Dhruin
SasqWatch
Over at Hooked Gamers they have a blog entry titled It's role-playing, not roll-playing that discusses how to "make a game feel like a real roleplaying game". Here's a snip on non-linear storytelling, which uses Oblivion's guilds as an example:
More information.Again, in computer RPGs you cannot go quite this far. Whereas gamemasters can take their unused adventures and plots and use them again later in another campaign, computers aren't yet that smart. However, in computer RPGs you still have to give the player some freedom. You do this by providing as many subplots as you can afford to design and making many of them as long as convoluted as you can (such as the progress in the Guild hierarchies in Oblivion). You try to take into account all sorts of gamers: those you like magic, those you want to rely mainly on their melee skills and those who like playing the rogue/ranger bowman, or any mix of the above, and design quests and adventures that serve all of them. This way, you make sure that they all have something to do and you do not force them all to play through the exact same quests - this also greatly increases the longevity of the game, since the gamer may want to take on a different role the next time and thus chooses different quests to take. Also, you never ever force the player to play through the main plot if they don't want to do so. Let them play around in your world with as few restrictions as possible.