To some extent, this can also happen with unlinked players who form strong bonds with like-minded players and then tend to make efforts to play together online.
A perfectly natural and understandable tendency – we will always prefer to roleplay and quest alongside those with whom we have the greatest understanding. Often, their being in the same room and able to enjoy the shared experience is a wonderful added bonus. This is one of the initial attractions of Instant Messengers perhaps.
Now, most of you know me well enough to realise that there is a ‘but…’ coming so let me say right off that I have absolutely no problem with the picture I paint above. It is, as I said, normal human behaviour. We are social animals, we have an innate ability to share thoughts and feelings and we pretty much always achieve more working together than we could do alone.
But…
There are some consequences of ‘default grouping’ which I do not like and which take away from the playing experience of others. I’d like to raise a few of those here and ask you all to consider them when you play. Bear in mind that I am highlighting the potentially most worrying examples and not levelling a finger at anyone. If you feel singled out, chances are it’s just that you’ve got a guilty conscience
First, some stereotypes (and feel free to add more if you think of them) another natural tendency is to label folk and put them in boxes after all.
The clique
A group of players that mostly exclude others and will generally only interact with a character who’s player is already part of their circle. This can be compounded by groups who’s players know each other OOCly or who share the same IM or IRC chat rooms.
The pair
Two players who enjoy each other’s company. So much so, that their characters are pretty much only ever seen with the other person’s characters. I’m not referring to players who only have one main character or those who roleplay an ongoing IC relationship, you can’t really help being seen together all the time if that’s the case. These are the pairs who go to unusual lengths to play every new character as joined at the hip to their friend or partners.
Awww man... what is it that’s so bad about this huh? Jeez, don’t you want us to have fun, I mean.. you guys are always going on at us to group and all… why can’t you make up your damned minds
(I’m pretty sure most folks would have wanted to add that in themselves, so that was to save you the trouble.
)The problems then…
It’s intimidating to new players, particularly the inexperienced ones. Hard enough to impress just one other player, never mind a pair or a whole group.
It can also bizarrely twist characters’ relations... X doesn’t like Y, so neither does Z… but Z doesn’t even know Y. Or, as is often the case, doesn’t even know why.
But if you want bizarre.. how about the gnome wizard paired up with dwarven fighter… or all those good-aligned wizards spelling up tieflings orcs bugbears and goblins and what about the evil clerics happening by to raise without fuss the still warm fighters of injustice. Sadly, these things are all too common and driven mostly by OOC considerations I feel.
Cliques and pairs invariably leads to sharing of IC information OOCly. Often this is just a short-cut to saving time in-game, but eventually you’ll have to deal with the temptation of passing around quest solutions or discussing what someone said or did to this alt or another.
Obligations, that’ll trip you up too. You feel obliged to help out your friend or partner’s new alt or you log on your priest because they IM you to say they are dead. So what if your Paladin of Tyr just gave a bunch of coin to a Maskite or your level 50 fighter gave a powerful quest item to their friend barely out of the Training Temple.
Balance, that’s the ‘so what’ and fairness. The game shouldn’t be about what or who you know as a player, it should be about what or who you know as a character – and that doesn’t include the OOC arranging of convenient meetings between alts who really should be poles apart.
Here’s another of my favourites. The one where you switch characters at the drop of a hat to support your friends. We’ve all seen it… heated discussion in MS, a low-level alt leaves and then instants later the close travelling companion or IC partner of one of the debaters shows up to poor scorn on the other.
Thankfully this hasn’t yet filtered through onto the boards, imagine what would happen if friends or partners began posting to support each other when arguing a point or requesting a change to the game.
Anyway, having alienated or upset around half the playing base, here’s where I hand over the floor to the rest of you.
Am I imagining these pitfalls?
Is it fine for off-game partnerships to dictate play?
Is it okay to ignore IC reality in favour of them?
Discuss…
I agree with almost everything you write on the forums, Mariela, but not this. The group currently involved with the Demonbane thing, both groups, and all incidentally involved people, made every effort to involve people. There was absolutely no OOC clique-ness that excluded people from the RP. Chances were given for people to get involved (a certain massive forest getting attacked seems to be a hook to get most PCs involved). As one of the people who tried to get personally involved with most aspects of this RP, I can say quite firmly that there was not any cliqueiness in it. Eventually, decisions had to be made on which PCs would do certain things, but I know for certain that PCs that eventually have gotten involved in one part of the RP at least are varied, and often from completely different "cliques".
