MrZork has already addressed most of these points admirably, but here are a couple of additional observations for the record.
avado wrote...
I didnt mean to be disrespectful! I know there are many folks who feel as you do, and that is their choice. There are many players who play crpg's and have zero understanding of rp with another person, and thats cool too...
To start, I accept that you didn't
intend to be disrepsectful. And while there may be crpgers who don't understand multi-person roleplay (for example in NWN MP, PWs, MMORPGs, and table-top gaming), I don't happen to be one of them. I was a D&D player and DM for many years before I took up crpgs, so I know, understand, and appreciate the differences. But that was my point: that they all emphasize different aspects of role-playing. You cannot simply declare that one kind is in effect "true" role-playing, and the others aren't -- not without being disrespectful to those other gamers who like or even prefer those other forms.
The problem I have is, when you are GIVEN the options, in my mind, you are no longer playing a role...
Why not? Granted that you are role-playing a role from among a set of options that the author has made provisions for in the narrative, but how does that make it not role-playing? If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck -- or in this case, it's role-playing. This is why I said that you are trying to define anything that doesn't match your preferred style out of existence as "not true RP," which is something that other players are going to take offense at.
It's also something of an illusion that you can ever get away from having to role-play from within a set of constrained options, even if you're playing a sandbox or table-top game. It's in the nature of role-playing that it involves disciplining one's actions to fit a role, as opposed to acting on whim or at random. And even in a PW or a tabletop game, the admins or the DM are going to require you to adhere to the scenario they're trying to present. In an SP game the author takes care to provide a set of options, very carefully thought out beforehand, that provide an interesting and immersive role-play experience. Other forms can be more flexible, but by that fact they also tend to make it more difficult to prepare all of the cooperating details ahead of time to create a strong sense of immersion. Each form has it's own strengths, but they're all forms of role-playing.
...but, in fact, following the mod builders predetermined path. I believe in freedom, not destiny, so I find it impossible to accept that following a path is RP.
Again, with all due respect you're trying to define RP to suit your personal views. Anyone who's played my mods knows that I don't believe in fate or destiny either, but that's not the point. It's inherent in storytelling through any medium that it has to have a
specific and limited nature. It has to involve a certain kind of progression of events that adds up to and means something, as opposed to simply being a virtual world "sandbox" in which you can go out and do anything you want at whim or at random. The more you try to tell an effective story, the more you have to constrain the play experience to be more of the former than the latter. There is nothing about the fact that you have to choose between provided options that are designed to enhance a narrative that causes this to cease to be role-playing. If anything, it's quite the reverse.
As an aside: several years ago I had the opportunity to participate in a very interesting round-table discussion on this topic ("Storytelling Across NWN Mediums,"
Part 1,
Part 2, and
Part 3) on the
Neverwinter Nights Podcast. We had a NWN SP modder (me), an MP modder, and a PW builder, each of us talking about the way we told stories and created RP in our particular medium. I recommend that discussion because we had to touch on many of the issues that are relevant to the topic of how role-play has to fit into and be adapted for different kinds of storytelling.
That said, to get back to the thread topic:
Besides, how many people HONESTLY rp with no one there to catch them?
Um, I do.
This topic is about cheating in a solo game. If you cant really cheat in a solo game, then anything else is also allowed. SInce there is no "judge", ANY action is acceptable so how do you hold the idea of RP? Your conscience? really! And that is the inherant flaw in solo rpg's. IT is way to easy to cheat on your character, or make up a story in your head why it was OK for your paladin too loot the church you just masacred. No one will ever know, right? RP lost.
As MrZork has already pointed out, there is a "judge" in SP gaming -- namely, the player himself. I'm not sure if you realize this, but your remarks come across as more of a personal confession than an indictment of the genre. Are you saying that
you can't or won't
refrain from cheating when there is no enforcement authority on hand watching you to force you to "be good?" OK, but I don't have that difficulty, and neither do many other players. We know that the "rules" of gaming and of RP have reasons, and that there are consequences when you disregard them and "cheat." One of those is that you break immersion and lose the distinctive kind of experience that role-playing provides. In the end, the only person you end up cheating is yourself -- out of the kind of compelling game experience that you could otherwise have had.
There is another "judge" who hasn't been mentioned, though: the game author, acting through the design of the module. He's the one who builds the scenario and rules to follow a certain storytelling logic, which can for example be enforced with scripting. In a well-designed game you can never know whether cheating will break the game because everything works together to create an immersive experience.
Here's an example from near the start of my first module, when you're attacked by a high level demon. You're supposed to start the modules with a new, legal first-level character, and run for your life because you
can't win that fight. But if you start the module with a powerful character instead (which BTW as the author I
do consider to be cheating), you can kill the demon when you're attacked. If you do, though, then the upcoming scenes in which the demon plays a role will break and won't make sense.
Here's another scene that touches on the OP's original question. At a certain point, you have to leave one of two companions behind. Can you strip them naked and sell their stuff for cash? Yes, if you want, up to a point. As the author I don't prevent that and don't consider it to be cheating, as long as you're doing it in character. (When I playtest, I always leave that companion equipped, but typically not with the party's best stuff.) The one left behind has a mission of his or her own to pursue, leaving from your "base of operations," so they'll just re-equip themselves before going; and one of them has unique items that you are prevented from taking from them regardless. In the end, it's really the author's job to address things like what equipment companions ought to have, what you can and can't take from them, and so on. If he doesn't, then anything that's not inconsistent with the scenario seems reasonable to me.
These illustrate some of the reasons why I say that, in the end, cheating in a crpg is "at your own risk," and that the only person you end up cheating is yourself.
Modifié par AndarianTD, 10 décembre 2010 - 03:40 .
