Only 4000 hours huh? lol Well okay I guess that is a lot, about a year and a half of full time (8 hour) days playing. It makes me wonder how many hours I have spent playing and DMing Dungeons and Dragons. I think what attracts me most about the game world you described is that the gods etc. are controlled by other players - that is pretty cool. Player vs. Player can be a really tricky thing - with the right group, it is a ton of fun, but it can also totally ruin friendships - like, real life friendships :)
It was interesting to read your exchange with @lextenebris here, that guy knows a LOT about the RPG industry and I picked up a few things to research farther. Ultimately I personally have long felt that you don't necessarily need to address the competition / PvP aspect in most aspects of game design (instead coming toa group consensus at the gaming table as to what is appropriate), as long as the character creation remains light weight enough that death is not a game killer. For that, and this is definitely out of style these days, I actually truly prefer random character creation. This of course flies in the face of the modern desire to "customize" your character - but if you have never played a random character creation game you may not realize how fun it is to have your character's strengths and weaknesses randomly determined, and how this leads you to a deeper understanding of who your character is. It supports role playing in a way that you might not guess if you have never played a random char gen game.
It is actually my experience that the more customization a game allows, the less people role play their characters. Typically people focus on these elaborate mechanical builds and customizations to achieve this character they have in their heads, but all of this does not actually lead to immersive role playing. On the other hand, if the mechanics of the game do not allow you "construct" your desired character, you have to roleplay the character to be the one you envisioned.
From my own experience playing many different old school variants of D&D (my favorite in this regard being Mutant Future which involves rolling for random mutations a la X-Men), the limitations and restrictions imposed by random char gen force people outside of their typical narrow role play box and I have seen players totally get into characters - players that NEVER really role played in games that featured char gen and leveling up as a mini-game outside of sessions (in essence).
I personally stopped playing video and computer games altogether nearly a decade ago, intentionally, because I decided I would rather focus my gaming time on in person groups. I have never regretted that decision.
Cheers - Carl
We have a bit of a conflict between two different kinds of "playing a character," here.
On the one hand, "detailed character creation" allows a player to invest the character with the things that they find interesting. In a real sense, and in the best sense, it allows the player to put on the sheet the things that they want other players (and the GM if there is one) to know and pay attention to when they are talking to that player about the character. They act as flags and signals as to what people want to do and the stories they want to engage with. That's a hugely important part of getting people to buy in to the game experience, if that's your interest. After having come up with those signals, they expect those signals to be meaningful and to change their experience. This is where a number of game systems fall down, in fact.
The other form of "playing a character" is what I refer to as "Oracular play." That is, having an external source with a relatively limited number of possible outcomes but of significant combinatorial complexity provide you with prompts to respond to. Taken from that direction, fully randomly generated characters are just a series of prompts which specifically speak to the kind of character that you are directed to engage with, just as they would provide prompts about what a scene may contain, or what a task resolution may involve. There are games which are built almost entirely around Oracular play (like Lady Blackbird), but because the means of interaction is entirely one directional, that mode of play is quite unrewarding for a goodly portion of the gameplaying public. The fact that the way that it's typically mechanized is deliberately exclusive of player choice and interest (aside from the selection of random selection sources, perhaps) makes most of the implementations of much less satisfying for people who prefer to play and the former style.
For myself, I don't want a game to force me to do anything. I don't want to be forced out of my "typical narrow role-play box," in part because I don't have one – but as much a part of it, because I don't think that a mere game designer has the right to lecture me on what "you should be doing to have fun". It comes across as an arrogation, a deliberate belittling of my ability to make decisions for myself. The implications are insulting, even if the game designer never thought for a moment that they would want to insult me.
Yes, choosing to write haiku can be a very liberating, very rewarding experience. Being forced to only write haiku for your own good… Not nearly as much, in my experience.
I love video games. I adore them. I have friends who are well placed at Ubisoft, some at other videogame companies, and we stay in touch fairly regularly. I spent a lot of time playing (and often writing about, elsewhere) video games.
They provide a different experience. I refuse to let myself get nailed down to any particular experience, because I am a creature that likes varied inputs. I like cool stuff, and I cannot lie.
And also, being a long-time adult, it's way order to get a regular gaming group together around jobs, families, and life in general, especially if it involves a fairly significant time sink at any given point. Spread your friend groups across multiple time zones and possibly continents – and video games with their specific contexts start looking pretty good.
If I want to introduce people to serious role-playing, those who have never played before, I sit down with a copy of Kingdom, them, and a couple of other people if I can – and I introduced them to a system in which nothing is random, everything is the result of player choice, they can choose every what and wherefore at any point along the way. Not only that, anything they say that they want to happen within the purview of their role – that's what happens. No ifs, ands, or buts.
It's amazing what kind of results you can get out of people who have never really embraced a role when you give them nothing else to do but that. When you make their decisions directly impactful. When you let them do what they imagine they should be able to do.
Random character generation? That strikes me as not trusting the player. It always makes me feel like I can't be trusted with the reins of narrative power – and I aggressively struggle against that.
(And if I really want to blow the minds of new people, I break out A Penny for My Thoughts and watch everyone who is ever heard of the traditional form of RPG play lose their minds as it does everything in the exact opposite way. I love it. It's such a great convention game.)
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I can see both points of view on this. I probably prefer creating my own characters as opposed to running with randomly generated ones. I like the idea of thinking about the setting, and trying to flesh out certain philosophies, themes, and/or game mechanics. I love that kind of thing.
I can enjoy randomly generated characters too. As GM of a D&D game that is turning two in February, I often have to ad lib or use quickly generated characters when the players decide to take the game a different direction. Some of those quirky NPCs turn out to be the favorites of the party. Being forced into a role you didn't come up with entirely yourself can give you a new perspective, especially when others interact with the role in ways you didn't anticipate.
I have considered doing a mad lib kind of character creation for one-off tabletop games, for a quick and light way to jump into a game.
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To me it is one of those things that I never would have assumed until I actually tried it - I definitely thought I was in the "more options during char gen the better" camp, and kind of scoffed at the old school random char gen methods. Then I actually tried some out in the past decade as I became something of a student of the history of D&D and I quickly realized that in practice, there are some really amazing benefits to random char gen. Not for everyone of course, but coupled with a rules-lite system that allows most of the "character customization" to come just from role playing and improvising within the very minimal guidelines of the rules, random char gen has led to the best gaming experiences of my life. Certainly I play all sorts of styles and am not slavishly adhering to this method at all times and for all purposes, but it was just kind of eye opening to realize that sometimes constricting choices actually spurs creativity, and not the opposite.
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