Posted by Sa Chi | 14 Comments

All The Galaxy’s A Stage: The Role Player’s Hidden Grind

All The Galaxy’s A Stage is a regular column at Ask A Jedi with some lofty, creative goals.  On one hand, we will be discussing and exploring meaningful topics to support the role-play experience and community.  On the other hand, we also want to introduce the casual Role-Player to the writing-acting experience that can add so much more to an MMORPG like Star Wars: The Old Republic.  Share your perspectives and experience as we co-create magical story in that galaxy far, far away!

Socially Acceptable

Social gear is gotten from social points.  Every conversation dialog you participate in gets you points. If you’re in a 2, 3 or 4 player group and enter a heroic instance you are going to get social points. Specifically, you get a point for each player in each response if you don’t win the roll, and two points if you do. When rolling with a 4-player group you will get 8 points when you win and 4 points when you lose.

But what does 8 or 2 points for each moment of dialog actually mean?  Well, the scale on the character sheet seemed to go up to at least a thousand points. I was not clear (since I did n0t get into many groups) as to how this works over time. On average there seemed to be perhaps 3 to 5 opportunities for dialog in a heroic quest. I suspect we will be looking at between 10-20 points per heroic quest run. Approximately 60-70 heroic quests will be needed to cap out that first tier of social points, assuming 1,000 social points is the target.

That does it! I hate these pants, and I'm simply done with this grind.

Posted by Sa Chi | 15 Comments

All The Galaxy’s A Stage: My Initial Impressions Of Role-Play Potential In SWTOR

All The Galaxy’s A Stage is a regular column at Ask A Jedi with some lofty, creative goals.  On one hand, we will be discussing and exploring meaningful topics to support the role-play experience and community.  On the other hand, we also want to introduce the casual Role-Player to the writing-acting experience that can add so much more to an MMORPG like Star Wars: The Old Republic.  Share your perspectives and experience as we co-create magical story in that galaxy far, far away!

I’ve had the chance to beta test TOR for a while now, and I thought I’d start off with an article about my initial impressions of RP potential for TOR.

The first thing that jumped out at me when I entered the game was the magniificent ambiance of every environment I stumbled across. Planets in TOR are gorgeous and are dripping with atmosphere. Admittedly, I played a Jedi Sage, and so I spent most of my time on Tython and Coruscant.  But regardless of the planet I really enjoyed the grandeur of the setting from the moment I logged in.

Exploring the environments in the game really did inspire me with the mental imagery for building story. At one point I realized little ideas for story and events were jumping out at me each time I moved into a new area.

As I wandered around it became clear that I would have no end of choice for places to RP. Cantinas are obvious starting points. However, the senate building on Coruscant not only offered a sumptuous setting, but also had the scenery and space. Throw in the ‘political’ backdrop and I can see some great RP scenes in the making there.

Posted by Sa Chi | 6 Comments

All The Galaxy’s A Stage: RP, Cliques, And Entitlement

All The Galaxy’s A Stage is a regular column at Ask A Jedi with some lofty, creative goals.  On one hand, we will be discussing and exploring meaningful topics to support the role-play experience and community.  On the other hand, we also want to introduce the casual Role-Player to the writing-acting experience that can add so much more to an MMORPG like Star Wars: The Old Republic.  Share your perspectives and experience as we co-create magical story in that galaxy far, far away!

In my experience there is merit to checking in once in a while to be clear on why you do what you do. I was thinking about why I RP the other day and the answer was simple.  I like to have fun, and co-creating story with others has resulted in some very memorable and fun experiences.

That said, in preparing for launch and the impending escalation of RP activity I also got to thinking. What kind of role-player am I? If I were to rank why I RP I think this would be my top three:

1. To have fun as I co-create the very best story I can with friends
2. To make new friends and have my imagination stretched by the creative genius of those I meet for the first time
3. To encourage newcomers to RP

It should be obvious to any regular reader of this column that I really take number 3 seriously. After all, I’ve been writing for Ask A Jedi for a few months now, and have taken great pleasure in having a platform to share some of my perspectives and reflect some of my experiences from over 30 years of role-playing.

Posted by Sa Chi | 7 Comments

All The Galaxy’s A Stage: Metagaming

All The Galaxy’s A Stage is a regular column at Ask A Jedi with some lofty, creative goals.  On one hand, we will be discussing and exploring meaningful topics to support the role-play experience and community.  On the other hand, we also want to introduce the casual Role-Player to the writing-acting experience that can add so much more to an MMORPG like Star Wars: The Old Republic.  Share your perspectives and experience as we co-create magical story in that galaxy far, far away!

There’s a concept in role-play known as metagaming.  For those of you new to role-play, this is the use of knowledge by a character that they should not have access to.  Wikipedia defines metagaming as, “the use of out-of-game information or resources to affect one’s in-game decisions.”  When this approach is consciously taken by a player it is usually to gain some advantage in the game or RP scene.

Imagine the following scenario.  A character of yours is killed by another character.  You then create a new character who has detests the killer of your old character, and may even invest lots of time in creating a backstory to justify this hatred.  This would be metagaming.

Posted by Sa Chi | 3 Comments

All The Galaxy’s A Stage: RP Tracker – SWTOR-RP Wiki

All The Galaxy’s A Stage is a regular column at Ask A Jedi with some lofty, creative goals.  On one hand, we will be discussing and exploring meaningful topics to support the role-play experience and community.  On the other hand, we also want to introduce the casual Role-Player to the writing-acting experience that can add so much more to an MMORPG like Star Wars: The Old Republic.  Share your perspectives and experience as we co-create magical story in that galaxy far, far away!

For this month’s RP Tracker I would like to highlight a new feature that the team at swtor-rp recently released; the new swtor-rp Wiki is now live.  From what I understand the wiki design team opted to spend several months configuring, coding, and testing the best possible Wiki they could.  In my opinion, this effort was undoubtedly worth it.  As a member of the RP community I would like to extend a big thank you to the many spies that died to bring us…Oh wait, wrong context.