C-3PO and R2-D2 banter while you wait

One of my favorite rides of all time (despite George Lucas’s attempts to ruin it) is “Star Tours.”  In the ride, you go on a scheduled tour of the Star Wars universe and thanks to the bumbling efforts of your ship’s pilot droid, you end up in mortal danger, culminating in taking part in the Battle of Yavin (the end of Episode IV).

One of the great things they do to set up the ride is an elaborate set up in the waiting line to make it seem like you really have stepped into a real space port.  Animated droids are busy repairing ships and making comments to one another and it is humorous to listen to the conversations going on while waiting in line.

For an adult, a certain amount of childlike suspension of disbelief is asked for.  You know that millions of people have taken this ride before and millions after you will as well.  But thanks to a clever introduction, set up and follow through, the disbelief makes it all part of the fun.

Computer games, and especially MMORPGs, also request a certain level of suspension of disbelief.  In the World of Warcraft, the human campaign has a plotline where a particularly troublesome bandit named “Van Cleef” must be executed and the player must take the head back to the Castle as proof of his defeat.

Van Cleef has how many heads?

I found it particular amusing that after Van Cleef’s defeat, my entire party was able to collect multiple heads from Van Cleef’s body, so that we could all complete the quest.  These are things that you allow as part of the fun of a game, but it required too much suspension for me to disbelieve the “amusement park” feel of an MMORPG.

Single player games do a better job of treating the player as special and unique in the world.  In an MMORPG, the plot movers and shakers are people like Thrall and Arthas – computer controlled characters.  You, the player, and the 8 million others players are simply the errand runners in this elaborate amusement park.

Until the tools for creating very unique roleplaying experiences in a short amount of time have been perfected, the only place I can find great storytelling for a group of people is in a table-top roleplaying game.  For as great computer games are, they cannot match what humans are able to create with the power of their imaginations.

In one campaign that I was running as a gamemaster, the players had defeated and captured a female drow (dark elf) bard.  Being a party of heroes, they could not outright kill a defenseless and defeated enemy but as a bard, she had the power to seduce and control the party through the sound of her voice.  So the party kept her under close surveillance.

A Captured Drow

Because of this awkward situation, she took advantage and became a foil for the group.  At every opportunity, she spoke and made the party second-guess itself, and verbally berated them, denigrated them, and humiliated them in gleefully vicious word play.  It became so intense that the cleric, the “holy warrior”, of the group wanted to kill her.  To the intolerant cleric, a drow is, after all, born evil.

One of the players created a monk who spent his days mastering his body through meditation and the practice of martial arts.  He was the crown prince of an kingdom and threw away his fame and fortune in an disagreement with his father over the need to expand the empire.  The monk was sitting and meditating while the party was resting from battle when the beautiful drow sat next to him and asked him a question.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked.

“That my body, this existence, is merely an illusion,” he replied.  The player was using Buddhism as the basis of his monk’s philosophy.

Wryly she asked, “So… Nothing is real?”

“Everything is merely an illusion.  There is no difference between me and the rock I am sitting on.  Nothing is real.”

And with that, the drow coyly drew herself close to the monk.  Being a bard, her features and charm were as much a part of her magic as her voice.  She let the opening on her drow-styled bodice drop to give the young monk a subtle vision of the secrets her clothing hid in curves and mystery and beauty and turning her head, let him brush against her delicate neck.

She planted a deep kiss on the monk’s lips, and after drawing a breath, she parted from him with a deep blush and said, “Tell me I’m not real.”  And with that, she walked away.

The scene I described was not planned by me or the player.  It came and went as a flash in my mind, and the scene was played perfectly by the player whose character was thenceforth flustered and unable to really contend with the drow philosophically or psychologically.  It was her intention to demoralize the monk, one of the toughest warriors of the group.

Instead of simply rolling dice or using rules to accomplish it, we played out a scene that is forever immortalized as a unique and unrepeatable story among friends.  Something that a computer-generated “amusement park” game could never beat.