Role-players vs. gold farmers

You’ll see a lot of my posts have to do with adding a bit of role-playing into role-playing games. Who’d a thunk, huh? The truth is, I get it. There are a lot of players out there who couldn’t care less about the role-playing aspect. They get annoyed when the GM tells them they need a character history, and they only care about the gold coin value of that really cool ruby necklace. I’ve been trying to come up with a way to classify the two styles, and the best one I can come up with is borrowed from the on-line MMO games: role-players vs. gold farmers.
If you play a MMO, you’ve likely seen them. (OK, if you play a popular MMO, then you’ve seen them.) These gold farmers are the jerks who wait for you to engage an enemy so they can grab the treasure behind the guy. They likely have bots running their characters, and they only care about the accumulation of stuff. Are they all in China? Probably not. A lot of them are similar to the rest of us, but they’re people that never even notice the art of the scenery in the game.
Don’t get me wrong – I may role-play by trying to figure out what a particular character would do in a particular situation, rather than try and figure out what the best strategy is from a die rolling point of view, but I’m still a little freaked out by the guys who have a different voice for each one of their characters. We all have our levels of involvement! Some folks might want cool sounding treasure and think it is wonderful for the mood and scene, but they still only care what it’s worth. I’m sure that there are a lot of folks out there who think the fact that I have documented what is on the heads and tails side of each major coin in my world is an enormous waste of time, but there are a lot of folks who think it’s pretty cool too. (If you do, check out Coins of Fletnern - it’s FREE!!)
So – From now on, when I refer to people who think more like me, I’m going to talk about “role-players”, knowing that there are extremes and moderates among us. When I talk about “gold-farmers” I’m going to be talking about those guys who know exactly what they need to hit an 18’ dragon while it is flying at 112” off the ground at 23mph in a light breeze, but have no idea what the name of their home town is.
I’m not set in stone on this! If someone has a better name than “gold farmers” I’m willing to be open minded.