Readers, I am about to blow your minds. Are you ready to have your minds absolutely blown? It’s going to be a huge shock, I promise. It turns out… I really enjoy Warframe. You know, the game I’ve now written several columns about (at least one of which has a content warning in front of it) and have even joined with MJ for streaming on occasion. Big surprises abound.
Those of you who still know me as “the roleplaying guy” are probably unsurprised by the fact that I do obviously want to roleplay in this universe. But therein lies the issue, dear readers. Warframe is not a game that wants you to roleplay. It does not have social spaces where you can speak in close proximity, its emote system is frequently limited, and it is on a whole a game where you run around shooting folks at high speed rather than a more traditional MMORPG where you can chill out and just RP. This means that it’s worth talking about games that don’t want you to roleplay – because there are a lot.
You might argue that Warframe is a particularly egregious example, but let’s not kid ourselves. Warhammer Online was not exactly friendly to roleplayers for various reasons, not the least of which being the absence of a button to walk instead of run. Destiny 2 is not a roleplaying paradise. I don’t know if Star Stable really supports roleplaying, but my instinct is to say “neigh.”
Please note that if I am wrong and you’re part of the Star Stable roleplaying community? I am deeply invested in learning more. Email me. I want to hear about this.
The thing is that I’m not picking games that do not have worlds to roleplay in. It is going to be hard to roleplay much in Trove because that is a game which treats setting more like a tone poem. Looking for in-depth storytelling is not really the game’s thing. But most of the games I just listed are games with big, vibrant worlds that absolutely facilitate roleplaying… in games that really don’t.
So how do you deal with that? Well… there are paths, but some are fraught with peril, or at least a lower degree of engagement. And it’s here when I bring up this older column about how roleplaying is more common than you think.
Let me keep using Warframe as an example: The game absolutely wants players to think about the characters they’re playing. There is way too much in the game that is based solely around fashion for you to engage with. You have a whole bunch of decorations, multiple housing spaces to decorate, loads of fashion accessories to wear… it is not subtle or secondary. A certain degree of internal roleplaying is expected.
But the game also clearly does not think that you are really thinking of your character as A Separate Person. Your account is your only identifying marker, and while you could name your account something like PyranaBurnfist, there’s no expectation of you doing so. At no point does the player character get a name outside of the name you think of, if any. If you want to do more roleplaying, you are going to need to do some extra work.
Fortunately, you are not without options. Making a Discord server for people who are interested in roleplaying, for example, is not difficult to do. It is fairly straightforward to make something called, say, Jake’s Warframe Roleplaying Trough, make some channels within that refer to different locations of import (like the relays, Cetus, Fortuna, and so forth), and then let people just flit about between channels, roleplaying and interacting as they wish. Congratulations! You have successfully established roleplaying in Warframe!
That’s what I would say if not for the fact that it would be a big fat lie. That is not roleplaying in Warframe. It is, by definition, roleplaying about the game outside of the game. You are just running a chat room based around a game you all like to play that sits parallel to the game itself, and while you can put in rules about offering screenshots of characters and frames and whatever… it’s still not actually roleplaying in the game.
Does this matter? Well… yes and no.
The “no” is because it is not actually possible to do a heck of a lot more in the game itself without narrowing things very far down into very marginal fields. The game is what the game is. I can certainly say that I would love more social features for the game, because I would, but do I think that’s a useful focus of development time? No, I really don’t. You create a community informed by the game, and that works fine. It’s not exactly unheard of; lots of games that do support roleplaying can also be made easier or more useful by including parallel means, like having Discord roleplaying to support your in-game Final Fantasy XIV roleplaying.
But the “yes” is because in the latter case there, the whole point is that the Discord channel is a supplement to something that already exists. It’s not the thing in and of itself. If you roleplay in FFXIV and in a Discord around the game but get kicked from the Discord? Eh, no huge loss. But if you get kicked out of Jake’s Warframe Roleplaying Trough? You now have to start from scratch.
One of the things that makes roleplaying in MMOs fun in the first place is the fact that it’s all the same game. The people I hang out with and have my character chat about feelings with are also people I see when I’m raiding Hamidon. These things exist in unison and in the same basic space. By contrast, in the theoretical Discord channel (or forums, or Facebook group, or whatever online tool you use), these are separate things you do. You play Warframe and then you swap apps and write fanfic about the game you play separately.
Is that worth it?
I think that’s going to come down to every individual player to decide. Obviously those who don’t care one whit about roleplaying are going to continue not caring one whit, and they will move on with their lives no worse for wear. It’s the players who are really invested and want to write their own personal stories about these characters and interact with others that are going to be the most affected. And for some players the lack of a good roleplaying solution is… y’know… going to be a dealbreaker.
They’re not wrong, any more than the studios who make these games are wrong for not really making a roleplaying-encouraging game.
I love roleplaying. Always have. And I think it’s really cool that we have tools and options available to us to support the act even when the games we love don’t really support it. But at the same time, I recognize that it’s jumping through a lot of hoops that will lead plenty of players deciding that it’s easier to just not. Whether or not that’s worth the effort is going to come down to personal preference, at the end of the day.
If you’re an old hand at roleplaying in MMOs, you can look to Eliot Lefebvre’s Storyboard as an irregular column addressing the common peaks and pitfalls possible in this specialized art of interaction. If you’ve never tried it before, you can look at it as a peek into how the other half lives. That’s something everyone can enjoy, just like roleplaying itself.
