Thanks for the response. One quick thing I wanted to go ahead and say during my lunch break is this: I thought based on previous discussions that what I meant by "roleplay" would be clear. I mean creating and play acting a unique character. Do you know of any game that has this and has any depth to player vs player combat interactions? Like a wargame, but where you create and play act a unique character. Like D&D, but more like a wargame in that there is player vs player conflict. That type of thing.
RE: A confession and insight on gaming
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A confession and insight on gaming
In game design from the last decade or so, in the videogame space, that's moved over into MMOs in general, which have a variety of levels of customization and characterization, but nothing like free-form character creation – which I think is a bit of a shame, because I'm more interested in the story than I am in yet another set of combat mechanics.
In the context of video games specifically, you don't find a lot of games which focus on detailed customization alongside complicated competitive conflict with long-term repercussions and death because that just means that the player ends up having to go through character creation over and over and over – and it makes the fact that all of the assets required for that level of character customization are expensive to make or have made.
If you can get killed reasonably easily, investing all of your development money into a significant, unique, individual character is largely wasted time. So with the standard response is to start with a limited number of premade characters with uniqueness largely brought to the table by customizable skinning, which lets you channelize the player base into assets that you can add to later and don't need to invest in upfront.
But that doesn't particularly lead to character centric role-play per se.
If you want wargames which focus down on individually specified characters, which can be constructed, you need to look at squad level or lower games with individually defined characters. The 5150 series that I have been solo playing and writing up is running in 5150: Hammer & Anvil, which obviously has the ability to focus down on individual tank crew members and their specific stats, along with the ability to treat a character as a Star, which comes with certain mechanical advantages – among which are the ability to choose your out, on some of the tables rather than having to roll for a random result.
5150: New Beginnings/Urban Renewal is essentially the house THW system used in all of their wargames translated down into a deliberately role-play-centric game. I've often described it as "what if RPGs had continued to be evolved from further wargaming development instead of branching off with very little crossover early on?" It allows for things like solo play, which RPGs are not exactly known for.
Though you might be more interested in Warrior Heroes: Legends, which is the THW fantasy RPG/wargame, which has a bunch of hooks into doing the same thing but in a fantasy setting. Including procedurally generated dungeon crawls, if that speaks to you at all (though the Armies and Adventures edition does a better job of that, in my opinion).
And if you want to get outside of the THW umbrella, Eternal Contenders is definitely a game which provides a context for all of the player characters to be in direct conflict, devotes a lot of the mechanics to resolving those conflicts, but you definitely play and act out a unique character. It's also GM-less, which makes it considerably different than a lot of the other options.
There are a fair number of unique choices, but they aren't coming from the traditional directions you would expect game designed to be coming from.
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This is a really great insight. I have done some brainstorming myself the past few months, trying to imagine character play acting and strategy in a table top game. I was even giving myself an additional challenge of trying to do it as a single session game. Everything I could think of felt like either the play acting was a light add-on to the combat grid mechanics, or the combat was a light add-on to the deeper play acting. (I am very intrigued by Gloom though.)
The question I just asked myself, after reading what you posted above, is this: How would one 'win' a game like I am trying to envision? What is the objective? Then I thought of CF, and realize there is no way to 'win' CF.
If I recall correctly, it is like SimCity where Will Wright said he had hard time explaining to publishers that there was no way to win. There was no end to the game. CF, like SimCity, is a simulation. That's what I'm looking for. I'm looking for a fantasy simulation. I want to combine custom character development and play acting in a dangerous, war-torn fantasy world with D&D, wargaming, FPS, RTS, or Civilization-style direct competition.
I'll still try to think of ways to do this on the tabletop, but it may be better suited for computer/consoles. Do you know of any fantasy simulations that have these?
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I have returned from outer darkness, i.e. the consumption of Life, and am ready to finish up my ideas.
It occurred to me while I was writing the original response that there are two games which market themselves a very similarly and which almost exactly fit your requested parameters. "Almost" because neither of them occur in a high fantasy world, but rather a relatively brutal low fantasy/true medieval simulation.
Wurm Online is probably the hard-core pioneer of this particular genre, the "Medieval Simulator MMO." In it you create a character, customize his appearance within some fairly clear parameters, pick some very low starting skills, and then get dumped into a world which may have an established architecture of individuals who have already carved up the land to split into rival duchies and be a constant low-level war, or you may be dumped onto a very new island, as one of the first pioneers, set to go out, explore the wilderness, and do your best to survive while everyone else does the same.
Life is Feudal MMO does much the same – in fact, they really don't have that much differentiating them. Both of them have a similarly awkward UI, skills which are all about micro advancement (that is to say, you advance your Wood Chopping skill on every chop of a log), both hinge on the fact that everything in the world is player built and player driven, and the big selling point is very much as you describe CF – it's PvP all the time and your best bet is to cooperate with others in order to seek mutual protection.
I'm going to be honest, these games are not for me. Because of the micro advancement architecture and the focus on dealing with other people, it's kind of like Hell. But for you – it fulfills every checkbox on the list. If you are looking for a deep simulation rather than a more traditionally structured game with inherent narrative, these two games are for you.
If you're looking for something a little more in the space between, there is Medieval Engineers, by the same people that put together Space Engineers. Rather than a big shared MMO universe, ME is all about running an individual server with a much smaller population. It also focuses more on the actual engineering of things in order to solve problems rather than micro advancement on skill lists.
I like ME a lot, but it speaks to my inherent need to mechanically engineer things.
If we were looking for games which very much fit into the old LP/MUD style of play? The first two on this list would be dead center and exact. There is no story except what you make, there is no construction except what other people make, there is a constant threat from and by other people, and that's the whole game. Any stories which are told occur entirely post hoc.
That seems to be more what you're looking for.
Also in that space, though not so directly, would be ARK: Survival Evolved, which involves starting in a very primitive technological level (including taming dinosaurs), but working your way up to advanced technology and dealing with other people along the way.
The more I think about it, the more I come to believe that you are at the core demographic, the absolute target, for the recent explosion in "survival simulator" multiplayer games. At least the ones which occur over a longer period of time, involve a lot more dealing with other people than you would find in something like PUBG, and which focus on the simulation/day-to-day aspect of the actual game.
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Coincidentally, I did play Wurm Online about 10 years ago with some online friends. We played quite a bit until someone came into our camp and killed everyone with a board. Turns out there was some kind of bug where the amount of damage you could do was related to your skill with that item. Weapon skills accumulated very slowly, but this guy was either a lumberjack or carpenter which translated into him being a one man army when wielding his board. We all quit that week.
These sound like interesting games, but they make no mention of one key component I'm after: play acting the character.
I checked ME forums, and the Roleplaying forum is a ghost town. I suppose I could create my own server and go around trying to recruit people to play on it.
Life is Feudal seems to be going the route of most poorly designed open pvp worlds--making the world safer and PvP more rare.
As I'm sure you know, PvP has to be baked into the design for it to work. I think CF just got extremely lucky in how MUDs are naturally a bit of a puzzle to get from point A to point B, and there is no way to move and keep your eye on another person at the same time. That makes chasing people down in real time challenging, and gives a slight advantage to a person fleeing combat as they only have to know where they are going. That way you can have combat, it doesn't always end in death, but extremely talented chasers can still secure kills.
There are other pieces to the pie, but I don't know of any graphical open world game that even gets this much right. If "getting better at escaping danger" isn't a skill a player can develop as they play (as it is with all decent RTS and FPS games), then the game is doomed to fail. For most of the open world sandbox style MMOs I've played, "getting better at escaping danger" usually meant not leaving the safe zones. There were no other options. It's very sad, and poorly designed.
The Darksun setting of D&D is my kind of game. It has been ever since it first came out. If I could somehow create a multiplayer version of that, with players actually play acting the different factions, I'd be in heaven.
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