GW RPGs

Alright, so this has very little to do with Treize, but I felt like ranting about it. So nyah!

I am an avid role player, as anyone who knows me can tell you, and being such I'm constantly on the look out for good online RPGs. And being the obsessed anime fan I am, I'm usually on the look out for games that deal with my favorite shows. The result is that I have stumbled across a lot of really bad RPGs and I've begun to notice certain things that are similar in each of them. So, with out further ado I present my list of pet peeves, annoyances, and problems I've found in GW RPGs.

Page

The first thing I look at when deciding if I might want to join an RPG or not is the page. Yes, that is indeed judging a book by its cover but I've found the old maxim of not judging a book by its cover to be untrue at times. Really, go look at some books published now a days. Good authors get good covers because publishers want the books to catch people's eyes and get sold. The same is true when it comes to an RPG. If I find myself on a page with jumbo-sized images of the pilots, annoying animated gifs, huge fonts, and a horrid midi that I can't turn off it shows me that the person didn't put a lot of thought into the page. The page was obviously built by a person who didn't care about the RPG enough to actually take some time on it. Chances are that RPG wont last long and on a whole would be a very bad role playing experience.

Usually with bad pages I will just hit the back button and get on out of there. But sometimes the page isn't *to* horrid and I explore further. Usually these pages all suffer from the same thing after the first page: un-organization, randomly changed page layouts and broken links and images. At this point I hit the back button and leave, never to return, and continue my search for RPGs.

Plot

One of the things that plagues Gundam Wing RPGs is lack of plot. Many of them just focus on fighting, completely ignoring the fact the GW does indeed have a plot and doesn't just focus on fighting. Many RPGs ignore the fact that there are plenty of interactions between the characters and bits of political maneuvering and such. The point of an RPG is to *play a role* and advance the plot, not just beat the stuffing out of anyone who comes near. That's not role-playing that's merely one of those fighting games with out all the fancy graphics.

Characters

This is one of the biggest problems among GW RPGs and there are several facets of the problem, which will be addressed separately.

- "Heero? Is that you?" Almost every character in GW that gets more than one or two episodes of screen time gets some sort of development through out the show. Unfortunately, that character development often doesn't carry over into an RPG. Certainly no ones going to play a character perfectly, but often the characters become stereotypes of themselves. They become two dimensional, which makes them less fun to role play with

- "It's-it's a Gundam!" �And another and another and another. New Gundam pilots are all the rage in RPGs and often they are way overdone. The first problem is that the new pilots are often bland copies of the original pilots, without any real reason for existing. They invariably want to destroy to oh-so-evil OZ and anything even remotely connected with it, usually for no apparent reason. Not only are these characters boring but they get repetitive very quickly. Plus, the addition of new pilots leads to another problem in RPGs

- "OZies out-numbered." Apparently very few people want to play the so-called bad guys of Gundam Wing. Often one can find three or four extra Gundam pilots in an RPG, whole truckloads of Gundam supporters (no, I'm not counting Quatre's little band of followers either), and only two or three OZ characters. I myself have been in this situation, playing my sole little OZ pilot and going up against two or three Gundams at once. It really, really sucks to be a lone OZie. No matter what you do you get squished by the sheer number of Gundams, usually all played within and inch of god-moding.

Participation

This is a HUGE pet peeve of mine. A lot of GW RPGs only have two or three of the members participating. People just make characters and don't do a damn thing with them. Not only is that annoying for the few people who do participate and try to keep the plot going, it often leads to the outnumbered OZies thing I talked about earlier.

Well, I think I'm finally finished with this rant. I may add more to it as I think of it or run across stuff, but for now I think I've covered everything. Whew, it's nice to have finally gotten it all out. Of course now I'm even more determined to make a site like S6 for Gundam Wing characters�

Back