Fantasy Heartbreaker, by Russell Bailey

I’m going to raise a bunch of issues here. Fair warning, I won’t be providing the solutions by the end of the article… or all at once. But there are a number of intertwined problems in basing next-generation MMOs on current-generation MMOs, and I need to dump those all on the table before I get around to figuring out where we need to go next.

First, the angry bit

It hasn’t been a good week for quests. First, Justin Achilli proposed we get rid of NPCs and questing. Then, Guild Wars 2 announced that they’re going to get rid of quests entirely.

As a professional content designer, whose livelihood at times depends on MMOs having quests, I have to say… I agree.

If you allow for the fact that a lot of people want to play World of Warcraft, and that I don’t want to take World of Warcraft away from them, then I’m 100% on board with getting rid of quest-giving NPCs.

Quests are a useful game mechanic that most games use to add a little bit of context to standard play activities. When you log in to kill things and take their stuff, the quest suggests which things you should kill, and offers you a little bit of extra stuff for taking the suggestion.

Since, for some reason, it’s not okay for our genocidal medieval combat squads to get their orders directly from God, we have quest-givers. These handily-marked¹ NPCs provide a front end for the quest system, and attempt to put a friendly face on it.

Way back when, with EverQuest (and to a lesser extent, Ultima Online), quests were there mainly to help you find your way at the start of the game. Then you made friends and started doing your grinding with them, exploring new regions and killing new things and taking new stuff.

I have no real objection to quest-givers as the video game equivalents of the guy at a Ren Fest who tells you that you should really try the Drench-a-Wench. Where they fall down is when they become the custodians of Story.

Story

Now, all of a sudden, it isn’t just a guy telling you he wishes you’d roust the underserved minorities off his farm and offering you a pair of boots in exchange. It’s about Heroism and Lore and the story the developers want to tell you.

And the story the developers want to tell you is about a bunch of NPCs and their Epic Conflict (which, even though the NPCs never do anything about it, is Epic, trust us). Usually, this involves WAR! and 15,000 years of backstory. And probably some shit about gods. Especially dark gods. MMO devs really fucking love Zoroastrianism.

You know what this story isn’t about? You. It’s not about your little guy, the one you spent so much time finding a name that wasn’t already taken for. If you’re playing the nicer sort of MMO, he might get called a hero from time to time, but nobody’s going to throw a party for him or do anything to make his life easier.

No, instead they’re going to cram more Story at you and tell you it’s vitally important to the fate of These War-Sundered Lands that he march up a hill and ride Pirates of the Carribean.

I mean, can you imagine if actual theme parks were like that? If you walked into Disney and every costumed character was jumping up and down waving a glowstick telling you how vitally important it was that you preserve DisneyWorld’s Forty Years of Magic by going on their particular ride right now?

Sure, the rides are fun. They’re great. I like the really old ones about the future, especially. But at Disney, they give you a little brochure and let you wander around the park yourself.

Funny thing is, though, they don’t abandon you. Walk around Epcot. The design of the space tells you where you should and shouldn’t go, suggests possible activities, and so on. And you absorb a lot of narrative as you navigate the space. Discrete plaques and displays tell you little factoids about the history of the park and the various countries it alleges to represent.

The Story, in other words, is embedded in the navigational experience. Seems to me we had a word for that the other day… oh, yeah, environmental narrative.

If there’s a war on (and it’s an MMO, so of course there’s a war on), you should be able to see it. And if you can see it, it shouldn’t be necessary to present fake reasons to get involved.

What if they gave a war, and nobody came?

Mm, yes, that’s a problem. Because for all the talk of Epic War and A World on the Edge of Total Darkness that MMO developers are so very, very precious about, most of the actual warfare comes down to watered-down PvP systems which largely don’t affect the rest of the game. I can at least say in EVE Online, players send their characters to war for reasons that matter to them, and that have a defining effect on the game’s landscape.

Which is great except that very few people actually like Epic War and grand strategy and military logistics, and most of them already play EVE Online. We’re not going to redefine the genre by cloning EVE anymore than anybody’s doing it by cloning WoW.

And that’s when the war is a real conflict, fought over definable resources, with long-term effects on gameplay. In most games, it’s just a couple of catapults and some instanced capture the flag.

Where next?

The thing about an environmental narrative designed for a couple thousand people is that it has very little to say about your individual choices. Even when the landscape’s a dynamic place of exploding spaceships and scarce resources, the little guy tends to get lost. And the rule of MMOs is that, statistically speaking, you will be the little guy. Or rather, your little guy will be the little guy. Or something.

But that’s okay. Because when I next visit this topic, we’re going to talk about an important component of  MMO narrative… and surprise, surprise, it’s not about quests at all. It’s about something… smaller.

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Premise: a character class provides players with an interface to the game world and a place for their characters within it. (See yesterday’s post on classes.)

There are a couple of major schema for constructing character classes. Most games use more than one.

Class by Combat Role

You separate characters by how they fight. This is the simplest distinction between Dungeons & Dragons‘ fighting men and magic users, and it goes back to Chainmail. The fighter/wizard divide (or lack thereof) is arguably the definitive problem in character class design.

Basically, in Chainmail, there were guys who fought other guys with swords and polearms. Then Gygax added wizards, who functioned as artillery. So, going into Dave Arneson’s original game, you had these two basic types of units.

In 1974 D&D, they were represented by two overlapping but distinct systems: combat and magic.

In tabletop games, D&D 4e is probably the most rigorous example of this approach. Not only is every class and monster defined by a combat role, but those roles are transparently explained to the players right there in the rulebook.

Virtually every Everquest-descended MMO is built like this. (The extent to which Everquest itself follows this model is a longer discussion.) The most transparent about it is probably City of Heroes, which marries Everquest combat roles to character concepts while staying fairly abstract about both.

This is a somewhat circular methodology, though. Since D&D, it’s become imperative to have certain classes if you’re going to do a class-based fantasy game. And if you’re going to have combat, there’s a strong push to give each class a unique place in combat.

(That last bit’s especially true of MMOs, where problem solving comes down to money or combat, no matter what style the game adopts otherwise. )

Classes by Concept

You have a fictional persona in mind, so you make a class for it. By volume, this is probably the biggest driver in class design.

D&D’s original classes (fighting man, magic user, cleric) were driven by combat role and need. The first supplementary class,* the thief, appears to be driven more by concept.

The thief appears to be loosely modeled on characters like Fafhrd, the Mouser, and maybe Bilbo Baggins. (Gygax didn’t like Tolkien all that much, but that didn’t stop him from using Middle Earth stuff where he liked it or thought it would be commercial.)

He has the skills one would guess a thief might need, as well as one which seems rather particularly borrowed from the Mouser: the ability to use magic scrolls.** In the process, he introduces a third system to D&D. Mechanics supporting fiction, we are go.

Classes to Fill Holes

Your system’s missing something, so you make a class to fix it. D&D’s cleric is the classic example of a class created to fill a hole in a game or campaign. Dave Arneson had one player playing a vampire. As Mike Mornard recounts:

Well, after a time, nobody could touch Sir Fang. Yes, that was his name.

To fix the threatened end of the game they came up with a character that was, at first, a ‘vampire hunter’. Peter Cushing in the same films.

As the rough specs were drawn up, comments about the need for healing and for curing disease came up.

This is pretty much always a supplement for another design scheme, and many games that start strictly adhering to another approach evolve in this direction over time.

Classes as a Template Layer

Your system operates on a point-buy or other system, but classes ease new users into creating a character.

D&D 3.5 almost works this way. One of my favorite video games of all time, Hero’s Quest/Quest for Glory I, works this way. Ultima Online‘s current character generation process works this way.

Vampire: The Masquerade‘s clans were intended to operate this way, but quickly became vital fictional concepts in and of themselves. By the end of the Revised Masquerade line, fictional concept drove class design completely. How that played into the approach taken to Vampire: The Requiem, and how the vision changed over the course of that line, is the subject for another article.

Classes on a Spectrum

You have certain “pure” mechanical concepts (melee, magic, stealth) with classes that represent them (fighter, mage, thief) and then a series of classes which exist between those.

This is the fighter-cleric-mage spectrum of the original D&D. The Mass Effect series is also built this way, and quite elegantly. Tunnels & Trolls primarily follows this method, though it’s also evolved quite a bit over the years.

Classes by Convergence

Your game has no formal classes, but character optimization favors a small number of builds. You probably lie awake at night worrying about tank mages. Later designs building on the same system end up centering around these builds more than the original open, underlying system (usually based on skills).

Ultima Online is the poster child for this. UO wasn’t designed for classes, but they perpetually emerged from each revision of the skill system.

GURPS is often played this way, though I’d be a little afraid to say so on a message board.

Exalted looks like it’s a class-by-concept scheme, with all of the D&D standards scaled up, but many people play it as a convergence scheme, and that’s the current approach to its mechanical design.

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* Class was a slippery concept in 1975, something I’ll treat in the future. But by the definitions later games would extrapolate from D&D, Greyhawk D&D has four classes.

** This seems to me to be directly from “The Lords of Quarmall“.