RPGnet : The Inside Scoop on Gaming

During a relative dry spell at work, I clicked randomly on a few of the new ads here at RPG.net, just to see what I could see. One of the (many) things I saw was www.skotos.net, a website dedicated to online storytelling. Now, I grew up on electronic RP, starting with BBSs, moving to chat rooms, and finally MUDs and MUSHes, so I figured I'd give Skotos a try.

Skotos' premiere game is Castle Marrach - The Forever Winter. It is with this online game that Skotos hopes to revolutionize eRoleplaying (I have no idea if this is a real word/term, but shall use it any ways). Judging by the advances of Castle Marrach, I'd say the folks at Skotos have a good shot at it, provided they do not fall in a wash of complex code and strange syntax.

Castle Marrach is still in beta testing, so there are a few bugs and features that are not online. Rather than releasing a whole slew of toys at once, it seems the designers are taking the 'slow and steady wins the race' tact when it comes to feature release. Though slightly annoying, I can understand the preference for 'inability due to lack of feature' over 'inability due to system-crashing bugs.' Some of the features waiting to be released include emotion signifiers, improved object manipulation, and magic.

As an online game, Castle Marrach is closer to a Zork than it is a Play by Email. You control a player in a mostly text-based environment and interact with others in real time. The system recognizes certain words or actions and can react to them in a limited form of artificial intelligence. Thus, you can 'pet cat' to make a cat purr, or 'punch fat guard' to get in a heap'n help'n of trouble. Because the system can only recognize certain syntax's, players are required to use certain constructions when interacting with the electronic fantasy world about them. This means that when interacting, you must enter your actions in the imperative and you can only use verbs that the system understands, which is a bummer. On the plus side, though, the system does understand some 1500 verbs and 1800 adverbs, which is significantly more than I know. Combining verbs and adverbs adds style to your poses and is required to avoid simple actions like 'Bob jumps' or 'Jane dances' in favor of 'Bob jumps spasmodically' or 'Jane dances divinely.'

I assume that as the system gets more sophisticated, so shall poses and actions. While the combination of 1500 verbs and 1800 adverbs can produce a math-busting number of different poses, 'verbing adverbly' does get a little tiring. Objects are starting to be able to be integrated into poses, so one can 'gesture foppishly with his handkerchief.' The whole imperative syntax thing takes some time to get used to. As a child of MUSH and multi-lined poses of prose, I had great problems interacting with others because the commands I'd enter would be simply too complex for the system to understand. It took a great deal of trial and error before my poor character stopped jerking about like a puppet with a string cut. I assume someone bred on Infocom games would have a much easier time of things.

As to the setting of Castle Marrach, the Skotos team was pretty clever in setting up their premiere game. Just as players would be new to the Skotos system, so shall characters be new to the Castle Marrach setting. All characters wake up from some sort of necromantic cold storage, their memories gone and future uncertain. Rather than being a cheap cop out to avoid creativity, this allows confused players to express their confusion in character. The hints of background information gathered through wandering about the Castle points to a well developed, if vague, setting.

Character generation is without numbers, statistics, or dice. When your character wakes up from necromantic cold storage, you are given some questions to answer in the context of a small, graphical prelude. Like a Mad-Libs, you fill in details about your character, such as name, gender, and lip-size. Before creating my first character, I ran through character generation a few times, creating males and females, just to check to see if the descriptives given were gender specific. They are, so no buxom, balding men for you. Finally, I settled on a consumptive poet/librarian named Henri and leapt into the fray.

Nine tenths of an online game like Castle Marrach or any given MUSH is dealing with other players. One's game really depends on the quality of its players. You can't build a house on sand and all that, after all. Castle Marrach's players, in the eight hours or so I dedicated to the game to qualify this as a playtest review, were mature and helpful. This is never assured on online games, as any EverQuestian ratkiller can attest, especially free ones. I have to wonder if the complex (and spelling intensive!) command system keeps the, ah, more disruptive elements of the eRoleplaying community away. Were it not for Marrach's players, I would not have made it as far as I did and would have been left to cough spasmodically down the Caste's long hallways alone. I do not know if the players I met were all alts of the game's creators, but they certainly were eager to get my character involved in situations and roleplaying, a definite bonus.

So, to sum up:

Boons

o A graphical, java-based client that requires no special software beyond a current web browser to use. This was the sort of thing that MUSH friends and I would pine for three years ago.

o Innovative features, such as proximity, permissions, and object manipulation.

o A well laid out setting full of interesting maguffins and fiddlybits.

o Helpful, mature players.

Banes

o A command system that is sometimes counter-intuitive and takes some time to learn.

o Features that are either not present or buggy. As this system runs on Java, with Java comes Java errors. Sometimes exiting the system makes my computer crash.

o Events based on Pacific time, which annoys us East Coasters and infuriates internationals.

o A too-big play area with not enough players to people it. This is changing as word gets out, though.

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I'm giving Castle Marrach a 4 for style, reflecting the neat layout of the Java-client and room setup. The .pdf helpfiles are a little jumbled with information and room descriptions aren't up to the elaborate MUSH-par I'm used to, so there is room for improvement.

I'm also giving Marrach a 4 for substance, reflecting their genius-like innovations to eRoleplaying as well as those pesky bugs. I'd up this to a 5 or 6 (breaking the scale!) if there was some way to work around the clunky verb-adverbing pose structure. When conjunctions and complex sentences are possible, I'll wet my pants in glee.

In short, the folks at Skotos are making breakthroughs daily in how I waste my workday. If you have a computer, give them a try (www.skotos.net) for a few hours. Pass judgement only after you get the hang of the commands. And if you see a pale guy named Henri stumbling about the halls of Castle Marrach trying to cough up a lung, give me a wave.