iRP

This horribly titled blog is about the two most neglected letters in MMORPG.

Author: Token1337Guy

I too spent a good portion of my younger teenage life (and even preteen) RPing on MSN chatrooms.. 56k was indeed the golden age for that.. It was hard to find a good chat room but when i did [Mirtanna Manor] it became my home for several years..

I'd log in daily and had several characters in place.. I watched as the Manor grew from a place houseing RP'ers useing several sentences and sticking to medieval role play than turn into a sci-fi bloodbath where several characters fought one another constantly and terrorized the manor.. I was one of those people in my later years, and with the creation of MSN bots (that could give themselves gold hammers and host abilities on all chatrooms) we started to turn the RP battles into real battles.. It was unfortunante but at the time i didn't realize i was one of the people responsible of ending the manor and MSN chatrooms in general, as after that there was some monthly fee tacked on.

I found refuge in AOL chat rooms; i had heard the horror stories but it was all that i had left.. AOL chatrooms were a whole different ballgame.. All the rooms had been established for quite some time and it was a hardplace for a new comer.. Not to mention everything on AOL turned into a fist-fight or sex-related.. They even had chatrooms where people RP'ed pedophiles doing lood acts with kids, and how would i know this? because it was the chatrooms tag...

Yeah, after i helped kill off the manor and couldn't find my niche in the AOL rooms i had given up.. Characters that i had been building for years.. People i had been RPing daily with for YEARS.. Several of my characters were even "married" which involved me RPing with only one other person in private chat for a long time.. lol sounds weird now but was fun back then when the closest thing i could get to a MMO would be Warcraft or Diablo lol..

Anyways, you're blog reminded me of these "golden ages" for me.. I really did have a good time playing out several different characters with like minded RPers such as myself.. I miss it, infact.. That kind of personal growth is something you don't see in MMO's, which makes RPing in a MMORPG impossible for me.. I got no clue what happened to all those people i RP'd with for so long, and almost all trace of Mirtanna Manor is gone.. If you google it you get very limited results, there was a old homepage hosted on the MSN websites, but MSN quit hosting mini-websites like that so it is now gone; with it all trace of those years i spent RPing.. Meh.

Not trying to be the old man, here, but I began role-playing in the early 80s, before 14.4k, before MUCKs, MUDs, etc.  I remember role-playing with dice-and-paper... that's right, folks, rolling the bones.

However, there really wasn't a whole lot of difference from what the OP described his earlier experiences were in those dimensions, and in the forum role-playing.  Actually, I ran -from early-mid 2003 until just last year- a very long, and heretofore incomplete game of Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play, beginning with 1st Edition, and currently on hiatus with 2nd.  http://www.wolvesau.net/wh/fantasy/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=7 is the address, if anyone would like to look.  The game's been on hiatus since early November of 2010, and I'm not accepting new registers right now, especially since I get about 150 globals a day, despite all of the upgrading I've done, but the game was still very good.

Character building was the mainstay of our game; alas, the story has gone on entirely too long.

I suppose a lot of people are asking the simple questions: What in the world does this have to do with MMORPGs?  ...and... Why do I care?

Well, I've often been an advocate of placing some real role-playing into the game setting of MMORPGs, but as the OP suggested, it's a LOT more difficult a question to answer.  I'm certain there are ways, but the question comes in the implementation.  The absolute best role-playing I've ever seen in any game I've played is found in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, followed pretty closely by the almost fully-voiced Fallout 3, both by Bethesda Softworks.  I'm not plugging any game, myself, except to let people know where my best experiences have come from.

For my part, role-playing -to me, at least- is not limited to Character building, to a Player living through their Character, but how the environment reacts to the passing of a Character, at who the Character's enemies and friends are, at the end of the day.  In my tabletop days -and, yes, we still have those, now, every other Saturday night for about five hours- I've had my RP Character marry another Player's Character, or a particularly well-done NPC in the game, I've felt the guilt of murdering an innocent person, simply because their life, their ability to live, would lead to the destruction of others.  In my Play-by-Post exploits -which I hope many of you will take the opportunity to read- I have known the joy and exhiliration of slaying evil, of performing in epic battles and completing them, my Character soaked in blood and exhausted, more than happy to take to the bottle afterward, or falling under the stain of evil newly vanquished.

The problems I see these days, whether it would be through tabletop role-playing or through Forums, and this may yet extend into their MMOs, is no one understand what Character development is, do not understand the relevance of role-playing because they never had the ability to live life through their Character's eyes, and many are terribly illiterate.  These all amount to a crying shame, but they are the truth and, until role-playing can be introduced for Players, their Characters will be nothing more than sheets of paper, or worse, an avatar to drive around beautiful scenery, lead around by their noses by the developers who put the game together.

That's my two cents, and I mourn for the olden days, only 26 years back.

Huh.  I'm surprised to see people are reading this!  Better get on writing the next entry.

Hate to burst your bubble DarkZeroSeth all the credit for the destruction of The Manor belong to Dean and Me -- Kris --.   Don't know why I'm even bothering posting here on account it's ancient historry -- both the post itself as well as the incidents you all refer to -- , nevertheless as shameful of a thing as it was to do I don't want you making claims otherwise.  Make your bones off something else.

Mind you, Age Of Apocalypse as I named the the group which didn't only stop role play in The Manor we also shut down The Red Dragon Inn -- Elliot, etc, etc -- Enchanted Forest Inn -- Sune, Lance -- so on so forth. We had a purpose, our purpose was that of sixteen year olds as that's what we were at the time mind you.   We wanted to conquer MSN's entertainment section and we did just that, with relative ease.

Let's not paint this in a light that's completly unfavorable for us however.  The Manor was falling apart long before we came, you had your internal struggles between Demona and so on, there were a lot of factors that should be mentioned in the fall of  it.  Mind you, even at sixteen, the biggest edge we had beyond having our bolts was we just role played better than you.. We were the cool, edgy bad guys, and a lot of the people you deemed friends drank up our kool aid and had no qualms about joining us. 

Floors open for debate, but your vaunted memory of Mirtanna Manor is cool and alll, but you guys were heading towards your demise regardless. We just drove the nails into the coffin.

Hellfyre? Chris?  Still on aol hit me up.

I joined this site expressly to comment here. Some friends of mine and I have recently been talking about our experiences with MSN RP. I came into rather late, and a good portion of the folks I RP'd with were from the Old Mirtann.  We found refuge in a little place known as Forbidden Starlight. That was my gateway into something that can only be remebered fondly. Honestly, I kept my head out of the petty squables and "politics" of it all. Hell, I didn't even know most of the real names of the folks I was playing with. It was pure escapeism for me. I lament the fall of something that brought me joy in my formative years, but it went as all things do. By the wayside. We've been looking to get something of a reunion page set up on FB. If anyone is interested, hit me up.

I'm here because Drake pointed it out.

Post is old. I saw it a long time ago but didn't care to comment til Drake said he posted. Anyways.

Manorite here. I see a lot of posts by people who speak about waging war on MM. It had a lot of opponents in its life.  AoA was ultimately the hatchet in the back though, like the Gemanic tribes to the Romans, they came when it's infrastructure was weak and teared it apart. MM was rife with internal problems by this time.

The AoA was simply a group of socially displaced misanthropic youths craving control over a make-believe world. Using organized chaos and an understanding of the infrastructure they were targeting, they achieved their goals. Their organization was short lived though, since that many power-hungry, narcocistic schizophrenics can't maintain an organization for very long.  Don't get me wrong, they weren't all like this, but most their leaders were in one way or another. I say that having read their posts on many occasions.

That's not to undercut the feat they accomplished. What they did was felt on a very large magnitude. They achieved something using tactics almost parallel with Sun Tsao's art of war.

I'm actually surprised sometimes when the AoA doesn't want to be painted in a bad light. Their actions really seemed to be to that end, or at least the outcome would obviously lead to that.

I do have possession of an old host list btw, containing the emails of many of the old prominent members of MM. It at least can be used to reconnect with old friends if someone wants to do that.

Lets face it though, those were old, old times. Long since dead and accepted.

My contact info is:

X_Titan_X at hotmail

Just know I might not reply for a week or two.

I keep track of this post only because it offers me a forum I feel to set the record straight on certain things.

First let me say this -- I remember you Titan as far as Manorites you were among the more respectable.  WIth that said there's a few things I'd like to address for the sake of debate.

I agree the infrastructure of The Manor was weak when AoA formed, but let's evaluate the situation.  Why was the Manor weak?  Constant infighting.  You guys were coming apart at the seams long before we arrived.  Mind you too, long before I ever became apart of the AoA I was a psuedo regular at the Mirtanna Manor -- more often found at the Crimson Pool Inn -- so I was familiarized with you all as well as you drama.  I liked Dancia, Matt, few others who's names aren't coming right off the tip of my tongue. 

Now on account of your constant in fight and differing in opinions of what was "acceptable" at Mirtanna Manor created an inconsistency.  Some of you accepted and allowed the -- dare we say "Scifi characters -- in. Some of you were trigger happy and ejected on sight.  Now that's where the iniital tension began. Matt who's character was an alien -- Levan Stargon, or some such. Don't recall the full name -- where as my character Holocaust was a Hellspawn, yet certain host would eject me yet allow him.  Now we have tension, and you have tension with someone who's friends with various people on your host list.

With that said -- we got angry, we got your bolt, we never let it go. Not to say AoA wasn't a notion born out of a teenagers superiority complex to control a make believe world because obviously it was.  Let's not throw rocks from glass houses because The Manor at the time -- and probably always -- was more about rpg boning more than anything else. So, to sit their raising yourself above us because we sought conflict as opposed to cyber sex seems..Well..Lame

On a final note. Paint me in a bad light all you want, but don't be oblivious to your own flaws because frankly you guys edit history a lot.  We didn't hack you and take a bolt, your friends, your buddys, your pals gave us bolts, your friends rode the wave of rpg revoulition and did so with a smile.  Now those very same people bitch about how we destroyed it alone.  As if AoA was a construction other than your peers.

Mirtanna Manor killed Mirtanna Manor ultimatly, we were just the people who insighted it.

Because mind you, Mirtanna Manor was a room. A name. If you guys were a cohesive unit why not open ~Mirtanna_Manor~ and actually stay in there while we held Mirtanna Manor? If you really let us destroy your perfect haven by simply holding a chat room then clearly you're not as deicated as you think to maintaining it.

Lastly not to toot my horn, AoA wasn't short lived -- we lasted nearly a year and a half, but we grew up and started getting lifes.  Something a lot of people at the Manor never had, or will have -- no offense, not referencing you personally.