Guessing Game

I don’t normally do the role-playing thing in MMOs, but I’ve found I’m physically incapable of not roleplaying in Star Trek Online, down to saying “Engage!” out loud when starting a mission…

Anyway. One thing you notice once you dip your toes into the role-playing community is that nobody’s just a Starfleet officer or a Klingon. Hey, I can understand that, you want your character to stand out. Just being an alien Viking/Samurai with an invisible spaceship who fights cybernetic zombies isn’t interesting enough anymore, you need to be an Andorian/Romulan/Changeling/Ocampa hybrid from the mirror universe*. And you’ve got to have a mysterious past and so on, sure, that’s fine.

Here’s the thing I don’t get, though. The mysterious stranger/man with no name archetype is cool, I can understand why you’d go for it. But… you have to actually do something to be cool. You can’t just stand there being mysterious and occasionally making cryptic statements. I mean, surely the idea of roleplaying is to actually interact with other players, right?

Because I keep getting dragged into conversations with people where getting them to actually communicate anything about their character has been like pulling teeth…


* I exaggerate. The character I saw was only a mix of three alien species and from the mirror universe…