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I am an old school gamer in the deepest meaning of the word, I am also a true fan of EVE Online. This blog will be where I will expound on my thoughts about EVE.

Author: Mopar63

I am an OLD school role playing gamer. I can trace my first experience back to the beginning days of D&D that was before the A was added. I was recalling the other day with my best friend Doug, our experiences in High School when I decided to take my first stab at Game Mastering. We had a small but tight knit group and our adventures went on to shape us into the RP monsters we are today.

Fast forward to today and the rising of the MMOs. Oh sure we have a blast playing the stand alone RPGs such as Neverwinter Nights or The Witcher. However those stand alone games miss the critical component that makes an RPG what it truly can be, interaction with others. So in this sense the rise of the MMO was to us the true holy grail, a chance to game without the need for 500 books and setting aside an entire weekend, finding gamers without having to advertise in the local paper, ahh life is going to be great.

That is until you get into an MMO. Now in fairness most MMO players are not old school pen and paper RPers so they do not know the difference. For an MMO player RP is about going to a forum and speaking with weird spelling or over the top lines. Sometimes it even involves doing this in the in game chat. That however seems to be the limit of their RP and this is where things fall short.

A true RP is not about what you say but rather what you DO. I will delve into this first from the perspective of LOTRO and then come back at it from EVE.

In LOTRO a lot of players try to RP but my experiences there show few truly know how. Oh you can find all the right words, I mean Dwarves talking about getting drunk and how Elves cause cancer. You can find a Hobbit that will talk about being hungry all the time. But to find a player that actually uses deeds to show their RP is extremely rare, even in just RPing a class. Case in point let’s look at a Guardian.

The Guardian class exists with the mentality that they are the defenders of the weak. They stand between the darkness and those that cannot fight it. In the case of a group a guardian, particularly a Dwarven Guardian is there to keep his friends safe because he trusts no one else to do it. Now if this is role played they way I described above then a battle scene might go something like this.

The party encounters a huge group of Goblins. As the Goblins begin an attack charge, with a yell of Baruk Kazah the Dwarven Guardian charges ahead and grabs as much of the Goblins attention as he can. His companions join the fray but soon they realize the party will be overwhelmed. The party leaders calls for a withdraw; the problem is that if they all withdraw at once the Goblins will pick off the weaker members.
With this in mind the Guardian goes into berserker mode and grabs the aggro of all the Goblins. He stands in the middle of the fray wrecking havoc as the rest of the party withdraws. Once the part is safely away then he attempts to withdraw as well. If he dies in the attempt then his death was noble and to him the best way he could go.

This to me is a GREAT bit of Guardian RP; he has captured the feel and essence of the Guardian. Sadly the reality is very different. Most of the Guardians I saw played would forsake the shield for a two handed weapon so they could dish out all the damage they could, after all it was much cooler hacking orcs than slowing them down for everyone else. Once the fight begins they ignore the rest of the fight and focus on what they can kill. Eventually the party begins to disintegrate because the weaker characters are dying since they are getting aggro the Guardian is missing and so the group leader prepares to call for withdrawal. However at this point the Guardian, seeing others dying has decided it is time to flee and is already half way down the road. The rest of the group dies the Dwarven Guardian thinks it is good RP to brag how wimpy those Elves and Humans are, they need to get tough like the Dwarf so they can live through a fight to.

Sadly this theme however carries over to all MMOs. In EVE the two best races for RP are the Amarr and the Minmatar. Both sides have some great RP groups, well let me rephrase that active RP groups. The reason I say that is they have some really excellent forum wars taking place but the real battles are rare, the reason why, no one will fight unless they have overwhelming odds. The Mighty Amarr, the Chosen of God, undefeatable because God is with them will run whenever faced with equal or worse odds for them. Minmatar ships can be ravaging within the Amarr home system and they will sit in station or hide until an overwhelming fleet can be assembled. Oh they can spout the great words in channel but their actions speak a different story.

Do not think the Minmatar get off any easier. The might saviors of their brethren, the freers of slaves will be happy to do so when they have no chance of losing. A small Amarr patrol rampages through Minmatar space buying up slaves at local stations and using this as an RP hook, claiming they are gather slaves. Do the Minmatar in the system move out to disrupt or stop this abomination? Sure they do, once they can get odds of 3 to 1 or better on their side. Oh sure they will cry with outrage over the chat channel but their ships will remain in station or hidden until the odds are amazing against their foe.

Now I point out these two races because quite frankly the RP in the other two races borders on none existent. I was part for a while of both races RP groups, The Caldari in a Naval Unit and the Gallente as an Intaki separatist. Both groups as mentioned before spent a lot of time paying lip service to their RP but where never willing to put their ships on the line to LIVE the RP.

Now reading this you might I think I consider RP in an MMO and EVE in particular a waste of time, this is not the case. There are exceptions to the above norms. This entire blog entry was prompted by the actions of a Minmatar RPer the other night.

In this go around of EVE I have found my fun in playing a Minmatar freedom fighter. This pilot has great navigation skills and since I love stealth combat, an old submariner here, I decided to train the pilot into Covert ops with his ultimate goal being to get into a Black Ops ship. Since I believe RP should be based on actions as much if not more so than words I set out and found the Minmatar Corporation that would most likely make use of my skills from an RP angle, the Republic Security Services. I have therefore dedicated my mission running to this corporation. During this time I have been frequenting the Minmatar public RP chat channels.

I am about to advance into level 2 missions and so I wanted advice on a cruiser I am looking at, the Bellicose. From an RP perspective I posed my question and had a number of responses, all of them basically saying I should instead get into a Rupture. I commented that while I understand their thoughts I was limited in my budget as my meager income from working for the RSS was being used to fund the advancement of my education. I explained that I was moving into covert operations and the use of the cruiser was only a stop gap so I hated to invest the extra cost if I could avoid it.

At this point I received a mail from one of the players in the channel. In perfect RP language he explained that he and the organization he worked with wanted to help a new pilot that was seeking to work in support of the Minmatar Nation. To this end he was giving 3 million of his own ISK to help me over the hump of moving into a cruiser. He explained that all he wanted in return was my promise to help the Minmatar people.

Now I understand that 3 million ISK to an establish character in EVE is chump change but here is this pilot who does not know me at all, for all he knows I could be an Amarr plant. Yet he puts out his own ISK and takes a chance at helping a new player that wants to save the Minmatar people. He let actions and not words show his RP.

Now this might seem minor to most and in some ways it is but the move showed me a player that is willing to do more than talk his RP. Now if he does this with his ship or not I do not know but it is nice to see the players that do not limit their RP to forum shouting matches.