Government Forms and the Gaming Guild
By Ravenhawk | December 11, 2007
These days it is finally being seen as important by game developers to allow players to easily form groups. This is something that has been needed since the early online games, and I’m quite glad to see finally becoming a norm. However, I have personally found an issue with the forms of governance allowed by these groups. Most games only have one form of governance: Complete Autocracy.
For many games, this isn’t a problem and it is often the most efficient in order to get a particular action done. However, when a group gets to any reasonable size, a guild leader is going to, at the very least, require delegation of authority. Most of world understands that authocratic governments don’t work. So why is it that game designers feel that it is the only form of government that gamers need?
Now, to be fair, not all games have this great flaw.
Puzzles Pirates has a couple other forms of government, however, the implemented them in such a manner that you’re being sickeningly inefficient to get anything done unless you’re autocratic or have all your members with voting rights on a very regular basis.
Dream of Mirror Online has an interesting system for it’s guilds. In order to create the group you need 5 people over level 20 and like.. 40k. The person who creates the guild is the guild chairman and the others are the elders. Elders have the ability to recruit, etc. So far it’s pretty run-of-the-mill.
However, DOMO also allows you to create smaller, sub-guilds within your main guild. Then, you can set managers for these sub-guilds, which gives them complete control over the sub-guild. This allows not only delegation of power, but the setting up of specialized sub-groups within your guild. For instance, my friend’s guild is called Radical Dreamers. Within this guild he has a subguilds for the following activities: One for teaching new players the ropes of the game, one which runs guild events, one for PVP players, One for merchanting for the guild, and one for resource farming.
While still technically autocratic, the sub-guild system allows for some delegation of power, splitting the hold from the hands of one, to the hands of a small group.
I’m still waiting for a game which finds an efficient way to implement a democratic form of government for the guilds. If I work out exactly how I would see it working, I’ll of course post it here.
Posed Question to the Readers: What do you see as the ideal form of governing a gaming group?
Tags: Game Design, MMORPGS, Autocracy, Clans, Democracy, DOMO, Dream of Mirror Online, Games, Government, Guilds, Politics, Puzzle Pirates, PVP
Topics: Game Design, MMORPGS | 7 Comments »
What Game Masters and Managers have in common
By Ravenhawk | August 28, 2007
So, I just read this post over at Coderific about What Game Masters and Managers have in common. It seemed an awesomely insightful and wonderful post… for someone who isn’t a normal Tabletop gamer. Obviously the post is aimed at those who don’t game much (or at all) for to those of us who have (and have a GM who doesn’t suck.) it’s pretty obvious.
If a Game Master doesn’t have good people management skills, they can quickly find their campaign falling apart as arguments break out between their characters. (Due to everything from PVP to who gets the last Dew) They also need to figure out how to take a group of people with diverse skills and get them to work together to complete a common goal.
As painfully obvious it all seemed to me, I guess if you haven’t had experience with a good GM, (or good management) it is quite the interesting point to think about. All things considered, the world would definitely be a better place if all our managers were required to run a campaign or two before actually being put in charge of people. And the higher in management you go, the more epic of a campaign you’re required to run.
The day gets slow, you can ask your supervisor to give you a retelling of his mighty campaign and the glorious deeds he set forth for his players. If nothing else, it would at least make the job more interesting, don’t you think?
Tags: Tabletop Games, Game Design, Games, Coderific, Game Masters, Management, PVP
Topics: Tabletop Games, Game Design, Games | No Comments »
Player vs Player Conflict in Pen and Paper Roleplaying Games
By Ravenhawk | July 8, 2007
Normally in Roleplaying games, you see parties come together that include such things as: A paladin, a necromancer, a rouge, a priest; All on the same quest with completely different alignments and personalities, many conflicting. But does this ever cause a problem? Not really. For the sake of their quest and party unity, the fact that these people should be at eachother’s throats never really comes into play.
In the campaign that I’m currently playing my necromancer (Who, like all good necromancers, is very deranged and evil) was partying with a bard and a monk. The monk objected to killing anything, ever and had a very short temper. Because of this, she was constantly at odds with my character who she found creepy. Eventually, this came down to outright attacking him, right when we were in the middle of combat against some highwaymen. She was slaughtered, and the bard, seeing the party member he actually got along with slaughtered, ran away. Our next session was spent rolling new characters for the other two players.
While making new characters is a pain, the conflicts between characters, I think, makes the game a lot more interesting. And the characters (those who live) become a lot more involved and developed if you actually take the effort to play them according to their personalities.
However, does this mean you should go around all the time in parties that will just be killing eachother? Well, if your group likes rolling characters, sure. I’m hoping this next group of characters will get a long a little better with my character, as, while I am amused with the notch I added to the top of my character sheet, I wouldn’t really want it to get a lot of friends.
Tags: Tabletop Games, Character Development, PVP, Role Playing Games, RPG
Topics: Tabletop Games | No Comments »
Trolls, Griefers, and PVP, oh my.
By Ravenhawk | November 15, 2006
Okay, so that doesn’t actually fit the wizard of oz tune. Sue me.
I was reading some stuff on mmorpg.com yesterday when I came upon this article. Now, I’ve been a reader of that site for quite some time. I find it a great place to find new games to play as they have some good quality standards that ensure that games that haven’t really gone anywhere don’t get on the list.
So the last thing I expected when I went to read was an article by one of their staff writers was troll-baiting of their own community. The article basically discusses how griefing, the repeated PKing, body camping, etc. of people who’re a much lower level than you, is the fault of the developers for allowing pvp. While I agree that game developers need to implement things to prevent slaying of nooblets more often. There is the ever-obvious “PVP Area” idea, but many “Hardcore PKers” Don’t like that. Namely cause many of them, like the article writer, don’t want to fight foes which are necassarily pvpers. The unwilling PvE targets are much easier to kill.
In many games, building a character who is effective in PVP requires very different stats than that of the PVE. Personally, I don’t understand why more developers don’t implement simple blocks to griefing. Like setting it so PVP can only be done within certain level-limits. If you can only kill people within 5 levels of you, the PVP is a lot more challenging.
Flyff had an interesting way of going about it with their bounty/karma system. Whenever you killed it’d effect your karma. I believe it went up if your foe was a higher level than you and down if they were lower. As your karma got lower, you’re name’s color changed. Other players had quite the incentive to slay players with low karma. Not only would it make their own karma go up for killing the “bad” person. But if you have negative karma, when you’re slain in PVP you drop items or money.
On top of this, the person who died would then go to a prison island, where they would have to do a quest to get off. Add to this the fact that anyone can set a bounty on a player’s head. Bounty hunting quickly became a popular sport. Yes, people such as Dan no doubt still existed. I know they did. But they would die, losing their items, money, and quite a bit of time getting out of the jail.
All in all, developers just need to create ways to deter griefing. At the same time, the grievers need to learn that just because the possibility is there does mean they should be an jerkwad.
And if they do, it’s their fault, not the game maker’s.
Until next time, Comrades.
Tags: MMORPGS, PVP
Topics: MMORPGS | No Comments »