I’m thinking of Return to Castle Wolfenstein’s multiplayer here. I always played that game as a medic. The medic’s job, for those of you who have never played that game, is to go around healing players AND (more importantly) resurrecting recently fallen players from death to effectively reduce their respawn time and allow them to avoid having to get back to where they died again.

In my mind, I was the hero. Mine was a story of a brave (not to mention deadly — I killed more Nazis with my shotgun than many of my Allied, non-medic peers!) young medic who would follow his brothers into any firefight, desperately hoping to make it to the next point of cover and dashing out in front of enemy fire to resurrect a fallen friend.
However, in the other players’ minds, I was just a part of their story, in which they were the protagonist. Their story was of a young (or aged) soldier who fearlessly… blah, blah, blah… and who often came near to death but was resurrected by a brave, nearby medic.

My point here is that in some multiplayer games it seems there CAN be multiple heros simply because there are multiple stories being told. More to the point, those stories can actually work together in synergy.
Any good MMORPG designer, of course, knows this, and the designers of such systems no doubt ponder how to encourage and nurture this type of player and PC interaction.

BTW, I imagine all this holds in the free, standalone sequel, Enemy Territory, as well. You can get that game for free at http://games.activision.com/games/wolfenstein/.

Your question: “Do players think of themselves as the hero in…”

Answer: No, they never saw themselves as heroes in first-player games. They see themselves as GODS. Games aren’t about BEING THE HERO. They’re about MANIPULATING THE WORLD, sometimes through an avatar. Being a hero is sometimes there simultaneously, if you have a strictly limited avatar, but a game still isn’t about being the hero – that’s just icing.

In a MP game, the problem is that the players still want to be the prime manipulator. They want to be King God – or, at least, on even footing with King God.

In a LARP, this is dealt with not by making all characters equal, but by making all characters want different limited things from the world. If they want different things, their manipulations will only tangentally reflect on each other. Except, of course, for their allies and enemies, who aren’t just people doing the same thing – they actually are people trying to accomplish the same kind of thing, with or against you.

In other words, in a LARP you don’t get the Great Disinterested Mob of Players. At least, not in a well-designed LARP. You get a mass of players who are competing for limited resources, and some want certain resources, and others want others… but NOBODY is just working in parallel for the same unlimited resources. Everybody means something, everybody has a clear field of influence, and nobody should feel ‘weak’ or ‘inessential’.

Grrr. Why am I having such a hard time writing this crap this week? I hope I’ve been clear.

Your second question I have hopefully made my opinion clear on already: a carefully designed game can run on its own. Hell, remember METEOR!? Not exactly the best LARP on the block, but it required only minimal supervision outside of combat resolution. All the ‘thought’, if you can call it that, went into the design.