I got an email from my chief Elf on my Roleplaying Sim:
“Dear Lord,
I’m going on holiday, so is the Potter and Human, all at the same time, see you in a week.
The Elf”
Now I must say that my first reaction was “Never trust a Hobbit” and then I remembered there are no Hobbits involved… although I still maintain that Hobbits are to be handled with caution, but this is an Elf, they’re supposed to be all sweetness and light…. which also probably means you should treat them with the caution.
Now the problem I have here is that as Evil Overlord of said sim, I may now have to speak to the inhabitants, in character! This could be a long week.
I generally trust the admins to run the sim as they best see fit, with the odd stepping on toes when I question some of the rules. I keep a watchful eye on their website and forum to see what they’re plotting and they really are a great bunch and have proven to be self sufficient when it comes to hiring entertainment or needing funds for projects, but now I’m faced with having to see if the Mer Folk are thriving, whether the pirates are at war with the Queen and whether the lycan and vampires are behaving themselves.
I’ll have to catch up with happenings because previously I’ve landed to sort out some technical aspects to find them being threatened by a Golem or standing around a pool of blood after the pirates went on the rampage, I always feel awkward tinkering with prims and rental boxes whilst they’re talking about latest developments, especially when I don’t know what the latest developments are!
There are a lot of opportunities for roleplay in Second Life and recent talk of scriptable NPC’s does interest me, we’ll see how that develops but where Second Life does struggle is in terms of combat, we aren’t going to see a blood and guts fest like the forthcoming Warhammer 40K has, which is maybe something we should be thankful for but combat is miles away from being a draw in Second Life, which pleases some people as one of my admins once sighed at me “Why does so much of roleplaying have to be geared towards some great war” indeed, especially on a single small sim, war, what is it good for?
I’ve seen Western Cowboy style roleplay, science fiction, post apoc, schools, traditional fantasy roleplay and much more, the scope in Second Life is large and as admins and sim owners we can direct storylines, there are opportunities to let your imagination run wild and create fantastic stories. However the actual roleplay experience could do with some oomph to make it more appealing to wider audiences.
In an ideal world I’d have several roleplaying sims, I always liked the idea of a minimum of five which would have been two large cities, a sea, a forest and some other small villages along the way, but that’s expensive for a roleplaying experience in Second Life and as I said, combat and NPC’s aren’t there. I do think if someone came up with a spectacular roleplaying idea and system that it could prosper as a paid for membership, there are examples of paid memberships working with some roleplay, but not as far as I know with fantasy/medieval style, but maybe one day hey. I still think Second Life will have arrived as a broadly appealing platform when people come not to Second Life itself, but to a sim or set of sims with a theme, when that’s the draw, rather than Second Life.