Posts Tagged ‘role playing’

New and Interesting:

Derek Smart may be a smart ass, a jack ass or “large and in charge” depending on you look at it, but he is great for getting publicity.

EA may have set the bar so high for Star Wars The Old Republic that even Superman couldn’t clear it. 

And now for the rest of the story…

Kaltxi everyone,

The interesting thing about those mmos that have actual “role playing servers” is that no one on them ever role plays.  Even if you try, the average player will look at you like you have fifteen heads.  It’s sort of an odd aspect of the hobby considering that one of the acronyms often applied to it is massively multiplayer online role-playing game.  The sad truth of the matter is that the only reason most people gravitate toward a role playing server like World of Warcraft’s (WoW) Earthen Ring server is that they somehow feel that the decent person/asshat ratio will be very low.  While it hasn’t happened in WoW, in other mmos we often see role playing servers merged with other servers, or eliminated altogether if there is more than one. Fortunately for those of us with active imaginations (I am certainly one of them) there is only one server in Star Trek Online.  And so, as mentioned yesterday, I present my latest effort, Na’vi me, with a special thanks to whoever the player was that first had idea – it was a good one and it is A LOT of fun.

Name:  Erzuli Taronyu “The Hunter”

Profession: Captain of Pandora’s Revenge

Favorite Quote: “Do you know how difficult it is to fit a tail into a Starfleet Uniform.”

Favorite Entertainer(s):  Blue Man Group*

Favorite Music: Blues… “The blue’s ain’t nothin’ but a good Na’vi feelin’ bad.”

Favorite Song: “Am I blue?”

Turn offs:  Ketuwong (Alien) people who attend a Na’vi wedding for the first time and think no one has ever heard the joke, “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue – say there’s always something blue at a Na’vi wedding!”

Biography:

She gained her immortality and lost her tail after recreating an “accident” involving two rubber bands, a nuclear particle accelerator and fifteen hundred gallons of Saurian Brandy.  Many people had attempted to recreate the famous accident that cast immortality upon Wowbagger “the infinitely prolonged” but no one had ever achieved it.  It is said that those who tried ended up looking silly, dead and usually both.

The situation immediately brings two questions to mind, the first being, “What does one do with immortality?”  Let’s face it friends, forever is a mighty long time. Most sentient species have some concept of an afterlife, but few people ever consider what they would do with an “eternal reward” even if they had it. Oh there are, of course, some cultures (especially on Earth) that believe they come back in some grand continuous cycle of lives repeating endlessly – and to tell the truth just considering the concept gave her the screaming heebee geebees. 

Those who know the history of Wowbagger (and may have even had the good fortune to be insulted by him) know that he occupies his portion of forever by insulting the universe…individually, and “here’s the clincher, in alphabetical order.”

Of course, after successfully repeating Wowbagger’s accident, Erzuli was immediately faced with a second question as well.  She could spend a few millennia hanging around the forest. However when you are part of an indigenous tribe that communes with nature through their tails (unlike some Earth men who,  rumors have it, talk out their posteriors – a remarkable concept to be sure) what do you do when you have suddenly lost your tail?  Well, without the tail, communing with nature, let along actually hanging around in it would be darn difficult to begin with.

Then the words of those who invaded her happy home as a child sprung to mind. It was something that Earth people belonging to a club they called “Starfleet” with what they called a “motto” – travel the universe, meet new and interesting people and kill them. There was another expression that an Earth woman had taught her. She wasn’t like the others. She once told Erzuli “before setting out for revenge you must first dig two graves – One for the one upon whom you seek vengeance, and your own.” It seemed fine to Erzuli, and as good a way to occupy forever as any…time to start digging.

Until later my friends,

Kiyevame

Na’vi words were from “Learn Na’vi” (http://www.learnnavi.org/)

*A popular comedy/performance art group in Chicago.

** Wowbagger the infinitely prolonged” is a character by one of my favorite authors, Douglas Adams.

Another peculiar aspect of roleplaying, a slight problem really, applies only to Star Trek Online.  Many of the players will be fans of one of the series: The Next Generation, Deep Space 9, and Voyager.  The star ships like those that were featured in each series are there for the player to obtain – Voyager, The Enterprise, and the Defiant.  The only problem is that these ships are not in the top tier of ships (Tier Five).   What this means is that they are much weaker in combat, whether pve or pvp, than their Tier Five counterparts – and even updating them with Tier five weapons and consoles does not make them competitive.  So as you level from the Captain tier to the Rear Admiral Tier, you are forced to leave behind that ship you enjoy so much, as it sits unused in the shipyard.