Ideas for an RP friendly game

[Zyrenica]

As requested by Grummz, below is a list of ideas from games with good RP communities. Put together by talking to a few players across multiple RP communities. (Though most have the old City of Heroes community in common.)

Please feel free to add to this list or discuss below.

Minimum requirements:

- Good chat system including tabs, timestamps, easily resizable. With support for emoting and preferably the support for colors to distinguish specific players, channels or both easily.
- Detailed and clear Lore for players to build their own stories out of and flesh out.

Nice to haves:

- Walk/Run toggle
- Large variety of text and animated emotes. (Hopefully easily accessible from a list or menu of some sort)
- Ability to use custom emotes and possibly save commonly used ones.
- Visual distinction between characters
- If above, ability to swap between looks at need. (Possible extra to above)
- Good social hub easily accessible but a little bit out of main player pathways. (Should be easy in this game)(The Chroma Pub? )
- Ability to have spaces in character names.
- Possibly separate name from account so that name does not fall under the 'someone already has your name' problem.

 

[Nalessa]

Usuable furniture like chairs, benches, beds, etc etc etc. is always really nice to have.

Customization for looks that isn't tied to having to pay for it.
I love being able to change hairstyles for just gold in WoW for example or for free in the new you in Firefall, I hope things like that won't be tied to real money transactions.

 

[Nutmoon]

A feature I liked from Star Trek Online was space for biographies when you looked at a player's profile in-game. It was a good place to insert information about your character and describe what wasn't being shown by the game engine (e.g. character is extremely short).

Ranged chat is a nice feature, so your say/emote is visible to other players within a "speaking distance". Helps cut down on cross-chatter too, when multiple groups are RPing in the same hub but you want separate conversations. The 'yell' might have a larger range than normal 'say'.

A nice-to-have would be to have game support for running RP events or designing triggers that can help manage a larger scale event with multiple supporters, and also help RPers find the ongoing events. Right now it seems a lot of this stuff has to be cobbled together with outside-of-game tools, and integration between game engines and external game tools is bad. One simple example would be an open world RP expedition event where all participants (who can join at any time during the event) need to receive a navigation waypoint so they can all converge on it. Everyone has to have to find the location coordinates (if they are even available in-game), and they'd have to be paying attention in a sea of IC chat text to see it. A lot of time gets wasted by the event runner just helping people know where to go.

It would be nice to have a world where there were also cosmetic just-for-fun events that were lore-significant that were (1) periodic and/or (2) triggerable by players. Maybe there's a certain kind of rock that glows if you shoot it; that could be worked into an RP with the players making up some reason for it. Or at a certain time of day, there's a bridge that appears normally covered up with fog that leads to another place with some interesting artifact that's related to lore. These are forms of "world emotes", you could say...ways to get the world to express its personality in a way that RPers can then riff off-of in their own RP.

Stances that affect the default walk cycle would be great. A stance that looked more "cautious" versus one that looked more "casual".

 

[Nutmoon]

Adding to the ability to "switch looks", it's nice to be able to have different costumes for the different roles your char has, and also for if you're "on duty" versus "off duty". Includes hair style!!! And haaaats!

You know what would be great? Some way of accessing RP information from external sites to help coordinate events and gatherings from WITHIN THE GAME in some seamless way, without resorting to third-party tools. Or maybe a way to sandbox a browser source. Cheating is an issue with this kind of access, but maybe the sandboxed browser source works only when you're in a "non-playing" mode (like, you can't get XP or perform any combat). During RP who cares about XP anyway?

 

[Degiance]

What i usually noticed and heard people say in WoW. Especially in the last 4 years or so is that dealing with people who intentionally go out of their way to harrass or pick on roleplayers became rather unbearable so alot of the RP community went to private servers and never came back.
In WOTLK when they introduced that phasing thing i kept thinking it would be nice if RP groups could use that phasing as a method to RP in public without being distrubed and with out them attracting unwanted attention. Granted it would diminish the casual roleplay aspect quite alot but i haven't really thought of a good way to remedy that and im well aware that it might also give this false sense of entitlement and elitism to some which very effectivly turns people away from roleplay altogether.

I personally liked to follow people roleplaying since most of the time it was better than watching tv or Netflix so i tried to stay at a distance and not disturb people but occasionally i got dragged in as a witness so i started playing on a druid staying in cat form using the excuse:"But im a mute cat."

 

[Nalessa]

Oh another thing I forgot, player housing, even if it's just a small room.

For example, in ESO you can get an inn room for free, just do a small quest and you get a small room, which is just completely empty.
However you can collect furnishing recipes ranging from beds, chairs, candles, desks, painting, etc etc etc ..., so you can customize this room to your own liking. (You can buy actual houses or mansions/castles for a lot of gold later on aswell)

This is a great and easy way to have player housing, just have an empty toom and give players access to furniture and decoration that's already in the game through recipes so that they can create their own personal space.
Very easily done, no elaborate systems need to be added for this since you're just using assets that are already in the game anyway, and players who like building up their own housing have a great way to have their own little living space!

And you can always also add trophies to put on display for having certain achievements (in ESO you can for example buy shop signs to hang outside your house if you have certain crafting achievements)

 

[Degiance]

player housing, even if it's just a small room.

I immidietly started thinking like some sort of small bunk room that you could get randomly assigned to with someone else (At complete random) or bunk room with a friend. Although if you had a group you could have like a small barracks like thing maybe. Then later on you could assign to get your own place as your rank up or something (considering it's a military concept? *shrugs*), while doing so the place could get bigger. Like combo the guild thing with the barracks as a guild house. (Im just spitballing.. Nothing concrete ^^)

Also if i can expand on the whole keeping RP'ers safe thing my friend mentioned:"Something like they had on BDO. They have one realm, and various sub-realms for that same realm. The whole realm has the same server chat, but each sub-realm is specific", if that says anything to anybody?

 

[Zyrenica]

Though player housing would be good for this, I was more thinking of ideas that they could sensibly implement in the first round of the game. That is usually a major feature. At least in the first round of the game I don't think that would be feasible.
On the other hand, rather than sit-able furniture or anything like that how about just an emote that puts your character in a sit position so you can sit on anything and anywhere?

 

[Pandagnome]

I like it if there was a way to send a notice/Alert for rp groups or even individuals perhaps other rp groups would be interested to merge their rp with another group and develop the story further. It could be used to bring newer players into the rp also.
If they are not into the rp this function can be switched off so that it does not bother them!

I was always a big fan of the tiki torch and that crazy pumpkin, tombstone etc, hope they have those or something similar this makes it fun for people to walk into that area and their animation changes and they join in the fun