Zombra
An iron rock in the river of blood and evil
I heard about Velvet Sundown on a recent list of good free-to-play games, so I gave it a shot last night. I had a blast - this is pure role-playing at a high level.
The format is short one-offs, less than an hour per game (I played the "Murder!" scenario, which has a 30 minute limit, twice). You are assigned a character, a goal, possibly some items and information, and put anonymously onto a yacht with several other players, and then ... go.
The meat of the play is conversation. You can open up the dialogue interface with one or more other people at the same time, and simply type your lines, which are made audible through a basic text-to-speech system. The premise is very straightforward: you must deal with the other players to achieve your goals, which are probably in conflict with theirs.
In my first game, I was the murderer. After a big confrontation with all five players at the beginning in which evidence was shared and alibis claimed, we split off into smaller groups. One player bluffed me beautifully into believing he'd seen me commit the crime, but I played it cagey. One by one I isolated the other players, and threw suspicion from one to the other. Once the Coast Guard arrived no clear conclusion had been reached, so I got away with it - quite a thrill.
In my second game, I started with an ally I could trust, which was fun. There was one dumb guy who typed in all lower case and didn't role-play, referring to game mechanics and so forth. Our initial evidence (though somewhat ambiguous) pointed to him, but after 20 minutes or so another passenger was caught in a lie, so we voted her guilty and she was arrested (to eventually be executed). Turns out the dumb guy wasn't as dumb as he looked - he had framed her.
Interactivity is limited to things like handing someone an object, showing it to them, and possibly item-specific things such as nailing someone with a taser, but there is no combat engine per se. There are also no stats, loot, or loud twinkling sounds for levelling up. It's just you, the other players, and a situation to be dealt with. This may lead a few of you to wring your hands and cry, "That's not an RPG!" You're wrong, of course; but let's just go ahead and pretend that we already had that argument because "What is RPG?" is not something we need to go over here.
Anyway, check out the game if you're into this kind of thing. There are a lot of negative reviews from when it first came out, but these mostly involve 5-year-olds excited at being able to say "poopy" with an audience using speech-to-text. That novelty seems to have worn off, and the people still playing the game actually play it, unless I was just lucky. Be sure to say hi if you see Zombra attached to a name in the post-game debriefing (player names are revealed at the end).
The format is short one-offs, less than an hour per game (I played the "Murder!" scenario, which has a 30 minute limit, twice). You are assigned a character, a goal, possibly some items and information, and put anonymously onto a yacht with several other players, and then ... go.
The meat of the play is conversation. You can open up the dialogue interface with one or more other people at the same time, and simply type your lines, which are made audible through a basic text-to-speech system. The premise is very straightforward: you must deal with the other players to achieve your goals, which are probably in conflict with theirs.
In my first game, I was the murderer. After a big confrontation with all five players at the beginning in which evidence was shared and alibis claimed, we split off into smaller groups. One player bluffed me beautifully into believing he'd seen me commit the crime, but I played it cagey. One by one I isolated the other players, and threw suspicion from one to the other. Once the Coast Guard arrived no clear conclusion had been reached, so I got away with it - quite a thrill.
In my second game, I started with an ally I could trust, which was fun. There was one dumb guy who typed in all lower case and didn't role-play, referring to game mechanics and so forth. Our initial evidence (though somewhat ambiguous) pointed to him, but after 20 minutes or so another passenger was caught in a lie, so we voted her guilty and she was arrested (to eventually be executed). Turns out the dumb guy wasn't as dumb as he looked - he had framed her.
Interactivity is limited to things like handing someone an object, showing it to them, and possibly item-specific things such as nailing someone with a taser, but there is no combat engine per se. There are also no stats, loot, or loud twinkling sounds for levelling up. It's just you, the other players, and a situation to be dealt with. This may lead a few of you to wring your hands and cry, "That's not an RPG!" You're wrong, of course; but let's just go ahead and pretend that we already had that argument because "What is RPG?" is not something we need to go over here.
Anyway, check out the game if you're into this kind of thing. There are a lot of negative reviews from when it first came out, but these mostly involve 5-year-olds excited at being able to say "poopy" with an audience using speech-to-text. That novelty seems to have worn off, and the people still playing the game actually play it, unless I was just lucky. Be sure to say hi if you see Zombra attached to a name in the post-game debriefing (player names are revealed at the end).