(Continuing my thoughts from Part 1...)

I mentioned previously that there was a lot of room for compromise between "high graphics, low flexibility" and "high flexibility, no graphics".

Second Life was one alternative which offered a lot of flexibility, but it still had issues.

You had the same "recurring fee" problem of an MMO, and it was considerably more of a show-stopper if you needed a significant amount of land to run your game, which you probably would. (As of this writing, Sim prices are $1000 set-up and $200 per month for a full-fledged region, or $200 set-up and $75 per month for a crippled OpenSpace sim. Most roleplaying groups would be rather put-off by that as a prerequisite, to put it mildly.)

And unless you got such a sim, you had no real ability to make your land truly private; parcel ban lines aren't as effective as a closed island in SL. Not everyone wants to hold their tabletop session on the equivalent of the corner sidewalk.

Using SL also would mean that griefer attacks were as much a risk as in an MMO, if not more (few MMOs have as many groups explicitly and publicly dedicated to deliberately ruining the experience for others as SL does, precisely because of the lack of subscription fees).


After awhile, I concluded that a good solution might be to go back to my old stomping grounds: First Person Shooters were traditionally very flexible thanks to the precedent of id software's Doom and Quake directly supporting modders, and they had excellent quality.

A modern game like Half-life 2, combined with something like Garry's Mod (a sandbox mod, sort of like Second Life, only using HL2 props and supporting Lua scripting) would be very useful for creating compelling environments. Garry's Mod even has a roleplaying gametype straight out of the box, though it has always felt a lot more video game-ish than what I'm intending to do. Add a Lua script like LiteRP, you have much of the work done on the interface and engine side of things. So you just need to handle the content angle.

But then we come back to that old problem: good graphics are time consuming and difficult. Most gamers just want to run/play their game, not spend months per session building stuff. The way I see VWORP games working is sort of a virtual LARP: it tends to be socially-oriented and it tends to have a number of recurring environments (the secret headquarters, the night club, etc.) So, in many games, once you have a good library of content built up, your needs tend to diminish somewhat. But still, getting started is a problem. How can we lower that initial barrier?

The solution I first came up with was a community of content creators (who often make stuff for fun) and gamers (who need stuff made so they can have fun). Bring the two together, and the problem could be taken care of. I have an image of a site where you can download packs of content in specific styles, or even for specific game settings. Modular buildings, to be connected up into an MMO-style area, for example. For more unique content, gamers could post requests, and creators could even take commissions on more unique things, such as custom player-models for specific PCs, just as artists on deviantArt take commissions on illustrations of those characters. And, being based on an FPS engine, the graphical quality would tend to be very high (higher than in an MMO).

However, that is for the future. In order to get there, I needed a way to bootstrap the community from basically, just me. So I still needed a short-term platform.

That's when I realized that OpenSim was much further along than when I had last checked (I previously mentioned OpenSim in my initial post). It has most of the advantages of Second Life (much quicker and more accessible building and character customization tools compared to an FPS) and few of the limitations of SL (it's free, you can run it completely privately, etc.). The only drawbacks are finding a way to host it, and the fact that the software is still in alpha and undergoing rapid development. Sometimes things break. Some things don't work at all. Still, it was sufficient for my purposes.

So, currently, my work on VWORP is being performed in OpenSim. I'm presently building private regions for our current Changeling game and our recurring Mage game, as well as the eponymous building from The Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor.

We'll see how it goes.