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Before UO and Everquest, the MUD and it's derivatives reigned supreme. The typical MUD was essentially D&D in a world of monsters and other players. Chaos reigned and RP was hard to find. Why RP when talking about getting more XP and equipment stats was so much more worthwhile to playing the game? A player could see their stats and how much XP was needed to acheive the next level, so why not talk about it? It was a game, and it was meant to be played and won. End of story.

Then the Tiny branch of MUD emerged. No more combat. No stats. No levels. Just players logging into a server to create and participate in a social world. People were friends. They talked, created alternate personalities and begin to role play. And from this, the themed social MUD arose. Now you could connect to a non-combat based online world where everyone was playing characters from the same time and location, participating in large scale role playing in the same universe. You could find online worlds under the themes of Star Wars, Star Trek, Vampire, and any other role playing game you could think of. You could fight other players (since conflict is a great driving force of role play), but combat was rarely the central goal of the players. Characer development and furthering your characters goals was the point, not killing people or monsters or leveling.

Using modern methods of literature and time travel, we arrive in the present. Ultima Online appears and calls itself the first persistant online multiplayer game. Since it is graphical in nature, and being pushed by a huge company, the typical gaming community digs into the game and this `new' genre. And the game has a well developed combat system, levels, all the items are combat oriented for the most part. Hence combat ensues. End of story.

Then Everquest shows up. Nothing has really changed. Except now people seem to really want Role Play. I hear it all the time, yet I never see it in the people who are willing to plunk down the money to play the game. Sure, the players seem deep in thought over how to keep people from killing the same monsters over and over or how to keep people from killing NPCs just to get rare equpment, but does anyone actually want to RP? And even if they did, could they actually do it on Everquest or UO? Maybe, but why bother? Repeat history.

I think someone needs to create a combat-less or combat minimal version of Everquest. Promote RP first, then add combat to those who have shown they don't need it for anything except RP. Hence my saying at the beginning of this article. It worked in the text world, why not the graphical one? To acheive real RP, you have to start at the social end of online gaming and swing towards the action side slowly. Then you stop when people RP and combat is still just a facilitator of RP. If you start from the other endof the spectrum, no one will be willing to start RPing when there are more important things to worry about (like XP and equipment gathering).

since june 7 1999