A roleplayer's case for multiple characters

First of all I can somewhat understand RG's desire that your 'avatar' be an incarnation of the player. I get it. I understand then why he wants to limit the player to just one character to lock in that idea. However, this is one of seemingly very few ideas that I can't quite agree with. At least not from a perspective of roleplay.

I agree with the case made regarding players who play say.. a criminal one moment and then come back as a saint the next to escape consequences.. but what about the rest of us? How many role-players does anyone know that plays one character exclusively across all games for the entirety of their gaming experience?

RG wants our one character to be US.. the player. I don't want to play me! I know myself already. At least as much as can be reasonably expected. Now I'm a nice guy I'm sure someone would find me relatively interesting.. but I hold very few surprised for myself on a daily basis.. so to me that's just not very interesting.

Now take the character I plan to play. Bowen has been many things in the world in which he was originally created. A ranger. A doctor. A bookworm. He's had a great many skills but what he has never been is a blacksmith or a miner or a mage. If I want to explore those skill trees and am forced to do so with Bowen, then he's not Bowen anymore. He's something else I never wanted him to be.

I have developed many characters with many different personalities and skill sets. Their skills are part of their definition and one of the things that make them interesting to me. Now as someone who loves crafting, I want to explore those skills but I want to do so with a character I intended to be a crafter. It's one of their defining characteristics that make them who they are. They might not be great at fighting or hunting.. that's also a part of who they are. They're not great at everything and I don't want them to be.

A lot of the fun also in playing different characters is that it's as much self-exploration as anything else. If I'm only myself than I will always play and react the way *I* think I would react but I am often surprised by my own characters in how THEY react that's different from what I would do. This is a character of MY creation and I'm having them do THIS??? Wow ok.. I guess they're really like that. Yet, that character came from me! That's part of the fun.

Let me see how many characters I can remember that I've created? Dugall, Isharah, Jaghar, Thadius, Daianara, Aliesha, Duncan, Bowen, Grovel Bloodclaw, Balin, Mir, Mace, Sir Reginald, Elisha, Vasal and probably others who's names escape me at the moment. That's over 15+ characters I have to choose from. All of whom are unique in their personalities and skills, backgrounds and motivations. Some are crafters, one's a healer, a barbarian, a rogue, rangers.. nobles, street rats.. One is even an undead paladin.

Yet it does not matter who I choose, the moment I'm forced to change their skillset just to enjoy parts of the game I want to enjoy, they cease being that unique person who's character I enjoy exploring. Being told "you can have only one" is a little suffocating.

I'm not asking for 15+ character slots. Just the freedom to play more than one of my characters in a 'pure' way. I want them to have the skills appropriate to them without having to go beyond that because I want to craft also. 2 or 3 would be idea.

I would challenge the devs to find other ways to regulate muling or whatever other behavior they want to curb that a single character limit might solve.

 

I agree. I need, at least, 5 characters. And, in the end, the players are not criminals. Just the individual characters are criminals. Anyway if someone preffer a single character he can just play one.

 

@Bowen: You should take a closer look at the way the SotA team has described skills so far. To paraphrase RG; players will be able to explore any skills they want without a skill cap forcing them to sacrifice aspects of the character that they want to retain. The only penalty for training any skill is the opportunity cost, in terms of time, of not training another skill instead.

For example, you spend one week practicing with a sword, now your character has a week worth of sword experience under his belt. If he then practices for a week with a staff he then has a week worth of staff skill under his belt without having to lose any other skills previously gained. The only penalty for switching to the staff skill is the sword skill you could have gained by practicing with the sword instead.

In my mind this not only makes the single avatar completely viable but it also makes it immensely more interesting!

You can have your avatar spend months in the woods as a ranger perfecting his bow and rapier technique but after a grand adventure into the depths of a volcanic dungeon where he slew a great dragon and found a magical artifact he retreated to his study where he began to delve into the realm of magic. Upon emerging back into the world of adventure he hasn't forgotten how to use his bow and rapier but now he finds the magical arts more intriguing and effective.

And by the way, none of the combat related skill gains inhibit or take away from potential skill gains in crafting skills. He could become an alchemist at the same time as increasing his magical prowess and months later after flying too close to the sun, driven by the power he gained through his arcane studies, retire to a small village to become a blacksmith/carpenter ... always keeping the magical artifacts of his past life tucked safely away lest they thrust him once again into a power lusting adventure.

This is why SotA is nothing short of revolutionary. One avatar all the way.

 

@Jean-J You couldn't have missed my point more! I wasn't making the case for being able to explore the skills with one character. Quite the opposite It was being forced to do so with one character. As soon as I HAVE to use my character to take skills they were never meant to have from a role-play standpoint, that character is no longer who I wanted them to be.

I want to be able to have multiple characters so that I DO NOT NEED to explore all the skills I want with a single character. I want to preserve my character's purity by NOT letting them have all the skills.

 

As I said in another thread I compleatly agree, one of my characters is Asguard a male, normally wizard and my other character is a FEMALE ranger\cleric\druid (depending on the game) called Alara. How exactly can I role play a male AND female character with only 1 character

 

Sometimes, it's not about you...

 

@Bowen: I see your point. Personally I prefer the single avatar. I guess we'll see how it goes! (we'll discuss more on the dev forum i presume

 

@Owain.. if you disagree then please explain. Unconstructive criticisms are just that. Unconstructive. A major point of the forums is for people to provide feedback and suggest what THEY want to see. It's up to the dev's to decide what they want to do. If we want something different then we should make our case for their consideration.

If you don't like it. Explain why please. That's why the forums are here. Make a case for or against but make a case.

A lot of roleplayers want to do just that. Roleplay. They have many characters and many stories they want to play out. A one character limit is a one story limit and for some that's a deciding factor. So why not make the case for those people too?

 

@Jean-J indeed we shall! As soon as I can get up to that level. For my part, I'm more than happy to play even if I'm stuck with one. I've played with a lot of RPers in recent years and nearly all of them have multiple characters that are very unique and I think it's a subject worth debate. So we'll see how it goes.

 

I am also a role-player. And apt to play multiple characters. For me, it is not really about the ?gamier? elements, and more about truly experiencing the character I create, and living in his/her shoes/boots. That said, I understand the rationale behind limiting players to one character. I can live with one character, and simply being able to delete my old character when I grow tired of it and want to try something new. As a RPer, I do sympathize with the OP, though.

My notion, which would not be terribly popular, would be requiring a separate character for each mode of play; the offline version. as well as each of the online and friends only versions, thus separating these modes from one another entirely.

I haven?t read much regarding the skills system, though I do hope it is more along the lines of UO, with a skill cap and skill atrophy. I would even venture to propose a rather stringent skill cap, such that characters are more specialized, forced to choose a few skills to master, and a few lesser skills to round out the character. Being able to master all skills would be disastrous, and is anything but revolutionary.

As far as playing my actual self in an RPG, I find the notion mildly intriguing, but overall had rather create a new identity base don the game lore. I suppose if the lore could state that the world is peopled with avatars of people from earth, though I do not find that terribly appealing.

 

@Archaaz: I don't like the system you propose because it limits the ability to transition between tiers... i.e. there are some days I will not want to deal with others in the game so I will switch to friends online mode, but most of the time I will want to deal with everyone and switch to open online. Without switching characters.

RE: Lore, what I have seen makes me think it is something along the lines of "The world is populated by people from the world, but something has happened and all PCs are people that have come from other places, specifically earth."

So you will never be playing a native of the planet as a PC. There are people from the planet that exist, just not you

 

@Elvish Dragon [Lord] -=UDIC=-
I understand entirely and expect many/most feel the same way. As a proponent of a more MMO experience, similar to UO, I am somewhat averse to being able to gain skills in one mode and bring those skills to another without having to face the consequences of a more open online experience (though I do realize that everyone will nevertheless be on the same footing and have the same possibilities). Just personal preference, really. I would not mind having a different character for each facet in which I wish to participate, but accept that I am quite in the minority here.

As for the second point, I actually considered that when I was typing out my response, but it is not quite to my taste. Merely a matter of aesthetics I think. Interestingly, in my PnP days, I entertained a campaign in which the PCs were based on versions of themselves transported to a fantasy world (similar to The Chronicles of Narnia or the old DnD cartoon). For some reason, I just does not sit well in a more expansive setting. Again, aesthetics.

 

@Archaaz I guess, for me it depends on the story. If this were an "open" MMO I would agree with you, but it isn't. They have been clear from the beginning that the purpose of this is to tell an openly deterministic story of sorts.

It is a sandbox in that the world is an open book that you can decide to go wherever you want... but the back-story is specific and plot driven. So its not like "roll up a character for a campaign in X world" its more like "ok here is the backstory and your quest, your characters are..... now make a character that fits that criteria." I have played in both games in a tabletop setting and they both have a lot of value. And there are a /lot/ of the former in the MMO world... it is interesting to see what they do with the latter in an MMO setting.

 

I understand and partly agree with the "lore" arguement. There's just one problem with it. That is that a lot of RPers are simply going to want to ignore it in favor of their own story. As RG understands all too well, you can guide people to play within a certain set of rules but you can't force them to play the way you expect them to and there isn't going to be any mechanic in place that won't allow you to say "I'm from Planet X!" or whatever absurd backstory people choose to come up with.

To this I argue that the game's features are intended to support a wide variety of role-play. More so than pretty much any other game out there. We've got combat and magic ok. We've been talking also farming, hunting, animal taming, painting, carpentry, politics, writing books, putting on plays and the list goes on and on to give players the most freedom they can possibly have in order that they might play the way they want to.

So if the game supports this (hopefully) unprecidented level of roleplay, does it make sense to shackle the player's creativity by limiting them to one personality?

 

@Bowen Bloodgood, in response to my terse (laconic even) remark, "Sometimes, it?s not about you?". Allow me to amplify.

LB has stated that in order to maximize player interaction and to minimize adverse side effects (you log out of your 'good' character and long in your 'evil' character and victimize the people you have gained a confidence with), SotA players will be limited to one character.

The people in threads like this all seem to be saying, "Well, _I_ want this, and _I_ want that, because that is what _I_ want." You, for example, talk about YOUR fun, and YOUR exploration of different characters.

Perhaps what the question you should be asking is "Does my having multiple characters help the story driven flavor of SotA, or does it hinder it?" I have yet to see someone make an effective argument that having multiple characters helps advance the story in SotA, or benefits the multiplayer game.

Hence, my comment, "Sometimes, it?s not about you?".

 

First of all, I too typically play more than a single character in RPG's and I almost exclusively play RPG's.

In typical RPG's, you have to select who your character is (female hunter for example) before you ever start into the game adventure. Then, you pretty much have to either play as that character or break the mold of your (up front) chosen character (change to a female paladin for example). For this reason, if I feel I want to play a male warlock or a female paladin instead of the female hunter, I need the ability of have multiple characters.

On the other hand, as I understand RG's intentions with SotA, we will not define our characters when we first begin the game. Instead, we will play the game as we see fit and that in turn will define our characters, and, we can change direction at any time. For this reason, I'm more than willing to give the single player model a chance.

I realize this single player model still causes issues under the condition Sir Asguard mentioned about having both a male and female avatar. Maybe a solution there would be to allow us, the players, to optionally have 2 avatars each, one a male and one a female.

 

Does having both a make and female character significantly advance the story better than otherwise? If not, then there is insufficient reason for Richard Garriott to permit it in the face of the reasons he has advanced to limit players to a single character.

 

@ElvishDragon,

I agree with you, and I like single-player, story driven games.

I just don't understand the point of some of the multiplayer aspects of the game that aren't story driven (crafting and selling goods on the player market, even hiring vendors) with the game limited to a single character.

With due respect, contrary to what Owain is suggesting, vendoring your goods isn't about you, about filling a niche in a world and contributing to the growth of the online community. You create a shop for other players to enjoy, and you also create a character associated with that shop also to add to the online community that would have a distinct personality. Its be basically like contributing an NPC to the world, except you're playing the "NPC." You're actually building the world along with the devs.

Now, like I said, I have no problem with a single-player driven game. I'm just really confused about the point of vendoring in that game model.

 

redfish if you are talking about online single player then your shop will appear in everyone else's world with your vendor as the store front selling what you make, this is the same no matter what online version you are playing.

If your talking about the offline single player then I finally got an answer to that very question. NPCs will run the economy in offline, they will buy your stuff, make other stuff for you to buy and provide an economy.

RG said that NPCs will be involved in the economy in online version but that they hadn't worked that out exactly yet

 

@SirAsguard,

Yea, I know. I just don't see a point of opening a shop. Earn some gold on my loot? I'll just find NPC vendors to sell my loot to. The same end for me, except I don't have to pay vendor fees.

The only incentive I'd have for setting up a vendor (provided I can't sell all my items), is to add to the online world & community. That's all about role-playing and setting up characters.

Same thing with guilds. You want to form a guild with similar role-players -- like a guild of thieves, who come together and form a thieves den somewhere in a mountain cave. But if your character's skills aren't specialized to thievery... whats the point? You're not thieves, you're multi-faceted characters that don't need to band together, because you can fight and cast magic, and craft items, too.

But I guess we'll see in the end..