The problem for a designer is that there are a lot of direct conflict decisions to make moment to moment, and role-playing choices aren't nearly as dense – they require a lot more set up, a lot more development, and a lot more time for payoff. If you put them both in your game, side-by-side, then your perceptual profile of gameplay turns into a lot of conflict decisions, all of which – per your request – carry a lot of weight, and only a few role-playing decisions which may carry a lot of weight individually, but happen too rarely for that to feel like a part of the game that the people who are looking for role-playing can really get into.
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?
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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