More Awesome Than You!

Who is Darth?  Inquiring minds want to know.

Darth Vader, of Star Wars :)  Or at least one assumes so....

Now i feel like an idiot. :-[ This is one of my blond moments. Haven't watched any star wars movie in ages.

Or it could be Darth Sidious.  With JM, it's hard to know.

Somehow I don't really see JMP as the Star Wars type. But then who know's what 'type' he is, besides old, fat, grumpy with a beard.

What a lovely visual.

It's most likely a reference to Darth Vader, as this is somewhat of a bastardization of Obi-Wan Kenobi's line:

"You can't win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."

From the original/first Star Wars movie or what some may call, Star Wars: A New Hope (Episode IV)

[/geek]

Ste

Yes, I know, but I was using that as an excuse to see if I could spell "Sidious."

It comes from our long-running joke about how horrible Star Wars would be as a MMORPG, before they actually went and did it. We still use it to symbolize the pointlessness of many forms of PVP play.

That made absolutely no sense.

I shall paraphrase: JM joked about making a Star Wars game online.  Then, they made one.  "PVP" means, presumably, Player Versus Player.

PvP is such a joke in itself.  I haven't played any online Star Wars games but I have played MMORPGs, and it's always the same.  You get a little handy-slap for dying, and very rarely do you have to worry about what'll happen to your accumulated gear.  If you make dying a big deal, what PvP that still occurs will probably be stacked battles.

You have to stick it to game developers for basically making player characters immortal, but there are those players who sign up not because they're interested in the genre, but because they want to go hunt some noobs.

Wow. That is a rather good point.

MMORPGs annoy me in general. They, like every other computer game I've heard of that sports the title "RPG," are not worthy of the designation. A game where the GM/DM cannot chuck stuff at unruly players is not an RPG.

And a game where players you kill don't STAY dead is no fun. If I'm playing a CE assassin pretending to be a LG paladin in a good aligned party, when I stab them all in the back I want them to be DEAD, dammit! Resurrection is no fun. That's why I like the way Arcana Unearthed/Evolved handles ressurection: you have to tell people your "true name" for it to work, but if your enemies discover your true name you are screwed. And if you get resurrected six times, your soul is altered enough that you no longer have a unique true name, but a generic racial one, so anyone who wants to can find out what it is.

And besides, if you need to kill an annoying player as a GM, you're not being creative enough. Much better to place him in the hands of Dr. Boris's (Unlicensed) Medical Facility, or a variation thereof. (And I mean no offense to Boris. It was just the first Russian name I could think of.)

See if you actually think seriously about the death/failure system you use in a game, instead of fudging a 'respawn' because hey, it worked in some FPS multiplayer shooter.... you might actually be onto a winner.  Unfortunately, you can't count on players not to metagame and say 'Oh, you don't want to go that way, a big boulder rolls down and squishes you' which they know because one of their earlier characters was wiped out, so.... you have to move the goalposts.  However, this may not be entirely fair, because a game in which the goalpsots are constantly moving further away from the player, and therefore becoming even more challenging every time the player is killed, well you could never beat it ;-)

A great example of what I'm talking about is Avatar (http://www.gateworld.net/sg1/s8/806.shtml), in which Teal'c plays a realistic foothold simulation in a virtual reality chair.  I watched it again last night.

That's not really such a huge problem. Sure, they may know that last time, a big boulder squished them, but that hardly tells them why this happened. Or that it happens again. After all, big boulders don't (usually) grow on trees. Once a big boulder has rolled down something and squished somebody, it takes a lot of effort to put it back so it can squish somebody again. That just doesn't happen by itself, you know.

Exactly true.  And yet many MMORPGs recycle and re-use these scenarios to death.  In which case, you would have to be kinda stupid to fall for the same old boulder trap again.

Perhaps, but let's face it. That's a static scenario that everyone who isn't a dumb newbie will avoid. The fact that players avoid it as such can hardly be blamed on them. After all, it's splashed all over the forums, "Do this and lose your character.". In fact, it's probably a common newbie trap. Everyone loves to bash clueless newbies like that. But you know, I don't really think that newbies being bashed like that is such a bad thing, really. I mean, when you're new at a game with a fresh character, and someone kills you like that, you just kinda shrug and make a new one. New characters are pretty expendable, after all. Oh, and put him on your shitlist for revenge. Revenge is always good.