There's an inherent conflict in design aims between depth of a role in terms of immersion and direct competition. For a role, you want a game environment in which failure is acceptable in situations where there is conflict between players, because if failure leads to not getting to play anymore – which is the situation in the majority of game designs – then someone is not having fun. Someone is out. If they can't immediately come back in, that means they're out for the evening (or at least the duration of the session), and that's not a recipe for a good time.
That's why the great majority of games which center on conflict between people at the table have very set, static roles or very light repercussions for failure, the latter of which has a side effect of making "competition" have obviously lower stakes for people who are actively seeking direct competition.
I have played on my share of MUDs (and MUCKs, and MUXes, and –) in my day, and outside of the old LP-style games, there's a good reason that most of them focused on role-playing more than direct conflict.
Competition is hard to design around with continuity.
Which is not to say that it is impossible. I can think of it at least two tabletop role-playing games which deliberately and actively integrate aspects of head-to-head competition in the pursuit of building a better game. Both Universalis and Capes hinge on inter-player competition, but they trade-off individual role identification with players for that advantage.
For the most part, for this sort of game experience you really want to look at the modern board game, which often integrates aspects of role-playing with an expectation of head-to-head competition. If anything, cooperative play is the new innovation in boardgames.
I hear you, but from my experience with CF I believe to have truly immersive roles, there must be costly failure. Your character's mouth has to be able to write checks that you (and your character's abilities) can't cash. That was the magic of CF. It allowed for uncooperative roleplaying. Many characters developed a nemesis or two. Infamous characters struck fear in you when they logged in.
I do agree that there needs to be a balance on the loss and failure to match player expectations. Investing in characters over a long period creates a strong bond, and has to be managed carefully.
However, games like Pandemic and Dark Souls give me the impression that people don't mind failing if the failure is expected and is enjoyable. Also, deep roleplay helps the bitterness of defeat not taste quite so sour.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Except for that last part – how long until you get to play some more?
Traditional game design, particularly in the tabletop space but also in the videogame space, has hinged on the idea that death and significant loss of playtime were the best motivators for engagement.
It turns out that's false. It fosters only one kind of engagement, fear of loss of opportunity for play, and fear of loss of investment. But there are other types of role engagement that have a more positive cycle, even if they have negative effects. For example, in Blowback the primary threat to your character is not that you might die – that's actually pretty unlikely unless you really want to. The threat is that you will accumulate negative story influences that you find interesting but which hinder the character's intent.
In games like Pandemic, there is very little threat of long-term loss – it's simple to start up a brand-new game in mere moments and the investiture for restart is low. (It's telling that Pandemic Legacy, which actively involves mechanics for tearing up cards and defacing the board in a long-term, ongoing way, spawned house rules which immediately subverted that intent mere moments after being released.) In Dark Souls, the big threat for death is not that you can no longer play, it's that you will have to replay the portion since the last save point, and that gameplay can lead to a brutal cycle of replay. While it does have a very strong emphasis on challenge, it has absolutely no focus on role. Being interested in your particular role would be actively detrimental to the design, since you are not really intended to maintain it in any real sense.
Investiture in the continuation of a character is often the primary driver of people being risk adverse in gameplay. In a situation where death is just a hindrance, losing the last 30 minutes to an hour of playtime but no more, people are far more willing to engage with the role in many cases. As that sacrifice increases, it's not often that they enjoy the potential of loss; the allure seems to be more in the advertisement of mastery.
The evolution of not just tabletop gaming but video games and their presentation of the repercussions of failure have evolved quite a lot, and overall I have to say they've improved since the days where high defeat threat environments with the potential to lose all of your work were the norm.
Now, it's all about setting up the expectation. Hard-core Mode is an option, not the default setting. That has resulted in video games and tabletop games becoming something more than those things that geeks play in their basement or telnet into; they've become a multibillion-dollar business.
We have to look at what is popular and how it's actually played to draw inferences about what people actually prefer.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
An interesting thing about CF is that no character had permanence. Each death took 1/3 of a point of your Constitution until you died permanently. Even if you avoided dying, all characters would eventually die of old age.
However, the vast majority of characters didn't die from old age or multiple combat defeats. They were deleted.
I'm not advocating for a hardcore mode. Even extremely competitive games aren't primarily a hardcore mode. I am advocating for more competition, more freedom, and more consequences than I typically see in roleplaying games.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
A character architecture in which no character has any particular expectation of long-term viability already sets up for less character identification, working directly against what you said you wanted originally.
One might ask the entirely legitimate question of whether those majority of characters deleted happened soon after creation, representing someone basically abandoning the game because they didn't want to deal with the set up, or characters who had been long present in the game and whose players wanted to delete them to move onto a new one (assuming one player per identity, which is in no way more likely than the other alternative), or just in a fit of pique.
You are going to have to define the context of what you imagine more competition would look like, because "more competition" isn't really well defined. "More freedom," likewise – preferably with some examples of things that you would like to do which you are unable to do in some contexts. And lastly, "more consequences", particularly in tabletop role-playing, are going to be hard to get – because the last 20 years of RPG design outside of D&D and immediate derivatives have been all about "more consequences," to the point where Consequences is a legitimate term of art that refers to a specific game mechanic in some systems.
I can say that, by and large, the markets for games have spoken, and direct competition doesn't seem to be what people want for the most part. Those that do have moved into game contexts which support that primarily, largely first-person shooters, where competition is very contextualized. Long-term consequences go very poorly with increased conflict density which as any element of randomness, because the feeling of getting screwed out of your efforts because of nothing that you did is a great way to turn off someone from engaging further with a game. Even the most casual player can determine when randomness overtakes any decision-making that they have a part of in the play of a game.
There has been some experimentation in that field. Escape From Tarkov is definitely a game which has long-term consequences and direct competition, in the fact that you really only earn progression by bringing of equipment out of these first-person shooter environments, competing with other people. Likewise, in a sense, Fortnite, because there you can come away with more resources and unlock blueprints that you can use in the next game. (Playerunknown's Battlegrounds goes almost the exact opposite direction, being very deliberately disconnected in many ways from one round to another, which at least reassures that some people that if they get screwed this round there's a chance they won't get screwed next round.)
So we really need a better set of definitions of what you're actually looking for, because it very well may already exist and you just don't know about it.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I agree. But I'm usually ready to move on after 200-400 hours of playing one character anyway. Ready to try another build and put on another skin.
You can see the list here: http://forums.carrionfields.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topics&forum=28
All of these are for level 30+ out of 51, so none directly after creation. There isn't a limit of 1 char per player, so most are likely due to more interest in another character. (AUTO) means the character was abandoned for an extended period of time. You can click on any name and see how many hours the character had been played.
By more competition, I mean depth of strategy and depth of tactics. Other players provide the best competition, in my opinion.
The top four most popular online games right now are all direct competition, and all have more active users than World of Warcraft: Dota 2, Overwatch, Hearthstone, and League of Legends.
If we're concerned about the overall marketability of this idea, the competition isn't the turn-off. It's the roleplaying. We're probably more likely to pull people into roleplaying by enticing them with competition than the other way around.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit