Not everyone who enjoys tabletop roleplaying enjoys roleplaying in MMOs. This is fine because they are different things and you are under no obligation to continually like the same thing in all places. But one thing that I’ve seen happen more than a few times is that tabletop roleplayers dislike roleplaying in MMOs because they give their characters absolutely terrible goals and then get annoyed that those goals do not work in MMORPG roleplaying.
I don’t mean to say that the people who are doing this do not understand the point of giving their characters goals and objectives. This is important. But while a lot of advice for roleplaying applies equally whether you are playing in a tabletop environment or in an online game, there are some things that really only work in one or the other. And one of those potential problems is when you have your character seek to do something that is just never going to work out for you in an MMORPG setting.
Let’s start with a fun example. In a tabletop game of Dungeons & Dragons, you can absolutely make one of your character’s goals be to bisect Elminster with a greatsword (assuming you’re playing in the Forgotten Realms, at least). That is a perfectly fine goal. The person who is running the game can either construct adventures to let you approach that goal, realize it’s a bad goal, or even continually let you whiff at the attempt. As long as the person running the game approves of it, you’re off to the races.
If you are playing Neverwinter, however, this is a terrible goal for your character because it’s simply never going to happen. The game will never let you address this. And I pick this out because it’s taking place in a setting where he exists; he’s just not ever going to fulfill that role. Whether you want this to be the case or not, it is not a good goal.
You might think that this is an extreme example, and it is, but the point is that no matter how you slice it, Elminster is a major setting character who is going to be used by the designers to develop a specific story. There are no two ways about it. And if you’re used to tabletop games, you might not be used to the fact that this is a bad sort of goal.
Let’s look at a better example: Your character wants to defeat the Lich King in World of Warcraft (and also it’s decades ago, come on and hang with me, no roleplayer ever cared about the Jailer). This might seem like a very obvious and achievable goal; like, there’s no doubt we are eventually going to fight this dude, right? But the problem is that first of all, there’s no way to really distinguish between who got the kill on the boss. Was it you? Everyone in your party? Everyone who cleared the raid?
Second of all… what do you do now? Usually this is the wrap-up point in a campaign. This is the part when everybody goes home, end credits play over Tears For Fears music! Like, watch, let’s make the ending of Game of Thrones about 30% better!
It’s still bad, but it’s better! What were we talking about again? Right, goals.
Tabletop goals for roleplaying games are generally based around achievable things that the group is actively working toward. If your tabletop group is being managed effectively, all of the things you’re working toward are actually things that are actively being pursued by the core of the story. And if a character’s main goals aren’t really being pursued, a good gamemaster usually gives that character a nemesis or two so that you feel vindicated when you get to take that person down.
But the thing about MMORPGs is that when I mentioned not necessarily being the hero, that also is true of your overall goals. It’s hard to tell an ongoing story when your main goal is to Accomplish One Thing. Once you do that one thing, the story is kind of over. Series that feel like they can last for a long time (whether they do or not) tend to revolve around a continual state of affairs. The crew of Serenity is always going to be trying to just keep flying, the Gang are going to keep doing almost anything they can to achieve their atavistic desires and occasionally run their terrible bar in It’s Always Sunny, there’s basically always going to be another super-strong alien Superman can punch into orbit.
These are pretty bad goals in a tabletop game, of course. If your bard just really wants to find him some handsome young man to settle down with, the odds are good that most of your friends are not going to be on-board for long scenes in which you go a-courtin’. But in an MMORPG, these kinds of long-term low-intensity goals are the literal lifeblood of ongoing roleplaying.
None of this is to say that your characters won’t accomplish significant things. That’s almost a certainty. It’s just that making it your primary goal to the exclusion of other objectives leaves you in a place where you are more likely than not to be disappointed. You will find yourself looking for big moments and not getting them, setting up major villains who can never feel wholly plausible because you know they’re there to be knocked down at best… or tying yourself to the fate of NPCs neither you nor your fellow roleplayers can control at worst.
This isn’t to say that MMORPGs should have characters whose goals are all devoted to just living; if your character wants to get into a proper donnybrook, that’s actually totally appropriate! But it needs to be motivated and guided. Instead of seeking to kill [IMPORTANT NPC] for Plot Reasons, maybe she wants to fight ever-greater threats because she wants to test herself. Or maybe she secretly wants to die in a way that feels earned and historic. Or maybe she says it’s the former, but it’s really the latter.
The point is that you need to develop a character with an ongoing set of goals that are focused more about a continued existence instead of Doing One Thing. It’s possible that Doing One Thing will become very important for a while, but it can be an outgrowth of other elements that lead naturally to having one goal which, in turn, leads into other goals.
Roleplaying in an MMORPG is more like a TV series with an open ending. The Enterprise is going to move on to another planet next week with some new weird stuff taking place, and that doesn’t mean the stuff happening this week doesn’t matter, but it does mean that you can’t build your main cast around doing The One Thing at which point their character arcs are over. You build goals, yes, but those goals are fluid, and sometimes wanting to eventually knock boots with the cute Orion from Engineering has to take a backseat to other problems that are going on right now.
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.
