Blockland Forums > General Discussion
What do you hate about City RPs?
Alex Man!:
CAN I BE CAT
Mr. Wallet:
My complaint with RP mods in games like Blockland and Garry's Mod is that they typically cater only to younger players who are more interested in "cops and robbers". A game that is ostensibly supposed to simulate urban life in general ends up invariably mostly just simulating the conflict between rule-enforcers and rule-violators. This is probably a critically important childhood activity to develop the social brain, but is rather uninteresting for everyone else who has more or less come to understand intuitively the concepts of law and civil society.
If you applied the RP mod principle to something more macro, like SimCity, it would be about funding the maximum possible number of police stations with the minimum possible number of non-police buildings. RP mods artificially regulate the ways in which people can behave in ways that favor disruptive criminal behavior. The only laws that people actually desperately want enforced are the only ones not automatically enforced by the computational laws of nature.
People have asked me from time to time why I don't have cops and crime in Rise of Blockland. Because this isn't a pretend game. This is a real game. The fact that you've landed on crime and not on the water table or on employee management or air pollution regulation shows that you don't want an accurate simulation or even a well-crafted game so much as roleplay make-believe. Well RoB isn't Dungeons & Dragons, it's Capitalism. Crime is illegal. If crime occurs, I will do everything in my power including change the laws of nature to prevent it. So why a police force?
What I'd like to see out of RP mods is a greater emphasis on other aspects of society. With Rise of Blockland I explored a deeper economic system. With Socialist Democracy, I explored politics (and that was very much an unrestricted role-playing type game!). These are the only two examples I have ever seen of "society" mods that do not include a major crime & punishment component. I'm not saying having it makes it bad, I'm saying that RP mods are stagnant as a genre because that's all they ever are.
Reactor Worker:
Wallet summed it up nicely.
All I can add is that the way the "jobs" in CityRP just hand out cash for simply having that position doesn't encourage any interesting forms of play. The player ends up grinding for a little while till they can get their next "job" that happens to print out a little more money for them each time. If the jobs had some meaning to them CityRP could be quite entertaining.
A few examples of possible jobs you could have: firefighters, designers, and repairers. The first puts out small fires that are randomly set around the city. Every fire they put out grants them money for their success. If they fail to put out the fire, the build gets put back the way it was at no expense to the owner but any firefighters in the server miss out on that opportunity. The second, designers, are given their choice of tasks for building public structures to improve the city. That might mean building banks, bridges, or more based on a written prompt from the server. Once they've indicated that the task is complete they can be rewarded money based on the quality of their work. The final job, repairers, assumes that public buildings (not private ones like homes) decay slowly over time. As these bricks fall off, the task falls upon repairers to replace these broken components.
The above ideas do require that the server host/mod maker generate artificial issues for the players to resolve, but at least it gives them something fun to do whilst they are in the server. The designer role encourages good building without the need for negative incentives. The roles need not be mutually exclusive and I see no reason why players should be forced to stick with a single "job".
-1 Up:
--- Quote from: Reactor Worker on February 10, 2011, 12:06:14 AM ---Wallet summed it up nicely.
All I can add is that the way the "jobs" in CityRP just hand out cash for simply having that position doesn't encourage any interesting forms of play. The player ends up grinding for a little while till they can get their next "job" that happens to print out a little more money for them each time. If the jobs had some meaning to them CityRP could be quite entertaining.
A few examples of possible jobs you could have: firefighters, designers, and repairers. The first puts out small fires that are randomly set around the city. Every fire they put out grants them money for their success. If they fail to put out the fire, the build gets put back the way it was at no expense to the owner but any firefighters in the server miss out on that opportunity. The second, designers, are given their choice of tasks for building public structures to improve the city. That might mean building banks, bridges, or more based on a written prompt from the server. Once they've indicated that the task is complete they can be rewarded money based on the quality of their work. The final job, repairers, assumes that public buildings (not private ones like homes) decay slowly over time. As these bricks fall off, the task falls upon repairers to replace these broken components.
The above ideas do require that the server host/mod maker generate artificial issues for the players to resolve, but at least it gives them something fun to do whilst they are in the server. The designer role encourages good building without the need for negative incentives. The roles need not be mutually exclusive and I see no reason why players should be forced to stick with a single "job".
--- End quote ---
That's a nice idea, but how would the designers indicate when their done? For all the game knows, they could've done nothing. How would the "quality of work" part be implemented?
OT:I personally agree with Reactor Worker.
DrenDran:
If you