Viti

ROFLMAO, gawd I love you guys! Thanks for trying to help my pathetically uninformed ass.

You did note I have NEVER played an RPG (unless you count the PS2 of Baldur's Gate)?...the terminology you are using is all geek, er, I mean Greek to me. Seriously, it all sounds very complicated...I had imagined a sort of cross between online chat and a video game. I must be way off base.

Answerer

How about the world of warcraft, guys? Sounds pretty good to me.

Soyin Milka

MMPORPGs are evil LadyShea

They're online. Other players don't see your face or don't have to face consequences for behaving like jerks, so many of them do. When I tried versions where PvP (Where a player can kill another player's character) is allowed, my beginning characters would be killed pointlessly, over and over, by people who had been playing the game for months or years. Their characters were way more powerful than mine. There was no challenge in killing me. It was like an elephant stepping on an ant. There was no "reason" to kill me in any role-playing sense either. Often, they would not even say a single word to me. They would just kill me because they saw me on their way to some place else. They did it because they could and because someone who could do it to them when they were beginners did it to them to. End of story.

The game I played the most (Everquest) is designed to favor those who accumulate the most wealth. It makes greed a key to success. The worst effect of this is that it encourages players to "solo" (hunt alone) rather than find partners to hunt with, because that way they don't have to share the loot (coins and items found on the corpses of monsters). The best characters to "solo" in Everquest are druids and, unsurprisingly, they are the most common. By far.

There's another perverse effect of greed that discourages some beginners. To be able to find a group willing to take you in for a hunt, you need to be good at what you do. In Everquest, that essentially means having good equipment. People who played the game for a long time usually have a very powerful character they use to "farm" money and items (Hunting monsters that are easy for them to kill because they are designed for characters of lower level). With that money they "twink" new characters they make (That means giving their new characters equipment they could not have gotten on their own). The end result of this is that new characters played by real beginners have to compete with "twinked characters", soloers and farmers for the monsters that were supposedly designed for new characters played by beginners. The competition for ressources simply can't be won by beginners.

The worse effect of the perpetual search for game wealth is what it does to some players. I talked with people who spent most of their free time playing the game so they could get enough platinum coins to buy a new spell or a robe. I even met a guy who bragged about spending over 100 hours playing during spring break. It makes these people sound like zombies obsessed with a pixelized version of reality.

It's not really worth it anyway. Killing stuff over and over gets really boring pretty fast. There's not a lot of role-playing. Some people call you "lady" or "lord", but most players I've met used short hands like "r u a girl irl?" or "can u sow?" I think the most common form of role-playing in these games is cyber-sex between unsuspecting males.

I had some fun playing Everquest because I was playing with one of my older brothers and some of his friends. They're a bunch of old geeks and they were making me in game gifts all the time, so I didn't have to endure the rigors of having to hunt to get my own equipment. If you are planning on playing on a MMPORPG with people you know offline, that can be fun. Otherwise I'd stay away from games where the main objective seems to gain wealth by killing monsters. Boring, boring, boring.

Baldur's Gate is old but it's fun. There's a multi-player option that works well. I'm still playing a game with my older brother, his girlfriend, and another friend. Once a week for four or five hours. I like it a lot more than MMPORPGs.

Bah.
I wish you to have fun whatever you do

Soyin

Dark Jedi

Wander over to any local college student union bulletin board. Read any RPG notices, and give them a call. Ask if they are willing to teach a total newbie. Most will be willing.

Everyone should try their hand at a paper RPG at least once. It is a great social experience, and a good way to exersize your mind.

Answerer

The most common thing I see about MMPORPG is that it encourages people to hack and 'steal'. Most players often ended up selling their hard-trained character to people who just started playing.

Clarice

My husband and I play Everquest, and we've had a ball with it. It is something like a regular RPG combined with a chat environment. To give you an idea of what it's like, here's what you'd do:

Go buy Everquest at the software store. Just start with the basic edition - it's cheap and will give you an idea if it's worth investing in the expansions. Install on your system and activate your account by giving Sony your credit card number. IIRC, it's $12/mo, so it's not much of an investment if you decide you hate it and cancel after 1-2 months.

You'll have to choose a server to play on. As a newbie, I'd say avoid Player versus Player servers (PvP) where other players can kill your character. I say, play on the Nameless, since that's where we play.

Then you'll need to create a character. Caster's Realm has a great guide to what the various classes are like, and how to build an optimum one. Some characters, like warriors or clerics, really need a group to play with, which is nice - you get the social aspect of the game, which is the whole point, AFAIC. Some characters, like necromancers or druids, are good at soloing, which can be nice at times. I have a high level warrior, and also a necro, who I play when I'm feeling misanthropic.

Anyway, if you do decide to try EQ, let me know - you can join my guild, and I can at least give you some money to get you started, if not some nice equipment as well. I also have a low level cleric so we could group together. Being in a guild is nice, since you have people you can trust to help you, and you know they won't do something dumb in a group and get you killed.

I agree that there are some true buttheads in the game - people who do nothing but beg for money or beneficial spells, or people who buy high level characters on e-bay, have no clue how to play them, and get their entire group killed as a result. But really, for the most part, EQ restores my faith in humanity. Most people are honest and generous. You will find strangers randomly giving you equipment and casting beneficial spells on you, because most people like to help out newbies. There's also a thriving system of commerce, and lots of exchanges occur that require honesty - there are circumstances aplenty where people accept money for doing a service, and could easily just take off with the loot without doing what they promised, but I've never seen this happen.

You can also make some good friends in the game. One of the most memorable nights I spent on EQ was an evening spent camping (waiting for a particular monster to spawn) with my guildmates. We spent the time getting drunk and teaching each other our respective languages (Barbarian, Halfling, and Dwarf).

Caveat: As you may have gathered, I have little resembling a real life. If you desire to go outdoors or see flesh and blood friends with any frequency, EQ may not be for you.

Edit: gee, you might want to know what actual gameplay is like.

Basically, you have a first-person perspective, though you can choose other camera angles if you like. You move your character using the keyboard, and can perform actions with either the mouse or hotkeys.

A typical day would be to select a geographic area which has monsters you'd like to hunt, and go there by running or, if you're lucky, getting someone to teleport you there (later game expansions make travel easier with self-teleportation hubs). If you're soloing, you "buff" yourself with whatever spells you might have, adding to your strength, armor class, damage dealing, and so forth, and you go forth and kill. It can take some creative thinking and trial and error to find the right approach for a particular area/opponent.

If you need others to help you (my warrior needs at least someone to heal her after battles), you can "shout" in the chat channel for a group, and turn on a flag so that others looking at your character know you are looking for a group. Once you find a group to play with, the casters in the group will buff the fighters, and the fighters go find monsters to kill. While things can get repetitive, there are definitely challenges, like how to split up a big group of monsters so you don't get mobbed.

After playing for a while, you will probably become familiar with the players around your level, and learn to avoid the few bozos who don't know what they're doing. A good group will have some leadership by one person, and a defined system for assigning tasks and distributing the loot dropped by monsters.

When your inventory fills up, you can go to a town to sell things and deposit stuff in your bank account, which is accesible from any bank (i.e., you don't have to run back to the town you originally deposited stuff in).

Animesh

I've tried Everquest, Anarchy Online, and Dark Age of Camelot. I could never get past the "okay, here I go killing snakes and spiders and rats . . . then sitting down and resting . . . then going back out to kill snakes and spiders and rats" phase. Last xmas, I decided to push and play Dark Age of Camelot. I was actually getting somewhere, but by the time I reached the "fun part" (realm vs. realm battles) I had burned myself out.

Invader Tak

Personally, I'm enjoying multi-player Neverwinter Nights.

I found a persistant world I really like a lot, but I also do quite a bit of server shopping. There are literally hundreds of servers out there to choose from.

Bialar Crais

If you want online rpg, and don't mind text only, there's plenty of MUD/MUSHes/MOOs out there heavily into role playing. The Mudconnector is the place to start.

Personally, being something of a Jordanite, like WoT-based RPing MUDs like:

Dragons' Fang
A moment in Tyme

Bialar Crais

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