpredictable - we once had four sides fighting for their own cause: bandits who tried to kidnap a lady, guards and man at arms trying to deliver her to castle safely, a town that didn't want to get between them, but were forced to take part anyway, because the shortest road to the castle went through the city and finally couple of assassins, who had a task of killing the lady (which made them enemies of both guards and bandits, as they wanted her alive). And do you know what happened?
After some struggling guards got access to the town, but were immediately attacked by bandits. Couple of citizens were in league with brigands, so guards decided to sack the whole city. Assassins ended up killing all witnesses but couldn't accomplish their task. And in midst of all the fighting guard crossbowman accidently killed the lady. The end. City is burned, citizens are killed, bandits flee, guards fail, assassins are happy. And everything was live. Isn't that awesome? Now imagine that with cRPG players running wild, shouting, insulting each other, betraying, plotting, hiding, surviving, killing and fighting.
During the course of organizing we faced lot of problems. The main one was how to make it organized and disciplined. The next was concerning TS and speaking matters - we had to divide locations into rooms in TS (it was 2010 year TS) and admin had to manually switch players when they move somewhere else. Later we kinda made a progress implementing Mumble with it's positional audio, so one couldn't actually hear you whisper in the bushes while drinking his beer in tavern. The volume also changed as the character moved away from/to the source of sound.
So why should we do this? Because it's very fun. Trust it me it is. I am sure lot of players are quite tired of endless battle hacking with no real purpose besides accumulating looms and gold, so i suggest we do this. AFAIK TS now supports positional audio so it wouldn't a problem. cRPG has a huge diversity of armor and weapons, so that won't be a problem as well. What we need is support from admins and big clans, that can provide both server and disciplined players. As for my part, i am ready to share with cRPG community my quite unique experience in organizing live RP Warband events.
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