The Fireman’s Guide to Different Online Games

The Fireman’s Guide to Different Online Games
OR
Just How Many Different Kinds of Idiots ARE Out There on the Internet?

Ahhh, online gaming. Most of us started out in a pencil-and-paper game setting. We were he geeks and not-so-much geeks sitting around the dining room table with a copy of the Players Handbook and the Dungeon Master’s Guide back when AD&D was the biggest game in town and White Wolf was not yet a wet stain in someone’s shorts and companies like TSR and West End Games and FASA owned the industry. We played games like Mechwarrior and its horrendous system and Twilight 2000 and RIFTS with their ungodly long and involved character creation process and maybe even a few “cool” games like Cyberpunk (or it’s slightly more Tolkien-meets-TRON cousin Shadowrun).

If you are reading this and you don’t know what half of what I just said means, then all I can say is you need to make a trip to the nearest gaming store that sells used books and skip right on past the shiny new Saga Edition Star Wars rules and go find a copy of the original West End version of the game. Then, prepare to ask yourself “What were THOSE crack-babies THINKING?!?”

So, here’s a run down:

Dungeons and Dragons. The game that started it all. The original system was written by St. Gygax… er… I mean Gary Gygax as far back as the 1970’s and was around in one iteration or another up until Wizards of the coast bought the rights from TSR and updated it to the D20 system, or D&D 3rd edition… and the open source license. This brought about a billion minor companies into the mix as they could all produce and sell products that were compatible with D&D. Some companies like Green Ronin or Privateer Press put out some damn fine game material, some others flat sucked the root. The problem in the end is that most people playing D&D online are either 1. Playing in an MMO and not really role playing, or 2. They are sequestered quietly away and playing a more or less private game. There are some large D20 games out there but when someone wants in you have to ask if they want to play the same kind of game you do or incorporate all of the WEIRD shit that’s been put out over the years.

Rifts. I have yet to see a Rifts game online. I have stumbled across hints of them, but they have never been active, I encourage anyone reading this who is aware of one to drop a comment bomb on this blog and let us know, or even better, let us know what it was like. Rifts has great art and an interesting back story, but the system is only just slightly less complicated than the mathematics involved in Quantum physics or Chinese arithmetic. Rifts is set about a thousand years in the future and it’s interesting if you can find a game that focuses on the story and the setting and themes instead of the stats and numbers.

Star Wars. Sometimes you find this in D20 as it was published for quite a few years using a system very close to that for 3rd edition and 3.5 edition D&D. Sometimes you find the old West End Games system, which worked but was… cumbersome. Sometimes you find a system-less site that claims to be role playing but is really more like a group of Star Wars geeks sitting around writing fan fiction and masturbating vicariously. It’s odd but I have seen very few places that produce as much drivel as a bad Star Wars fan site and also very few places that produce such clever and well made fan material. Star Wars is cool, but man, it collects a VERY wide range of fans. If you don’t know what Star Wars is about I want you to go rent Episode iV, A New Hope, and don’t come up for air until you’ve seen it.

White-Wolf. Not a single game but a whole SLEW of games in two different catagories and where I spend a lot of my time, it includes:

OLD World of Darkness. The game that made role playing cool again was Vampire: The Masquerade. How violent, how goth, how horrific and dark… it was like distilled cool. The thing about these games was that they had tie in, one game sometimes kissed the next, but they all tied into each other and the real world around us in metaphysical and social and historical sense. The system wasn’t as refined as it would become with the new World of Darkness, but god the setting and metaplot and history included god and the devil, angels and demons, vampires and werewolves and mages and fae and alllll manner of things.

NEW World of Darkness. Okay, this is where the happy boat stops and I get off because frankly my biggest gripe about the old World of Darkness was the system, in the new game they tossed out everything that was cool and worked and fixed the system but broke every other fucking thing. I won’t go into details (in THIS blog post anyway…) but I will say this: the new changeling game is the best of the new stuff and the only one I REALLY like.

The World of Darkness games both boil down to this: they are both about playing anti-heroes. The eldritch magi, the brutal werewolf, the monstrous vampire, the nightmare fairy. Fun, but atypical, and set in the world just outside your window (only with mages and werewolves and vampires, oh my!).

There are, of course, other games out there on the internet. Now, for those of you who are about to utter the words “Final Fantasy” or “Second Life” don’t even think about it. ROLE PLAYING means you assume the role, not you watch a scripted cinematic. Making a yes or no or an either / or decision by hitting A or B on a pad or clicking with a mouse on options is NOT role playing. Role playing was once argued to me to be Magic the Gathering… yes, that stupid fucking card game that I swear is packaged with heroine, was presented to me as role playing. I laughed so hard I like to piss myself.

ROLE PLAYING means you PLAY the role, you make ALL the choices, create the dialog, the characters temperament, choose the paths to take, and so on. No video game is role playing, what you have is video games where you ASSUME a role as presented and then follow a linear path. Don’t believe me? Show me in a final fantasy game where you can deviate from the script? And I don’t mean make a choice, I mean, take up knitting in the game or perhaps rape the annoying female lead. For the record, I don’t recommend rape EVER, but it illustrates the point that in the game you can’t deviate from what’s programmed. That’s not role playing. Also for the record, if someone tried to rape in a game I was running they would probably leave my house via the front door at roughly the speed of my boot in their ass.

So, that brings us to methodology. There’s basically three ways most people who play online play: in chat, by email, and by forum. Playing by email means you sign onto a mailing list. You receive email at whatever address you signed up with containing information, you reply. I personally don’t think this is worth a damn as a viable role playing experience, but you can write your fan-fiction and so on using this avenue with a framework. It also can be easier to see what’s going on before you leap in. If the game looks like it’s being run by a retarded monkey, then you can bow out before you even get started.

Playing by forum means that there is a message board somewhere. You log in and everything happens on message threads that you follow and post to. Not the most interactive, but once more, you can usually get a feel for how things are run before you leap in. Only real difference between this and email groups is that with an email based game you don’t have to visit the site.

The final means is by chat. This is by far the most interactive and has the longest learning curve. The upside is that in a chat you can interact real-time, the downside is that until you actually catch a story teller and get involved, you won’t know if the game is run well or if it’s the mind child of a brainless nitwit, or worst of all, a nightmare given semi-literate form by someone who’s got the coping and interpersonal skills of a rapid Chihuahua. These can run from amateur in layout to complex and professional, but ultimately they are run by volunteers and as such the value and entertainment factor of an online game can vary widely and how well laid out the sites themselves are have NOTHING to do with how well the games run. Some of the lousiest role playing I’ve had has been on some of the best administered and layed out sites, and some of the most fun has been on barely-there bare bones sites with only the most minimal of functionality.

Now, a word on “system-less” role play. Let me warn you about these place, you will sooner or later run across them, that allow people to make shit up as they go. Places where there are forum, email, chat, or combination’s and some outpatient from a Thorazine clinic had the bright idea that role play without any rules or guidelines based on the literary works of some whacked out British author is a GOOD idea. You’ll run across “furry” sites where people are playing otherwise normal characters except they are DOGS or CATS of RABBITS or wookies or oompa-fucking-loompahs or platypus’ or whatever. It’s one thing to meander into a Star Wars game that’s marginally skirting Lucas’s ideas on the futuristic worlds of space… it’s another thing to run across a site where people are writing bad gay porn involving Howard the Duck and Jar Jar Binks and think it’s a GOOD outlet for their creative “juices”. (Ewww.)

So be warned… there are good sites, and there are bad sites, and then there are the sites where there are no rules to the game they are playing. Stay off the later.

One last note… the pursists and those who have gamed for a LONG time will note that I have missed a HELL of a lot of game systems. Well, that’s because when I get on I find only a few of them still out there. Scion and Aberrant and a few other games show up here and there, but those represent the most widely played that I have run across. There’s so many out there that if I was to try and review or give you a brief on every game system that is out there and could possibly be played online… well, if I was going to write THAT much I’d be punching out novels and trying to at least get PAID for it.

Anyway, that’s it for now… more on the topic of online venues and games and specific sites and so on and so forth later.

-The Fireman.