Frontier's Horizon: The Paradox Experiment, Issue Two

(This continues an ongoing series of articles about an experiment in MMO role-playing and collaborative storytelling.)

I took a few seconds to get my interface working, some things tweaked, and then I walked Ren up the steps toward the crowd that usually forms around Miss Liberty. My broadcast channel was filled with requests for teams and some banter. Assuming the Broadcast announcements would not be emitting from the cloudless sky, I had Ren ignore them in character since he had only his backpack and the clothes he was wearing. My first goal was to get Ren, in character, to the contact of Susan Davies.

While near the crowd, I cast out with a few emotes like "Ren stands at the edge of the space, watching everything, and looking slightly nervous," as well as, "Ren looks at a small piece of paper and then looks around at the chaos with confusion." There were a handful of characters nearby but none took notice that I could tell. There was certainly no overt reaction.

Finally, after several minutes of this, I had him approach the knot of heroes and say, "Excuse me." I waited for a response but nothing happened. About the time I was about to do one more emote to push the issue, one of the heroes at Miss Liberty turned around, "Yeah, kid, what do you need?"

Quite happy with the turn of events, I had Ren hold up the note and ask, "Do you know where Miss Susan Davies might be?"

Protokin, the hero, responded with something like, "Never heard of her, kid. My guess is she's in the City Hall." He then emoted that Protokin waved a thumb at the large City Hall building which dominates the center of Atlas Park. He finished it up by turning to Miss Liberty and saying, "Now, Miss Liberty, where were we?"

Success! Though minor, I had hit Roleplay within 12 minutes of coming into world! I had Ren thank him and moved toward the City Hall building. My plan was to have Ren ask more questions when he got inside the building.

Unfortunately, the inside of City Hall was empty. The only other characters around is the NPC character run by the game itself to handle players creating supergroups or guilds. Ever the artist, I had Ren run up to the empty counter and say, "Hellloooo? Anyone back there?" A few players ran past but no responses.

Ren would then logically move onto any other official looking people in the area. There were two in the room, one is the City Representative and the aforementioned Supergroup Clerk, both of which are run by the game and stay silent. Regardless, I had Ren run up to them and post a few lines to represent his side of the communication. This only took a second to draw the attention of a character called Big Daddy Sweetlove.

Big Daddy Sweetlove was not a roleplayer. He was, however, the epitome of a helpful player. This type of interaction happened frequently to me when playing Rusty in character during the Mainland excursion. Basically, a fellow player who believes your roleplay is actually someone needing help on the out of character (OOC) player level, not the in-character (IC) character level. When it happened it always caused me to send a tell to them privately telling them I was RP'ing.

Big Daddy ran up to Ren and immediately asked, "You need help?" I mentioned I was looking for Susan Davies and he responded with, "Nav screen up?", referring to the player interface that allows the PLAYER to move the character around in the game with the aid of maps, compass points, and chat windows. Unfortunately, for him, I had Ren respond with, "What are you talking about?"

"Can you see a compass on your screen?" he asked.

Ren responded that he had no idea what Big Daddy was talking about and that he just wanted to find Susan Davies. I think Big Daddy started to sense the RP at that point and simply said, "ok. follow." He ran me around the corner and to the stairs. From there, he told me where to go to find Susan Davies.

Thanks to Big Daddy Sweetlove I had made my first goal in 28 minutes.

Susan Davies is a contact within the game. What this means is that when you run up and click on her, a pop-up window opens letting you read what she is saying to your character. A contact will usually offer you a series of missions to complete which, in turn, moves you up in levels. At some point, they will offer to have you meet someone new. This new contact will have different storyline missions and game content. A player can then move onwards from there up the level ladder.

For me, this got me a static response of "Do your job well and we'll get along fine, Ren Paradox," that I got to have fun with. I waited for a player to run within hearing range and while facing Susan Davies had Ren say, "What job? What are you talking about?"

The downside was that there was no response and the player exited. Thing slowed considerably at this point. Susan Davies is the contact for Natural origin characters. Needless to say in a superhero game, there are not a lot of "Natural" origin superheroes. Players were few and far between in the office of Susan Davies. Perhaps that is why she was constantly reading the paper?

Everytime a player would draw near I would post something similar regarding Ren's side of the conversation. After nearly fifteen minutes and several players ignoring me, I realized I had to change my tactics or be stuck in Davies' office for the rest of the afternoon. Clicking on the task of going to speak to a Detective Brogan, I turned and headed back outside of City Hall. A few attempts to ask heroes in area about where I could find Detective Brogan turned up nothing and things began to really slow down with no interactions. Perhaps the experiment was going to fail?

At this point, I had to make a few creative changes. First off, I decided Susan Davies would not have just accepted a note and story like Ren's, smile, nod, and then have him to go run off and see a Detective. Some actions would have been taken. I made a few story decisions. I decided that Davies, head of the ELITE department for the entire city, had him scanned and tested with ELITE's equipment. They had found nothing suspicious and had determined he was, indeed a natural with super abilities. She had registered him as a hero in the city's database, sat him down and maybe briefed him a bit, handed him a communication/navigation unit and THEN, sent him out to talk to a detective.

She, did, after all, have a newspaper to finish and could not be bothered with anything less then the city exploding. All in all, I figured this would have taken several hours at best.

I fast forwarded a bit and dumped all that into the character idea. The bottom line is that I still had a young confused man in an unknown city being told to go find a detective that showed up on his communicator/navigation unit. My attempts at having any interaction outside the City Hall proved useless so I moved onward.

I had him run out to the Detective and avoided a few of the bad guy groups scattered around at streetside. At one point, I had him watching three NPC bad guys who are programmed to look like they are breaking into a door. I assumed Ren was NOT about to jump these guys and pull a hero act. As I watched though, a hero ran up and began to paste them with energy beams. I emoted with, "Ren watches the battle." When it was all over the hero ran slightly past Ren and I had Ren say, "That was awesome!"

The player had his hero wave and then kept moving.

In a way, I chalked that up to some good RP. Right out of a comic book, actually.

While at the Detective, I did some more one sided comments but there were no players in the area. Things were starting to look grim. Eventually giving in, I clicked on the task the Detective had for me which was to go save a rave dance party from a gang of super criminals called Skulls. Though I thought it odd for a newbie to get the assignment, I figured Ren would freak out a bit about this. I also decided it was time to get him back to better RP waters for said freakout.

Back at City Hall, I had him slowly work his way up to the podium underneath the giant statue of Titan outside of City Hall. This area, close to City Hall, is typically known as an unofficial gathering area for the players that goes back years to the games beta testing stage. Once there, I saw one or two other players roleplaying a bit. I had Ren move to the outskirts of the social group. The goal was to see if A.) someone would try to help him with the assignment or B.) have Ren hand off the Skull assignment to a "real hero." Like at Miss Liberty, I had him ask again, "Excuse me."

At the one hour and a half mark, things were about to finally get going...