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Elder Scrolls Online is one of the most popular MMORPGs. Personally, I have been with them since beta. Recently my trust in developers was slightly shaken when loremaster Leamon Tuttle took a stance to a player complaining her roleplaying character wasn’t approved in the guild. The player in question shows a photoshopped screenshot, where her idea was laughed at. While the behavior was sub-optimal, the actual timing of the topic is dubious. Original discussion took place in March 2021 and Twitter revelation in October 2021. Note: I’m not going to post a player complaint and the attached picture as it contains player usernames and is not something that should be given time or validity.
The discussion on the topic took a better part of the week and after writing to Zenimax Online Studios, I got a very good and sensible reply from community manager Jessica Folsom. For the player community, this topic is closed, but the question of creativity and how much emphasis should the community give to loremaster opinion, will use precious time from community managers and guild leaders. Here, I’m going to go through arguments why a developer shouldn’t take stance on one case, without knowing all details.
Loremaster is job title on Zenimax Online Studios, meaning the person who is responsible for the coherency of Elder Scrolls Online lore. He is not a community support person or manager, his position being a storyteller.
Loremaster is job title on Zenimax Online Studios, meaning the person who is responsible for the coherency of Elder Scrolls Online lore. He is not a community support person or manager, his position being a storyteller.
36 Rages of Vivec, lore paraphrased
Lore is a word we use to depict all fiction on a certain topic. Elder Scrolls-games have a high emphasis on storytelling kerygma. The odd nuance here is that former developers have continued to create their own lore to the world, without having to face legal action. Sometimes these ideas have been adopted back to the primary source, games. So official and unofficial lore do go hand in hand.
Naturally, everyone has the right to elaborate their intended message, film industry knows this as ‘word of god’, for example only the director can tell what was inside the Pulp Fiction briefcase?
Sometimes the person with the story ownership has been meddling with fan interpretations and stomping them, examples include George Lucas on Star Wars and J.K Rowling on Harry Potter. This kind of behavior is considered bad by fans, as some of Potter fan theories were later admitted being close to the truth.
Source: www.bustle.com
Elder Scrolls lore context doesn’t give us the final truth. Even game depictions are under artistic license and limited to it. Developers readily throw the question back to the player ‘how did you envision this question’. In the end, Elder Scrolls is a dream and things can happen dreamlike logic, so either everything is or nothing is canon.
Roleplaying has a strong social aspect. A guild is a community that has its own rules and norms. For example, the guild can ask a player to apply for acceptance. These guilds have their own stories and they generate new content every day for the MMORPG. No other group of users will actively develop the game and take responsibility for their own enjoyment. However, this also means that questions of creativity can cause issues, and immature players can easily generate drama.
This is not unlike with 90s Live Action Roleplayers, for example, YLE of Finland made a pretty good short series telling the story of LARP teenage drama called ‘Siamin työt’. Today we see similar drama on similiar topics in MMORPGs.
Roleplaying has a strong social aspect. A guild is a community that has its own rules and norms. For example, the guild can ask a player to apply for acceptance. These guilds have their own stories and they generate new content every day for the MMORPG. No other group of users will actively develop the game and take responsibility for their own enjoyment. However, this also means that questions of creativity can cause issues, and immature players can easily generate drama.
This is not unlike with 90s Live Action Roleplayers, for example, YLE of Finland made a pretty good short series telling the story of LARP teenage drama called ‘Siamin työt’. Today we see similar drama on similiar topics in MMORPGs.
Picture: YLE
If we talk for a moment about the case of the complaining player, she did fulfill the application, joined the guild, and was asked roleplaying character that fits Morrowind. After this she offered shapeshifting dragon, that is half dwemer. This immediately put many players off. As a comparison, we can tell that there’s only one dwemer (plus few ghosts) that have ever been present in The Elder Scrolls series of games as the whole race has vanished. This is one of the biggest mysteries of Elder Scrolls lore, made deeper only because developers of Bethesda and Zenimax have refused to comment on the matter. Hence the issue is what can be written about dwemer to public roleplay space. Defining dwemer as something would backfire when developers decide to elaborate on the matter.
This is our canon lore source!
Roleplaying is a story woven together. The fact that one player wants to play a special character doesn’t immediately strike as problematic, but it kind of sets them apart, which is not a good situation. Playing special characters can lead to an arms race-like situation where every player needs to have more odd and more powerful characters. This kind of culture existed in Second Life ten years ago, and normal characters didn’t really fit in.
Playing strong roles has been considered problematic from the beginning of roleplay from the 1970s all way to this day. The reason is that players have a poor track record of using them. The classical example is Mary Sue, who was a parody of bad Star Trek fan fiction. While the story was a parody, we know many Mary Sues from today's roleplaying communities. Such players exist. When the admin of the roleplaying guild meets the tenth new player applying with vampire character, he really can’t hold a straight face. Is it an example of the creativity that everyone wants to play a cool character than a believable one?
Source: TVTropes.com
Red lines and dogmas are born this way, just because players are the herd of cats, they cause mess and fight about stupid things. Hardcore themes are easier to limit, but clear definitions and limits are hard to place. In the end, everything depends on the context and how it is depicted.
For example:
The Player writes a new tribe to Ashland's and doesn’t use eight tribes defined by lore. This is totally possible as long as the player doesn’t contradict previous lore (like writing a new tribe to be bigger than the original four). The issue comes in a social context, where other players do not have the faintest idea of this tribe, they have never heard bout it. With readily defined tribes they could open UESP.net wiki and get ready options, but new content is harder to implement in roleplay. Ready-defined things ease up other players joining to write the story, uncertainty kills roleplay. Hence, roleplayers often stay with the ready written lore and do not expand it without good reason.
Role-playing guilds tend to avoid certain topics because they always seem to cause issues between players. A real-life example of a player coming to tavern openly as vampire or werewolf, causes either roleplayers a) accept that this is normal b) to turn the roleplay to conflict. There’s also c) the possibility to ignore players, which invalidates the idea of a story made together. Bad choices, in other words.
After vampire visit (2018)
Even if Skyrim Dragonborn is the chosen one, vampire, and leader of all guilds at the same time, this is in no way a realistic or healthy starting point for roleplay. Guilds tend to play side characters of Elder Scrolls games and not main characters. Even if Star Wars: Old Republic players can be Jedi or Sith, the fact is most of the inhabitants of the galaxy are not this powerful. At what point Suspension of disbelief doesn’t work anymore and we can talk about poor roleplay that can be given fair criticism?
Drama can be created quickly if one player gets too special a status. From the Old Testament of the Bible, we can read how old Jacob is cheated to give blessing to his youngest son. Similarly, roleplayers are known to compete on petty things and foster jealousy.
Horst, Gerrit Willemsz. - Isaac blessing Jacob
Despite the fact I agree with Leamon Tuttle, that roleplayers should be more accepting in general, the total freedom of writing is a really poor way to develop community. Social context doesn’t often allow it.
Besides, limitations are not the enemy of creativity. Twitter discussion forgets that most creative things happen inside of the box. Using limited time or resources to create something new is the real exercise of creativity. Repression is a killer of creativity, but repression is not about the box, it’s curating and judging the ideas inside of the box.
Total freedom has been understood as piss poor idea in roleplaying communities. Player communities seek to dream the same dream, rather than your own fantasy. Players that are interested only their own powerfantasy can be found from common Dungeons and Dragons groups. But they are universally disliked as they are not interested to dream the same dream. The challenge between player freedom and social context is nowhere new. Exactly why roleplayers talk about 'roleplaying etiquette'.
Roleplaying etiquette is a collection of unwritten rules about diegetic and narration. They exist to protect the good game. Since the 1970s Erving Goffman frame analysis has been successfully used to analyze frames of the roleplay. Pen and paper and otherwise. In this text, I’m looking at the roleplay through the social agreement frame. The social agreement can be intentionally or unintentionally broken. For example, it’s against good etiquette to roleplay the main character of the story or their closest. Playing cousin of the High King in ESO would be a breach of this etiquette, while playing Lion Guard would be totally ok. First is inserting yourself to lore, latter is playing non important person.
Roleplayers shouldn’t be held guilty if they show shock or have poor attempts at jokes if someone breaches roleplaying etiquette. A similar breach of trust and etiquette is to publish names of players to the whole internet, claiming they are guilty of harassment. Where I live posting it like that is called lying.
Roleplaying guilds should put emphasis on tutoring new players, understanding underlying social agreement, and wording it so anyone understands what is accepted and what is not. However, this is not easy. The best source I have found is the Human Floyd youtube tutorial series for roleplay. The best part is: “7 Sins of RP [RPing in MMOs: A Beginner's Guide - Part II]”, which I highly recommend for new and old players alike
Seven sins of roleplay are a collection of common breaches of roleplaying etiquette, and I have seen too many examples of all of these:
1. Taking RP Too Seriously
2. Powergaming
3. Stealing the spotlight
4. Metagaming
5. Lore breaking
6. Godmodding
7. Blending
My 2 cents is that if we can avoid these mistakes, I’m certain that amount of conflicts will grow and the quality of the game and player enjoyment will improve considerably.
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