[TRENCHES] Thursday, April 3, 2014 - DeIncepted
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
DeIncepted
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/deincepted
Superman’s Useless Morning Jog
AnonymousA few years ago, I was a Game Master for a fairly popular MMO. One of the benefits of this job was our ability to play on GM accounts that had access to special commands that could make our characters invisible, invincible, able to take on the appearance of any model in the game, adjust our size.
However, with great power comes great responsibility or at least insane oversight. These accounts were watched over carefully and we were advised to stay invisible any time we used these characters on a live server and to only actually play the characters on the test server where our shenanigans could not have rippling effects on the game’s economy or possibly be overseen by players.
The downside to this is that it absolutely ruined the “normal” game for me. I had somehow found my way into a job that allowed me to literally play an MMO all day long should I want to do so, but the GM tools destroyed all desire I had to actually play it. Once you are given an account that can make that special rare sword appear in a few keystrokes, suddenly forming parties with real players and running a dungeon that only has a small chance of dropping it becomes a ridiculously arduous task for a marginal reward.
You might be thinking, “Well, just play in the test server,” but even that becomes dull after you have god-mode. The game’s verisimilitude is destroyed when you can one-shot kill a world boss. When there is no challenge and there is no reward, you are no longer gaming. It becomes an empty task like Superman going for a light morning jog.
There are a few jokes to make with these types of tools to amuse yourself and other GMs like porting other GMs into deep, deep holes that contain nothing but fire. However, these pranks were really all just permutations of the same joke where we slightly inconvenienced another god for the minute it took them to laugh and type a slash command to restore themselves to immortality.
Maybe the Greeks had it right. Maybe there is a pantheon of narcissistic immortals that invented us and mortality to bring consequence to their squabbles. If so, they had it right. I have no doubt the GM tools would be endlessly entertaining had we permission to unleash them on the foolish, mortal players.
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I don't even like using Creative Mode in Minecraft, because if I do that it takes away from the satisfaction of mining materials and building something from my own effort. Creative Mode is like having a box of infinite Lego, where you have unlimited pieces of any kind of piece, and that ruins some of the fun!
Godhood is dangerous, kids. Use with caution.
Summoning world bosses to a random major city, for example. Not in a way so as to grief the players, but just as an event.
Or maybe to go to a quest hub and randomly kill every hostile NPC in the region, in a way that gives kill credit and loot to any players who have tags on 'em.
Or maybe turning everyone's character into a clown for ten minutes in a city.
Just mildly funny/beneficial/engaging events for the playerbase.
The comic...
This really should just have been last Tuesday's comic, instead of two weeks' worth of Jeff and the Snuffler dropped in the middle of an ongoing plot.
Or it should have been an April Fools' joke.
This one was extra bad because neither the "real" strip, nor the strip-within-the-strip had anything resembling a functioning joke.
Agreed. I always thought it would be great for GMs to be given a limited amount of latitude to use their powers in game. Would make a good gold sink if GMs started charging gold for "favors" like tributing a god, they could change weather in a zone, give a player a temporary model change, warp a player to a specific area or zone (or requested zone but random area) obviously there would have to be clear red lines to prevent using a GM to cheat, but it would be pretty neat if a balance could be struck. I think they should also be able to design world events, but have to submit the details and have it approved in advance to prevent major negative disruption.
The individual personalities and quirks of each server's GMs could really help foster a sense of server community that lacks when games get too big. If there is more than 1 GM per server maybe they could even raise armies of players to fight for them against the other GMs. It would be like holy wars, but the winning side gets to be showered in gold, titles, or cosmetic buffs at the end.
On the other hand, some of those games were impossible or nearly impossible without a Game Genie.
I recently joined a site called RetroAchievements and have been playing some of those games on Hardcore Mode to see if I can beat them as if I were playing on the console, with no cheats or savestates. So far I haven't been able to beat Zelda II. Back when I was a kid I'd play that game with two cheat codes: nine lives (cause infinite lives means you can't save), and "swap shield with life", giving you regenerating health.
So far I've failed six times in making it through the final palace.