Very interesting analysis here as well. I am definitely going to bookmark your site and check back.

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Also, having to research optimal build combinations on forums is just… fail. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fun when it’s your first RPG. Once you’ve “done the maths” on a half dozen or so of these games, it gets pretty old.

This is partially because RPG stat/combat systems are just so arbitrary. Compare it to an FPS game where at least your aiming skills will carry over to the next game you play, or an RTS where your micro skills can be put to good use next time, etc… all having the mad “build skillz” does is make you good at *that* game. No others. This promotes you playing the same game in your mother’s basement for 5 years (cough WoW cough).

Just robs the motivation from me these days.

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Beyond that…well, hey, thanks for assuming that I’m a terrible player who doesn’t know what he’s doing. Ass.

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“Who’s to say that they won’t offer a coupon to allow a full Power House redo when they make such sweeping changes? We have no evidence as to how they’ll handle that either way, so making assumptions before the fact is rather pointless.”

I was actually referring specifically to the exact sweeping changes that happened the morning of Sept 1st. And while in the light of things they’ve made some changes to the respec system they haven’t given any coupon for a free respec to anyone but sorcery builds. Which, while appreciated, is not quite the same thing. So no, I was not making assumptions.

I’ve got a relatively high level toon that was rendered fairly impotent by the changes that will now have to spend a significant amount of currency to respec. I’m not a min/max player. I roleplay, I build characters with certain images and pick from power sets that fit that image. My sword wielding wraith spartan is not going to have robots that heal him or any such nonsense. But in that same vein, I’m not going to pick skills that are useless to me.

What I think it boils down to is that these aren’t RPG’s. They’re MMOs. Ever changing, ever evolving. As such, the system needs to allow for the players to do the same without having to re-start. The skills I picked in NWN aren’t going to change anytime soon, so I don’t need the respec functionality. But in a game with active development working to ‘balance’ the gameplay? Respecs are a must.

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And SPOOKILY it’s exactly what I said would happen. I’m a modern nostra-fucking-damus.

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And while the hardcore min-maxers are fewer in number they really help drive publicity and word of mouth online. You need both groups. And you need catch-up and respec mechanisms to allow people to move back and forth between those two groups.

Unless you’re talking about a truly dynamic endgame that adjusts in difficulty based on the efficiency of the player’s spec, but in that case you end up with the opposite problem, as customisation becomes entirely meaningless as it doesn’t actually make you any stronger.

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Most RP systems I’ve played (the exceptions are the ultra-detailed ones… you can see where this is going) play merry havoc with realism and simulation in favour of broad strokes. Hit points inevitably lead to people surviving things they couldn’t survive (like falling from terminal velocity) or dying instantly from things that couldn’t possibly be lethal (like being punched in the leg).

As a roleplayer you always have to choose; do the mechanics define the game world, or does the player’s imagination define the game world? In the former, you take hit points literally. In such a world (like D20 Modern) humans can, with sufficient combat experience, survive falls from terminal velocity. In the latter, you gloss over such things, typically at the GM’s discretion. A player claiming that the mechanics supported surviving a fall from terminal velocity would be told to get stuffed, and that their character was dead.

Neither is superior or deserves the undisputed title “roleplaying”. Both work as long as the players involved want to play it that way.

A typical example of this in action is D&D’s Paralyse spell. This spell has a mechanical intention – it makes someone inactive in combat – and a characterful explanation – it literally paralyses their whole body.

Over the years this has evolved in two different directions. The attitude taken by hardcore 2E players is that the characterful explanation rules, ad therefore if you cast paralyse on someone and throw then in a river, they drown.

The attitude taken by 4E is that the (balanced) mechanical effect rules. Paralyse is a “debuff”, not a “kill”, so it can’t be “exploited” to turn it into a death spell except as demarked by the rules (for example in 3E you could Coup De Grace the subject of a paralyse spell). How you choose to explain it is less important – 4E explicitly endorses this by encouraging the players to come up with alternate explanations for their powers. Whether the paralysis comes from magical force, or poison, or roots bursting from the ground is mechanically irrelevant and therefore up to the players to decide. Using a more literal system, this difference would be desperately important – where are you going to find roots on a glacier? What happens when you run out of poison or are fighting a golem?

Most systems ultimately find an unwieldly balance somewhere along this axis, and most groups include players who would prefer it in different ways, which is where all this legendary “You’re just a rollplayer” etc etc comes from.

Neither is better. Both are valid.

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Its a bit a YMMV thing I suppose.

Constantly teleporting away a few moments before death is a passable explanation for respawning, but its still going to seem absurd with lots of repetition isn’t it? It did in bioshock, (which may as well be Dostoevsky in comparison to narrative in MMOs) despite the fact that on paper it wasn’t complete nonsense in terms of what was possible in-universe.

Is, what is a fairly trivial narrative patch job over the ugly mess that is constant respawning really so convincing for you that it doesn’t jar your suspension of disbelief?

And don’t you think that someone could come up with an explanation for respeccing that was at least as serviceable? Nanobots rewriting the pathways in the brain, brainwashing, cloning, UBER-NLP, I don’t know it doesn’t seem that difficulty. I mean its a universe where people fly about with capes shooting energy beams from their foreheads and your telling me their isn’t enough space in the fluff to coherently explain repeccing? Really?

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Yes, wholeheartedly yes. I’m sorry if you have had so many bad experiences that you can’t conceive of play that freely mixes the powery-G & high-R but yes, it is possible. If it wasn’t I wouldn’t bother!

“It depends on the World. For something like Warcraft? It makes sense. For something like Champions? It doesn’t.”

I’m happy to take your word for it that the WOW’s lore explicitly permits infinte respecs, but that CO’s does not, I haven’t played WOW for many years, and I don’t play CO.

Personally I don’t tend to think of MMO’s as immersive-type games, and so have never paid much attention to the lore. For me the game-universe is a product of the mechanical features of the Game. The reason being that I have high standard when it comes to narrative and exposition and MMOs are so appalling crude on both counts that it doesn’t seem at all unfair to treat them like elaborate strategy games with lots of text boxes pasted on the front end.

“Is it unreasonable to believe that Nightcrawler might teleport Cyclops away if he’s hurt in battle”

Is this what happens in CO? PCs never “die”? Does the game intervene to provide an explanation for the PCs escape? One that isn’t pretty quickly rendered absurd by repetition?

As I say I haven’t played CO much beyond a few hours in beta, and I’d love to believe that the mechanical shortcuts and abstractions don’t excessively impinge on the narrative and render it supersubpar, but I’m pretty sceptical. Complaining that a convenient and accessible implementation of one mechanic messes with the RP when the very medium itself is so far from being conducive to it seems to me to be a bit mean. If I’m wrong about CO and it is in fact at least as good a platform for real RP as other MMOs are for power-gaming then, hooray!

“We have to accept that Champions Online is a different kind of beast, we need to accept its individuality, and see it for what it is instead of trying to make it into what we want it to be. No.”

I may be underestimating how innovative CO is, but I suspect that like other MMOs its probably a decent platform for G, and a weak platform for pnp quality R. That being the case I I’d imagine that enabling the playstyle its inherently inclined toward will probably produce a better play experience (for me anyway), compared to trying to get it to facilitate a type of play it probably can’t, at the expense of what it probably can.

I’m speculating wildly though, based on familiarity with MMOs in general. As I say CO might indeed be substantially different.

“It really sounds like your post is saying that you want Champions Online to be World of Warcraft with a cape and in spandex, and that you’re throwing a bit of a wobbly because it isn’t.”

Easy tiger. I don’t think I mentioned CO in my OP, and was responding to the discussion re. the mechanical aspect in general. I also laced my post with lots of imo, so the patronisation is, imo, unnecessary. I’m not at all invested in WoW, or CO, or CO-as-WoW.

I’d love to play a graphical multiplayer rpg that was capable of facilitating pnp quality RP, and I’d be very impressed if CO specifically was a substantial step forward in that regard, but so far I’m not convinced. Feel free to correct me though, as I say I’m not intimately familiar with CO.

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You’re clearly open to the idea of different people meaning different things by roleplayer. You’re clearly of the opinion that people who play the game mechanics are not your sort of roleplayer.

In the ~GNS system you’re not a roleplayer either. You’re a simulator. You’re portraying a role, but you’re not portraying it in the sense of an actor playing a part – you’re portraying it in the sense of a simulation system. Your arguments hinge on the notion of *mechanical* enforcement of roleplaying.

To many roleplayers, this idea is as anti-roleplaying as the idea of min/maxing is anti-roleplaying to you.

To me, roleplaying is about a shared storytelling experience. Glossing over things is an intrinsic part of that process. Just as Superman never uses the toilet on screen, my characters (in MMOs) never die on screen. Some players like to incorporate death and respawn mechanics into their roleplay, whereas to me they stretch the believability of the world long, long past breaking point and so I simply ignore it “canonically”. (You can see the ridiculous consequences of not doing this in any story setting which ostensibly includes resurrection magic but then decides it wants a tragic character death – Warcraft 3 springs to mind.)

A typical play session might go:

Fight boss
Die
Die
Die
Die
Die
Kill boss

In character, my character explains what he’s been up to as “Oh yes, we fought and it went this way and that and we looked like we were going to lose but then eventually we prevailed!” rather than “Oh yes, we fought and we five times and then we prevailed!”

You don’t have to incporate mechanics into your roleplay to be a roleplayer. You can step back from them. To me the mechanics themselves – the literal script of events – is nothing but a framework to draw inspiration from. The official truth is whatever I want it to be.

The relevance to respeccing is this; you are required to explain only as much as you want to. If someone isn’t a roleplayer, and their character literally leaps from powerset to powerset on a daily basis, then you as a roleplayer are not required to interact with that player in a roleplaying sense. As they’re probably called “xXxDarkKnightxXx” this is not a problem for you. You don’t need to explain how they’re doing it, and neither do they.

Someone who is a roleplayer is free to respec as much or as little as they like, and explain as much and as little of it as they like. Although some people enjoy it, is it absolutely not a requirement in roleplaying to explain every detail. All Superheroes have changed radically over the years, and sometimes this is expained and sometimes it isn’t. Characters undergo gradual refinement as you bring them closer towards an emergent vision – all of this change can be retconned, off-camera.

In a professional storytelling product, such aimless retconning would be completely unacceptable (I’m looking at you, Metzen). This is not a professional storytelling product. If I decide that actually my character’s ability to throw out chains is actually inappropriate or harmful to his premise, it doesn’t make me not a roleplayer to rub out that aspect and replace it with something else. I could explain that he’s undergone some transformation, or I could ask you to kindly pretend he’s always had XYZ power and just get on with things.

Remember, simulation is not the be-all and end-all of roleplaying, it is simply one way to do it.

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If you want an example for the irrationality of super powers and people changing from one t other then you just have to look at Heroes(the series).

They change powers more often than they have hot dinners, and they change their minds more often than that.

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Anyway, I support the idea of having a coupon which changes a few powers but not a complete respec, I mentioned supporting that early on but I never said why. I want to. It’s because I already had an idea in my head of how that could work.

Every now and then, characters in comic books have life-chanigng events which change them a bit but never completely. An example of this is the Beast. Their primary powers will stay the same, but they may have minor additions or changes to their character profile.

What I’m thinking is that at certain points in the game, it may be possible to acquire, via a micro-transaction or simply through questing as a rare-drop, a Life-changing Event.

A Life-changing Event would be a coupon to allow someone to get refunds on up to three powers whilst ignoring the order of the retcon list that the Power House enforces, any more than that and it would be more than a life-changing event. It would allow a person to get rid of useless powers whilst still keeping their character mostly the same.

I also think that there should be a maximum on how many Life-changing Events a character can have, not limited to the account but limited to the player. I’d keep this limit tight, perhaps even just to one or two, since this kind of thing doesn’t happen to heroes often. It is life-changing, after all.

The reason for this is say … if a character lost their arms at some point in their adventures and had them replaced with cybernetic ones, it might not change the nature of their character, but they might want to drop a few of their close quarters powers in favour of power armour ones to go with the shiny robotic limbs they picked up at the costume tailor.

So definitely not a complete respec, but the ability to earn a very partial one.

It would also be nice if a life-changing event allowed for an addendum to the origin story of a character, so you’d get a second section in that field where you could scrawl something about how such an event actually occurred.

So yes, I support the idea of Life-changing Event coupons!

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