Eccentric Flower:200909/For Bunny

Bunny42:

Ooh. Okay. The scenery is remarkable, but I can see where it would be very confusing, depending upon where you are on your journey. Thus, maps. You reference in-game maps. I think that's what I was used to seeing when I played with the Dragonslayers. But we had no virtual locations, only the flat maps. I'm getting that you are clarifying some stuff that was left off of the in-game maps, according to what you are seeing as you progress, yes?

Thank you, kind sir or madam, for this glimpse into another world. So, do you roll up your own characters and select abilities, etc. as one does in D&D? You're playing with or against people all over the planet, right? Is there any possibility of characters overlapping? Do you have a local area (Higropor, Nan Wathran, the Old Forest, etc) where your quests take place, or is everyone in the world playing on the same field? That'd be crowded... This is what you play with Mel? Are you two sort of like a merry band of slayers, or is everyone basically on the same quest? I think I'd better look at Wiki a minute...

-- 21:15, 3 September 2009 (BST)

Columbina:

Exactly. I made a paper map because it was so easy to get lost in the Nan Wathren area from the in-game view. The game's flat maps are (perhaps deliberately) not very helpful.

This particular game is, of course, in the Tolkien mythos, so first you select a race (human, elf, hobbit, dwarf) and then a class (hunter, champion, lore-master, etc) each of which will have a different set of skills and so do things (especially combat) in different ways. A hunter, for example, does best with a bow and therefore prefers to kill at range rather than facing up-close enemies, if possible. You don't directly control your character's statistics/abilities, but what you do/learn/equip during the course of gameplay affects them.

Right now the LOTRO world encompasses all of Tolkien's Middle Earth from the Shire to a small portion just east of the Misty Mountains. In effect, and with some alterations. The Shire is missing its detached South Farthing, for example. In real terms, the scale is obviously reduced - it takes somewhere between 5-10 minutes to cross the Shire on a fast horse, double that on foot. You can go through Moria and get to Lothlorien, but you can't go to Mirkwood, Gondor, Rohan, or Mordor - they don't exist yet. Quests take place all over, but the game is not especially crowded. Although everyone on the same game server is playing in the same world and can interact, the world is big enough - and the server populations ideally kept just small enough - that you don't step on each other's feet often. Many quests in the world cannot be done alone; for most players of these games, forming groups to do things is the whole point.

Mel and I have various characters, some of which have regular pairings. The character in those screenshots is a hunter, and tends to pair these days with a character of Mel's who is a minstrel, who in this universe plays the healer/cleric role. We are sometimes on the same quests, sometimes on different ones.

-- 21:29, 3 September 2009 (BST)

ProfRobert:

You are in a maze of twisty, little passages, all alike.

See, I can joke in geek, too!

-- 22:23, 3 September 2009 (BST)

Mel:

I just want to say again, as I have said before (but not here) that anybody who is a Tolkien geek at all is doing themselves a huge disservice not to get a 10-day trial of this game and at least poke around the Shire a little bit. Because how often do you get the chance to experience one of your favorite books as a three-dimensional world that you can interact with?

(I really only want to keep going in this game so I can get to Lothlorien one of these days. I don't care near as much about Moria. And I'm hoping they'll hang on long enough to get the next expansion out so we can at least see Rohan one day.)

-- 00:36, 4 September 2009 (BST)

Bunny42:

I found the answer to my next question all by myself. (Wikipedia and I, that is.) I was puzzling out how you could possibly partake in a given quest with three or four thousand other players, all striving for the same outcome or prize.

Then I came across something called instance dungeons, or instancing. Ahhhh. That makes much more sense. It roughly corresponds to duplicate bridge, which requires several groups of people to play a given set of hands as they rotate through the tables. I couldn't get how your band of six or so could be searching for the magic seed bowl or whatnot, at the same time as 30 - 40 other groups were doing the same thing in the same location. I had envisioned...clones?...of the location, such that only the members of your particular party could interact in your particular virtual copy. Turns out I was right, but didn't know how to express it.

I continue to be astonished at the intricacies and progressions of these games. The reason I left D&D was that I did not grow up in this particular culture, and was spending all of my time trying to catch up to the level of today's gamer group. Can't be done.

-- 03:01, 4 September 2009 (BST)

Mel:

Bunny, also remember that most games run simultaneous copies on several different servers in order to spread out the load, which also serves to minimize the problem of many people trying to do the same quest. WoW has several hundred servers, I think. And in games like WoW (and LOTRO) which are mostly non-instanced, it's still a problem. You end up "camping" in one spot waiting for a certain monster to re-spawn so you can kill it. The big dungeons and raids are instanced, but most of the regular quests are not.

I did not grow up in gaming culture either. Col and I have been playing these games for over three years, and I still feel like a newbie from time to time.

-- 08:03, 4 September 2009 (BST)

Bunny42:

Mel, thanks for those encouraging words. Sean's bi-weekly table RPG is held here at our house, and I listen to these six guys, consulting their own personal copies of the player's handbook (I believe they're using Mage: The Ascension, right now) and arguing arcane, esoteric details about entropy and prime, and I think geez, where was I when all of this was happening? On another planet, no doubt, or at least in a parallel universe.

Hmmm... So, while you are "camping" and awaiting subsequent events, can you watch what another group is doing? I'm not sure you'd want to, since it might color your approach to a given quest, but could you, if you so chose? Again, I reference duplicate bridge, where one foursome doesn't get to see how another foursome plays a given hand. It could stifle creativity, surely, but, then again, it might help less-seasoned players to learn new strategies.

-- 16:34, 4 September 2009 (BST)

Settsimaksimin:

horsey butt!

(sorry... :)

-- 17:43, 4 September 2009 (BST)

Columbina:

No need to apologize, that was my dominant impression of these screenshots as well. Having a horse is convenient, but you sure do end up staring at its rear end a lot.

-- 19:32, 4 September 2009 (BST)

Mel:

You can see what other people are doing, but it's hard to make much of it. Maybe Col can see stuff I don't, having been at this longer, but usually most of the impression I get is a big blur and a lot of clanking noises. Usually you get there and the boss is already dead, anyway, and so there's nothing to watch.

I don't think I have the patience for D&D - all that fiddling around with paper and stuff. Back when I was in high school that was a boy thing, anyway, and I was not invited. (I'm not at all sure my mother would have let me go if I had been, come to think of it.)

-- 05:43, 6 September 2009 (BST)

Bunny42:

Mel, D&D seems still to be predominately boy play. At table, anyway. I ran across a few women in the online version (well, hell, I was one of 'em) but six or seven guys play the game here on Sundays. They're all old friends and have been at this particular game grouping for over ten years. It's a way for non-sports-oriented males to get together and swap stories and catch up and just, I dunno, bond, I guess. Some are married, some not. The wives and SOs seem grateful for a day to themselves, so it's all good.

In LOTRO, doesn't it get boring, just waiting for some other group to get out of the way, or are there other things you can be doing to pass the time? In D&D there's learning time and sleeping to catch up, and rehab time if you've been gravely injured, etc. But that usually takes place from one game day to the next, so that you start the new session relaxed and retooled and raring to go. With the 24/7 access to LOTRO et al. I am wondering how one passes dead time. Chatting? Multi-tasking? What?

-- 19:46, 6 September 2009 (BST)

Mel:

Well, the camping thing doesn't really happen all that much - especially in LOTRO, where the population's not that high compared to WoW. In WoW, you had to worry about yet another person/group coming along if you wandered away, so you pretty much had to stay put and chat, or whatever. LOTRO is not like that, for the most part. You can wander at least a little ways off and kill wolves or whatever and not worry too too much about the boss getting killed again while you're gone.

I always feel like Col has more dead time than I do - everything takes me longer, like selling stuff, or reskilling, or such. So I have less of a problem with that than he does. About the only multi-tasking time is if you're on a pay horse (meaning the ones which serve as a taxi service between towns, as opposed to the ones you get later on which you can steer yourself) and that tends to become bathroom time, more often than not!

-- 06:25, 7 September 2009 (BST)