A Eulogy to Garry's Mod Roleplay

Don't just be glad that it happened; be glad that it's over

I am a small star destroyer and these are big waves.

Garry’s Mod roleplay is over.

Granted, there are still active servers on Garry’s Mod: DarkRP, MilitaryRP, Star Wars RP, maybe some 1942RP or SCP-RP or Fallout RP, but for the most part, the tradition of Garry’s Mod roleplay is dead. The communities are aging out, new ones struggle to get off the ground, and the very structure of a classical Gmod RP server is perhaps too oligarchical to be sustainable in the first place. Perhaps it was never going to work out in the end.

But “in the end” is not the past, nor is it the present. In the past I was a very active member of several Garry’s Mod RP communities, and in the present I am very grateful for that. If I was going to spend hundreds of hours of my rapidly-dwindling youth gaming, Gmod RP is probably some of the most productive gaming I could do.

For those joining us cold:

Garry’s Mod (2006), AKA Gmod, is a sandbox computer game that is best imagined as a fusion of Roblox and Half-Life 2. It’s more of a platform than a game: the idea is that anyone can create maps and add-ons for Gmod that can be installed very easily. One Gmod server might be a free-form building game, another might be Prophunt, and another might be Trouble in Terrorist Town.

Roleplay in the context of Gmod is a specific type of game where players take on a character role and collaboratively tell an ongoing story. Gmod roleplays encompass everything from Afghanistan 2010 to Berlin 1942 to Fallout‘s fictional Mojave Wasteland in 2281. In theory you get to create a character, join a faction, take part in events, and be part of a community. In reality, it usually didn’t work like that.

Most of Garry’s Mod roleplay was, I think, terrible. It was often very boring and it was hard to do anything interesting unless you had money or connections. It was frankly a terrible method for collaborative storytelling.

And yet, I had fun with Gmod RP anyway. But not without a lot of trial and error.

Most Gmod RP was broken by design

I cut my teeth on Gmod RP’s MilitaryRP gamemode back in 2015 or so. I would have been ~13.

Here’s the thing about MilitaryRP and its subgenres: there is a great deal of friction for newcomers. When I spawned into that server for the first time, I had to wait in a virtual waiting room for 10-30 minutes to get “trained”. Eventually, some higher-ranking player will enter the training room with you and instruct you on a few things. The training process takes about half an hour.

Some things you might “learn” in your MilitaryRP training:

• How/when to stand at attention, at ease, and when to “salute” by typing \me salutes in the text chat

• Marching formations such as single file, double file, VIP protection, et cetera.

• The difference between an NCO and an Officer

• Restricted areas, base protocols, server polices, permission-to-speak rules, and so much more

I wish I had time to go through just how absurd some of the strict rules and procedures and etiquette on these servers was. I refer you to Frisky’s hilariously dated videos on the subject of Gmod RP for further reading.

For some men (and yes, it was all boys and men), the power associated with leadership in an RP server was clearly too much for them to handle. Permit them to join the Military Police profession, hand them a stun baton and handcuffs, and make them a First Sergeant, and suddenly they can barely control their cruelty and their lust to brutalise new players.

Hence why I found myself on that first day in MilitaryRP apologising profusely to a fellow squeaker for calling him “Sir” rather than “Staff Sergeant”. MilitaryRP players spend many hours grinding for their ranks, and they take them extremely seriously.

To be sure, server regulars have good reason to be paranoid and aggressive towards noobs: plenty of people only joined RP servers to grab a gun and shoot randoms, run into restricted areas to press forbidden buttons, and otherwise just troll (an act derisively called “minging”) for as long as they could until they were banned.

But even for the honest, dedicated RP player with no interest in minging or FailRP, advancement to a position of true power or influence is close to impossible. Most RP servers are governed privately by the owner, his friends, and top donors who keep the server running. In many servers a random non-donor player has very little chance of rising up to serious command. Indeed, on that first MilitaryRP server, roles like “Apache pilot” and “Taliban insurgent” were locked to donors only.

All RP servers hosted “events”. This could be anything from a small attack on the base to a search-and-rescue mission to a massive assault on a city. In practice this usually amounted to admins spawning in NPC enemies for us to shoot, some checkpoints for us to reach, and maybe some very light narrative, but not much else. Many events sucked, but some were kind of fun, especially when they were unscripted and allowed players to make their own decisions ad-hoc; when you and a few friends get cut off from your unit and you have to make decisions for yourself rather than radio your platoon commander for orders.

A very big and busy server might have one event per day. But on most servers events tend to happen on a weekly or semi-weekly basis, meaning that for a lot of your time on the server, you’re simply standing around doing nothing.

You might patrol the base or stand up in a guard tower, or you might simply go AFK (away from keyboard) for hours and wait for something interesting to happen. As a lowly Private or Private First Class in MilitaryRP there is very little that you can personally do to create your own fun. This is part of why I bounced off of MilitaryRP and explored other RP gamemodes.

Creating your own fun

It’s very difficult economically to create a truly egalitarian Gmod server where there’s not a class divide between donors and non-donors in terms of the player experience. But some gamemodes are better at it than others.

Take, for instance, SCP-RP. Based on the excellent “SCP Foundation” fiction, most SCP-RP servers involve day-to-day life in a sprawling secret laboratory. You can be a security guard, an administrator, a Mobile Task Force operator, a Class-D prisoner, an actual SCP monster (which is great fun), and more. Me personally, I always enjoyed playing as a scientist.

Clearly Dr. Akimoto wasn’t very good at grant writing when I was 17. Most of my proposals were shot down.

For much of my career on the “Area XYZ” SCP-RP server, I was Dr. Fumio Akimoto, a mathematician and biocomputing scientist in the Research department. One of the best parts of Area XYZ is that a lot of the actual roleplay took place on the server’s online forums, not the server itself. I dialoged with fellow researchers, made admin requests, and published scientific papers all on the forums (which are tragically lost).

On 19 June 2019, I conducted an experiment with SCP-079, a highly advanced artificial intelligence that lives in 1970s computer. I wanted to play some games with it, but my supervisors did not allow me to install Super Mario Bros. or Minecraft onto the machine. We instead played chess and tic-tac-toe. I think I was trying to see whether the computer had a concept of fun? I was 17 at the time and quite brainrotted so I didn’t really understand the nuances of a “null hypothesis”.

Some notes of mine from the project:

After the game, I told The Computer that we (myself and the security detail) would tell it some jokes. One of the guards who didn’t identify himself to me told a sexist joke. The Computer disliked it. I then told a science joke. The Computer was silent. The security guard told another joke, The Computer seemed to grow angry and was asked by the senior security officer to leave. Finally, I told a longer joke with a setup and punchline, to no effect.

The experiment ended slightly early due to a Code Orange. I was escorted out and hid with Dr. Kronislava near SCP-914.

It’s a shame that The Computer didn’t enjoy my games. I do wish we could have introduced it to Minecraft, but rules are rules.

Yeah, I was kind of a loser in high school.

But what I loved about SCP-RP was the degree of agency I was granted. Bigger projects with dangerous Euclid- and Keter-class SCPs required approval from up top, but I was mostly free to do whatever I wanted outside of that. I could wander the base, supervise other projects, screw around with the Class-D and SCP-999. Area XYZ did what any good Gmod roleplay should do: it put the tools in my hand to muck about and improvise stories with others.

Rebels with a cause?

I was in a pretty dark place in the winter of 2020/21. I was extremely isolated in my first year of university due to the COVID-19 lockdowns, and I really had no social structure outside of Discord hangouts with my friends. And much love to my friends, but I needed diversity and structured fun in my social life.

I joined an RP server set in Berlin 1942. This server was sort of adjacent to MilitaryRP, but everyone started out as a civilian. So while you could join the Wehrmacht/SS/Gestapo and rise the ranks, it was opt-in. Civilians could have a normal life or make side money with illegal drug and arms trade.

I wasn’t interested in joining the SS. Not for any moral reason; it just sounded boring and bureaucratic like the MilitaryRP servers I’d fought so hard to escape. I decided to start a communist newspaper to promote proletarian resistance against the Nazi rule. This mostly amounted to me spawning in pieces of paper, labelling them as “COMMUNIST NEWSPAPER”, and leaving them around town.

I ended up joining forces with about 5 other regulars on the server, founding an armed communist resistance together. This was not done with in-game mechanics, there was no “Communist Uprising” faction you could assign your character. It was totally ad-hoc.

I’m “Ernst”. I can’t remember what my character’s surname was.

In-character, we were united by our desire for a communist Germany. But I think what connected us out-of-character was a shared dislike for the orthodox structure endemic to RP servers such as ours. The strong majority of the players worked for the German Reich in some way, with their chain of command and rules of engagement. But we were free agents. We started shootouts in the streets. We smuggled weapons and vehicles into and out of the city. Our cell came crashing down more than once in epic rural shootouts as Waffen-SS units surrounded us.

Roleplay shouldn’t be a theme park where you show up to events and you watch the battles happen while occasionally getting to shoot your gun. Roleplay should be a sandbox where players, even the casual non-donor players, get to shape the world and the collective narrative. And for the hundreds of hours I invested into Gmod RP, I did get to glimpse that sandbox a number of times, for which I am grateful. I just wish I could have glimpsed more of it.

There was an interesting thread on Glosso this week about internet RP. “What happened to it?” they ask. There are probably a lot of reasons why internet RPs of all kinds— Gmod, Roblox, Forums, WoW RP, etc.— are on the decline, and that question is beyond the scope of this post.

But it does kind of suck that those places for dynamic, structured yet spontaneous, immersive and semi-serious RP seem to be drying up. Maybe one day it will have a revival in a new form, or maybe online RP communities were just a passing fad, a footnote in our cultural history. But if nothing else, I am glad that the Gmod RP’s heyday and my youth intersected.

It looks kinda crummy now, but Lord Trilobite’s “Rp_Stardestroyer” map blew people’s minds in 2010.