So when introducing new players into a tabletop game (usually D&D, sometimes savage worlds, or L5R) they insist using the words "pull, tank, aggro, dps" . I understand the easiest way is to relate to a game you have played "in this case WOW/ guildwars".
I, as GM, would BAN ALL SUCH TERMS AND THINKING.
My games are for ROLEPLAYING, not replicating MMO's. If they wan to "tank" or "aggro", let them go play Warcraft.
Of course, for me, it bothered me that MMO concepts were in the game to begin with as much as the terminology.
Video Game terminology is banned at my table. I find that people that use those terms tend to be contrary to my playstyle and will ruin the gaming experience.
Honestly, this sort of thinking bothers me far
far more than even the people who talk about 'rolling toons'. And I really dislike calling characters toons - makes me want to declare duck season. (I dislike calling them toons in MMOs as well).
It bothers me for two reasons; firstly a lack of desire to expand the hobby and secondly rejecting MMOs indicates to me a complete lack of respect of D&D and its influence.
The desire to expand the hobby is simple. There are what? A few hundred thousand D&D players. World of Warcraft has literally
millions of subscribers, all taking part in what is in some ways a third rate knock-off experience when compared to the one you get round the table. (In other ways it's better, but I digress). Probably half those players don't even know that D&D is even in print - and 90% couldn't give a damn about D&D terminology. But if we can even pick up one tenth of them we've vastly expanded the hobby and that will be good for it (especially as we'll have expanded it by the people who care about roleplaying and tabletop interaction).
The second is the fundamental lack of respect for D&D that rejecting MMOs shows.
D&D terminology is based on
tactical wargames. Why is it based on tactical wargames? Because that's what smart nerds were playing when Gygax and Arneson came out with D&D. It's now an extremely niche hoby as computers have eaten it alive. A cry to reject the language of MMOs is a cry to reject the players of MMOs and to keep D&D in an inward looking niche.
MMOs on the other hand owe their roots to
D&D. And a lot of the MMOisms that people are decrying are traceable directly back to D&D. Tanks? Dragon in the 80s was using Tanks to illustrate negative AC. Tank/DPS/Healer trinity? Straight out of the brown box. With fighters tanking, wizards being mobile artillery, and clerics healing. (The thief showed up later). Tanking was the job of the fighter - keeping the bad guys off ths squishies. 2e of course had its families of classes. Fighters didn't need an aggro mechanic because they had a battle line and some nice solid stone walls in the dungeon. DPS? D&D came out of
tabletop wargaming. Weapon types did different damage
to prevent people carrying iron spikes as those were the cheapest weapon.
Almost all the objections to MMOs are traceable directly to things at the very core and origin of D&D - and normally it's because the MMOs have stolen from D&D. Anyone who wants to keep D&D pure IMO needs to read Appendix N.
Second, it comes to mind that I may not hate the vernacular of MMOs as much as the mentality of approaching encounters.
I recently ran an entire dungeon with different ways of completing the encounter making them extremely easy. For instance I had a huge river magically flowing through this dungeon like a wire in mid air. This river had fish and all kinds of things in it. Well the party reached this machine which was generating this magical river and shut it down. In the very next room there were many small wrymlings in a nest crying out , their mother dragon was gone and they were hungry (we had a druid who discerned this). In this room, there were rotting fish on the ground. So when the party approached the dragonling nest they started screeching at the party. So the party starts completely destroying them.
Instead of giving them fish to eat. Which I THOUGHT was very blatant when the druid figured this out, but they decided against it. Now you might say, well maybe the party wanted to kill these wyrmlings. (In my world there are no good or evil dragons necessarily... and the party knows this and doesnt care it seems). The thing is I had a dungeon of at least 10 encounters similar to this (infact most every encounter I run has some special element to it) . I like to heavily involve personal stories and characters when planning encounters. There are usually several ways of getting around these things, but it's like the party doesn't even care, they just want to attack everything.
And the thing that completely baffles me is that after the session we usually talk about it, and I tell them (or they ask me) stuff like could we have done -specified thing- and made an ally, or gotten around this? I tell them yeah, that's why -specified thing- was there, to provide roleplaying purposes and develop the story in a deeper way. Then they say things like "damnit" and "I should have realized that" , and every week I say the exact same thing " I always put in special elements to the encounter, always". So then they usually leave and the next week rolls around and the exact same thing repeats. Exact. Same. Thing.
Honestly the game sounds like a computer game to me - and not on the players' side. The part you've described is an arbitrary puzzle with an oh-so-convenient solution located in the next room. And you're putting special elements into the encounter quite intentionally - it's all sounding
extremely artificial to me. And as if you are setting it up to be approached as a game. All the PCs are doing is approaching it as a slightly different one to the one you want. Combat is more interesting than a fetch quest or a "click the random object" quest. And the party doesn't even get the mental reward of having been creative, merely having solved the arbitrary puzzle you set them. A creative group given license to be creative will come up with solutions and ideas you never expected - and you don't get that from a series of well defined Sierra-style quests.
