I have to wonder, after getting banned from the first thing I've been banned from in years, a dumb little game called "cowed" on BYOND. I mean, really, is the point of an RP game to make the creators of it fill big and powerful for enabling players to do things that aren't allowed and then "punishing" them for it? (Banning me from an RP game is hardly what I'd call punishment, but rather more like a convenience for disabling a link to something incredibly annoying.)
Perhaps the real point of "cowed" is that you're supposed to be cowed when you play, devoid of humor or fun, obedient to the omnipotent Dungeon Master. The design is stupid. If you don't want a person to do something, then don't enable it to be done. I suppose the counter is that then you wouldn't be able to do anything in an RP. Maybe that's true and maybe RP's are inherently flawed because of this, or maybe it's possible to design an RP game that doesn't suck?
For example, when I first logged-in to "cowed" my first dilemma was in my inability to successfully escape my starting room. I received the strange tip that I should equip an axe and hack down my door. I refused to do that however and found that I should drag a key into the slot. The whole process of escaping my start point and joining the rest of the cowed masses took at least 15 minutes, probably in partiality because I didn't think to try mouse commands in BYOND as the mouse hasn't traditionally agreed with BYOND in terms of speed.
The next thing I know I'm running through the world wild. I find a knife in my inventory and decide to see if I can stab another player with it. Thinking, incorrectly, that of course I can do whatever I want, that's the point of a "free" RP world, right? Apparently not. I can say that the world of RP is new to me, but the concept isn't foreign, it's been around for ages. That said, when did the whole thing get so weak? The whole RP thing has gone from Dungeons and Dragons to idiots pretending they can write bad poetry or build a world where they have a crappy 2D shop for making pastries.
If anything, we, the "insurgency" as we were called, or the "severe noobs", did these RPers a massive favor by showing that the fundamental logic behind their fantasy world is just as warped as their logic in the real world. Screw this, I'm watching South Park, that's sane by comparison.
ID:99365
 Jul 28 2010, 4:59 pm
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Jul 28 2010, 5:08 pm
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C-Kronos
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You should totally hop on SS13 if you think Cowed is bad.
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Ehh, I could never get into "Cowed" due to it always lagging.
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umad?
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More annoyed than mad.
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It's no wonder you were banned. You made your character a souless husk being manipulated by a griefer from another world.
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It's players like you that are the reason "free roleplaying games" require bans.
It is not a design flaw that developers expect their players to follow their rules. While I might agree that they should try to make it so you CAN'T do these things (though I accept it's probably pretty difficult to do, probably), that is not an excuse to not follow them. If you didn't intend on roleplaying, you shouldn't have joined the game. | |
Cowed RP has a lot of potential, but it is ruined by ridiculous rules and a terrible community.
For me, growing up with Dungeons and Dragons, Shaodwrun and GURPS, role playing was all about doing what you normally can't. You were taking on the role of a new character, but they were also a extension of your own personality. Cowed RP has these ridiculous rules set in place. If you ever play outside the closed minded idea of any of the character classes you get automatically labeled as a "griefer" and usually banned. I was banned for breaking into the castle and killing the king and taking his crown. My character wanted to be king and look at history, it's normal for a king to be assassinated, instead I was accused of "greifing" and banned on the spot. Most of these "RP" games on BYOND are fundamentally flawed, because everyone always expects you to play within their own scope of the game. Especially with these free-form role playing games on BYOND. If you don't agree with what someone says, or you don't follow their lead, suddenly you are "power playing" or "greifing" and banned. Fuck that, why should I ever want anything except the best for my character? In dungeons and dragons I would often leave my group behind so I could horde extra treasure and not share it. Shit one time I even killed my friend's character caused he pissed me off. I slit his throat in his sleep. | |
It is not hard to disable or prevent a player from doing any of these things. Roleplaying seems to have a rather pathetic definition these days. Why couldn't my character be a soulless husk? Why couldn't he be a complete maniac or insane? Wouldn't that be fun? And isn't fun the point?
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Rockinawsome wrote:
Why couldn't my character be a soulless husk? Why couldn't he be a complete maniac or insane? Your character COULD be a soulless husk. He COULD be a complete maniac, or insane. But he wasn't. Because you weren't roleplaying, as you have already said yourself. You attacked a player because you wanted to see if you could. It might be different if you roleplayed as someone who was insane. Though I have to admit, roleplaying as a total dick, and not having the luxury of other people knowing that your character is a total dick is often interpreted exactly the same as just being a dick and not roleplaying. This is compounded even more by the fact that it is a "free roleplay" game, where you can just do whatever you want. And you can't really just interrupt someone's roleplay and expect people to go "oh, hey, random event. cool." So yeah. Roleplaying as some random maniac will probably generally NOT work in a "free roleplay" game. | |
That's why I don't play RP games on BYOND. They suck...90% of the time.
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Rockinawsome wrote:
It is not hard to disable or prevent a player from doing any of these things. Roleplaying seems to have a rather pathetic definition these days. Why couldn't my character be a soulless husk? Why couldn't he be a complete maniac or insane? Wouldn't that be fun? And isn't fun the point? That's the problem with roleplaying games, they are fundamentally flawed. No one wants to play a normal person; if they wanted to do that they wouldn't be playing a game, they would be roleplaying themselves. In the end you have a roleplaying game full of people who either want their character to be insane murderers, invincible conquerers, or unstoppable evil-doers. | |
Cody123100 wrote:
That's the problem with roleplaying games, they are fundamentally flawed. No one wants to play a normal person; if they wanted to do that they wouldn't be playing a game, they would be roleplaying themselves. In the end you have a roleplaying game full of people who either want their character to be insane murderers, invincible conquerers, or unstoppable evil-doers. This isn't a flaw. This is just an inevitable part of the design. The implementation of the game determines if this causes a problem. In DND, if you want to be an invincible conqueror, you have to do the adventures and actually work for it. Naturally, if you have no interest in doing adventures and finding treasure, then DND isn't the roleplay game for you. The same applies here. Cowed has rules as well. And it just so happens that you get punished for randomly killing people without a roleplaying reason, because it is not part of how it was designed. | |
Cowed's rules is why it sucks.
I bet you anything, if someone was to make a Cowed where there were no rules and you could just kill whoever you wanted or go on quests killing cow zombies, it would have much more players. Especially if you were to add more spells skills, a few more weapons and armors etc. I'm pretty sure more people are banned from games with these ridiculously stupid role-playing rules than from games who have less rules and give the players more freedom. What makes things worse is that when you add these retarded rules, the GM positions become more attractive to the imbeciles playing the game. So then you get more whining and begging for GM, and then the people who are GM get thrills out of using their power so they can feel like cybernet kings. This is why you were probably banned - because the morons in the GM positions don't really care about being fair or enforcing the rules. They just want to take every opportunity to ban people so they can feel like they're superior and in charge of something. If that was your first offense, you should have not been banned and whoever banned you needs to be demoted. Better yet, just shut the stupid game down. Ever since its creation, its been managed by idiots. | |
The biggest flaw with Cowed RP is the fact that, while there are rules, it does a very poor job in presenting them to the user. Not only that, the game offers very little, if any direction in what your supposed to do. They toss you in the game and that's the end of it.
I think with a little more polish and work the game could be fun, but as it is right now, it just isn't. | |
EmpirezTeam wrote:
Cowed's rules is why it sucks. I'm a firm believer in quality over quantity. If you want to play a game where you kill everything in sight, then check out these games. There are Roleplay Games on BYOND in order to appeal to the audience that enjoys them. Just because you don't like the rules or the gameplay does not mean these games should be different. They're the way they are for a reason. | |
Ew did he say role play?
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F0lak wrote:
EmpirezTeam wrote: But couldn't there be an RP game that didn't suck? Imagine, you don't want your chefs murdered for no reason, so build in some sort of mechanism for preventing the murder in the first place to give the chef a fighting chance. If you make it hard enough to kill a chef via some sort of police system aka Grand Theft auto style, the whole point of killing one goes down substantially. Or you could do something as simple as creating areas that disable murder in certain regions via a simple boolean variable. If you exit the area, the boolean kicks on, and you are killable. Lets say you wanted to travel to another city--guess since you're such a rich merchant from selling all those pastries you're going to have to hire some folks to protect you on the highway, now when you reach the new city, you re-enter an area where that boolean kicks off again. This gives us murderous, blood-thirsty types a bit of fun, and lets those who would like to run a virtual pastry shop a space as well. Boy, that didn't sound too hard did it? | |
Rockinawsome wrote:
But couldn't there be an RP game that didn't suck? Imagine, you don't want your chefs murdered for no reason, so build in some sort of mechanism for preventing the murder in the first place to give the chef a fighting chance. If you make it hard enough to kill a chef via some sort of police system aka Grand Theft auto style, the whole point of killing one goes down substantially. Or you could do something as simple as creating areas that disable murder in certain regions via a simple boolean variable. If you exit the area, the boolean kicks on, and you are killable. Lets say you wanted to travel to another city--guess since you're such a rich merchant from selling all those pastries you're going to have to hire some folks to protect you on the highway, now when you reach the new city, you re-enter an area where that boolean kicks off again. This gives us murderous, blood-thirsty types a bit of fun, and lets those who would like to run a virtual pastry shop a space as well. Boy, that didn't sound too hard did it? No because this is just you grasping at straws to feebly defend the idea that you should be able to rampantly murder people for no reason. In your scenario, if people like you were allowed to play, everyone would have to have bodyguards 100% of the time. This turns the game into, let's hide/defend from the griefers instead of let's roleplay. You just want to play a game where you don't have to roleplay, so quit acting like it is the roleplaying game's fault that you can't roleplay because you aren't roleplaying in the first place. A roleplay game doesn't suck because the game doesn't provide hard boundaries to keep people from griefing. If you want to roleplay a murderer, do more than murder people, be a murderer. Study your prey, make them feel awkward, follow them home, sneak into their bedroom, all those creepy things besides walking up to them in broad daylight and axing them down. Although, I think the automated guard thing could be of some benefit. | |
Rockinawsome wrote:
But couldn't there be an RP game that didn't suck? Imagine, you don't want your chefs murdered for no reason, so build in some sort of mechanism for preventing the murder in the first place to give the chef a fighting chance. If you make it hard enough to kill a chef via some sort of police system aka Grand Theft auto style, the whole point of killing one goes down substantially. Or you could do something as simple as creating areas that disable murder in certain regions via a simple boolean variable. If you exit the area, the boolean kicks on, and you are killable. Lets say you wanted to travel to another city--guess since you're such a rich merchant from selling all those pastries you're going to have to hire some folks to protect you on the highway, now when you reach the new city, you re-enter an area where that boolean kicks off again. This gives us murderous, blood-thirsty types a bit of fun, and lets those who would like to run a virtual pastry shop a space as well. Boy, that didn't sound too hard did it? What you have described would be hard to implement. It would require thinking about problems, solving them, and then implementing solutions. I agree that this would make for better games, but it's *much* easier to have people enforce "rules" than it is to add these features. Edit: Vermolius wrote: If you want to roleplay a murderer, do more than murder people, be a murderer. Study your prey, make them feel awkward, follow them home, sneak into their bedroom, all those creepy things besides walking up to them in broad daylight and axing them down. In the real world this is what you'd have to do to kill people (not that I know). There are policemen and witnesses, you have to be mindful of both. Lazily-created RP games don't create a realistic world. In such a game there's no reason to go through the trouble of stalking someone, just kill them when you're out of view of all other players. | |