» Fri Feb 18, 2011 7:56 pm
Shamus Young has an http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/experienced-points/7760-Experienced-Points-Alpha-Overhaul over at Escapist.com that I found rather interesting, and relevant to this discussion (and he was talking in regards to Alpha Protocol, another Obsidian game no less.) Essentially, he reminded me that even table-top RPGs themselves didn't have as much freedom as we often give them credit for.
Personally, I remember both playing in and running campaigns back in the day, and they weren't usually "sandbox-based" either. If I had just spent all week working up a scenario where my players investigate a haunted house, you could darned well guarantee that they were going to that house somehow. Plan A is always to try and make my players choose to investigate that area, but players are notorious for bypassing the GM's plan. When it came down to it, however, they would only ever have the illusion of personal choice - no matter what they did, it was going to end up with them stuck in my obsessively-detailed creepy mansion.
And as a player, the same rules applied. The very fact that I'm playing with a group of people means that at some level we're going to have to be sharing some common goals. I'm not going to make a character that's so completely a "lone wolf" that he'll never have anything to do with the rest of the party, for example. Because always going off to do my own thing might constitute "playing my role" accurately, the rest of the group isn't going to want to wait around all day while the GM plays through things that I'm doing by myself all the time.
I did know a few GMs that were exceptionally good at giving players a long lead and creating scenarios on the fly based around what they wanted to do that day, who were perfectly willing and capable of throwing out their pre-planned scenario for the day and just "winging it." Those guys were few and far between, however, and even then it's not like you were going to create your own character with no regard to the rest of the party and do whatever you wanted - and most of the "freedom of choice" was still an illusion - more often than not these "super-GMs," as good as they were with improvisation, were equally skilled at tricking a party into eventually doing exactly what he'd planned for them to do in the first place.
The only games that I've ever played where total freedom of choice actually existed, was way back in the day when I got heavily into the text-based online sort of roleplaying (MUDs, MUSHes, etc.) That was more like LARPing on a grand scale, however - and there's a different sort of paradigm at work in those. We didn't have any GMs or pre-ordained adventures to deal with. Most of the conflict would arise emergently from groups of characters with their own agendas crossing paths.
To me, in a videogame RPG, a certain amount of freedom is certainly a good thing - I want to at least feel like I have a couple of options at my disposal. But I'm still sort of playing a relatively pre-set "role" within the game. Sure, I can start Fallout 3 and make a character that I then imagine to have been raised by raiders and roleplay him accordingly - but for the game as it's set out to "work" properly, I have to make a couple of concessions to freedom of choice, from the beginning. My character is going to be a Vault Dweller from Vault 101, and I'm going to be at least moderately motivated by my father's actions.
But really, that's not so different from how we'd all sit down at the beginning of a tabletop roleplaying campaign and create characters. Occasionally, we'd all do our own thing and leave it to the GM to craft a scenario that would bring all of these unconnected people together for a common cause that would potentially last for years on end - but the majority of our campaigns started out with us all settling into a common theme and some form of common background, so that everyone already knew each other from the beginning. We were still making characters within the parameters of what would "fit" the campaign that we were playing. To use that previous example - if we were playing a Fallout tabletop game and the GM had decided that events would start with us all living in the same Vault, making that Raider character would be just as out of place as it would be in Fallout 3.
Now, I'm sure there's a place, and a market, for a completely "sandbox" roleplaying game (and I don't think there's anything wrong, either, with making a Raider character even though the game doesn't necessarily recognize that - it's your game, after all, you get to do what makes it the most fun for you.) One without any preset goals for the player to follow, and likely no Main Quest, either -if we went far enough down that rabbit hole. I think something like that could be a very interesting game. But that game would it's own sort of monster, unique from what we commonly and traditionally think of as a "roleplaying game," Single-player LARP might be more appropriate, if we have to label everything. I don't think, however, that every game that deigns to call itself an RPG needs to follow that particular path, however - for the most part, you're going to have to make some concessions to personal freedom - I think that so long as there's a degree of consequence to what choices you are able to make, then that's all we really need.