Raiding vs. tabletopping

[wedgeski]

Thanks for the info, everyone. Do MMOs have any sort of narrative aspect? I mean, is WoW just raiding in dungeons, or do they have adventures where there's a villain actively doing something you need to thwart? How much plot is there?

From the point of view of WoW, the *entire game* is actually plot-driven. Azeroth's lore is rich, and its villains dastardly. There's so much to enjoy if you take the time to look for it.

Spoiler

For example, the currently-running expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, tells the story of undead armies massing in Northrend under the Lich King, Arthas, a fallen knight of Lordaeron. Major plot-lines underway as you level and run endgame involve unexpected treachery in the courts of those opposed to him (known as the Wrathgate cycle), massive revelations about the origin of the world (culminating in the 25-man raid instance of Ulduar), answers about the origin of the human race on Azeroth, the role of the ancient dragon-wings in the whole tapestry, and more.

Layered underneath these major plot-lines, dozens and dozens of individual quest chains explore various facets of Warcraft lore and characters, or continually forge new stories to play through. Even the simplest "go here, kill that, collect these" grind-type quests are usually part of a much bigger event. Plot is played out in quest setup, NPC conversations, the events going on around you and crucially, the bosses you have to fight.

Spoiler

For example, in a dungeon called the Halls of Stone, the ancient Titans have sealed away information which might explain how the dwarven race came to exist. A famous dwarven faction called the Explorer's League have made it their mission in life to understand the Titans and the role they played in Azeroth's earliest history... and Brann Bronzebeard is the most famous explorer of all! So, venture into the Halls of Stone, and who should you find? Bronzebeard himself, camped out deep inside!

The second half of the dungeon puts you in the role of body-guard as he makes his way to the deepest vault, where he discovers exactly where the dwarves came from... how and why they came into being, and what a titan called Loken might be doing to muck things up. These revelations take you further into a dungeon called the Halls of Lightning to face Loken, and later, Ulduar, to destroy the foul entity he actually serves.

I'm treading the boards of outright fanboyism but the quality of the ongoing story is, for me, one of the major draws of WoW. Obviously, everything has to be considered from the perspective of your character and your character alone, and once you've done a dungeon once, you're just experiencing the same "reveal" over and over, but those first runs are always special. Over time, the picture painted by your character's journey through the world is quite spectacular.

 

[wedgeski]

Okay, why does that stuff not get talked about more? That sounds really frikkin' cool.

I ask myself the same question regularly. Part of it is WoW's preoccupation with PvP (as opposed to PvE, Player vs. Environment, which is what blargney and myself are describing); yet more of it is that the leveling experience, where most of this stuff is to be found, is considered by a large proportion of the WoW population as little more than a necessary evil to get yourself to max level so you can hit the endgame content as soon as possible; and lastly, until the most recent expansion, the endgame raiding content where a lot of stories reach their fruition was seen by only a small proportion of players. Thankfully, this problem has now been rectified.

 

[Kzach]

How much plot is there?

In WoW, there are several novels worth of story going on.

The problem with WoW is that you're not really immersed in the story. You're really just a spectator. And even then, 90% of quests are grind-fests which serve as little more than time-wasters.

They rectified this a lot in Wrath of the Lich King where they introduced a technology called 'phasing'. Phasing is where the environment appears to you in a manner dependent on what quests you've completed.

A for instance is a portion of a zone that is an enemy citadel. You complete quests for a faction that wants to take over the citadel. As you progress through the quest-chain, the area itself starts to appear differently to your character. You enter different 'phases' as you complete each quest.

Eventually, there is a trigger quest that has you accompany several NPC's to take on the head honchos of the citadel. After you complete that task, and watch the chatter between the NPC's play out, the entire area changes to become a new base for you to operate from.

Other characters who are on different phases to your character, will be invisible to you and neither of you can interact with each other in the phased area.

This was experimental in WotLK and was, quite frankly, the best thing to ever happen to the MMORPG genre. They've been fine-tuning it and will be introducing (or maybe they already have, I haven't been keeping up to date) phasing to every area of the game, including remaking all the old zones and quests to give them this level of interactivity and immersion.

 

[Doug McCrae]

I've been in game sessions ranging from 3 hours to 8. But I don't play WoW or any other MMO. How long do raids tend to last? I have a sense you can play a short raid in less than half an hour. I'm looking for the differences in what appeals for MMOs vs. tabletop RPGs, so I can play to the strengths of face-to-face gaming, and not try to compete with multi-million dollar technology.

When I was raiding it would take an evening, 3-5 hours and we'd do as much as we could in that time. So if we kill a boss quickly we go on to another and keep going. When I started, raiding meant getting 40 people together (nowadays it's 25 - a very good change), which is a major logistical problem, so you want to make it worthwhile.

There have always been single boss dungeons, such as Onyxia, who can be killed quickly once you have them on farm, and raid dungeons with around a dozen bosses - Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, Naxxramas - which take a lot longer. One can usually get them down to an evening eventually, but they take much longer than that at first. It normally takes many wipes to learn each boss. For example one could have the first 5 bosses in a dungeon on farm, be able to kill them in a couple of hours, then spend the next 3 evenings trying and failing to kill the 6th boss.

5-man dungeons are a lot quicker, about 1-2 hours, if everything goes according to plan. The new 5-man dungeons in the expansions are faster than the old ones used to be. They are a bit smaller, with less trash.

Obviously things often don't go according to plan. If you're pugging, the first difficulty is always finding a healer or healers (one for 5-man, more for raids), which can take a loooong time.

I've experienced a great many wipes and screw ups in my time playing WoW. I've personally caused a 40-man raid to wipe on at least one occasion to my knowledge by straying too near to a 2nd boss while we were fighting a first. Even simple stuff like one party member not being able to find the dungeon. Party members leaving or DCing (disconnecting). Ninjas (people who steal loot). And, ofc, the wipes. I've spent whole evenings wiping on Onyxia, even once we thought we had her on farm. The same for Vaelastrasz, the second boss in Blackwing Lair. The latter is particularly notorious because a single mistake from one person can wipe the raid. Most bosses aren't as bad as this, in my experience.

 

[Cadfan]

To the OPs point, there are a few things that MMOs do well that tabletop games don't do particularly well. I'm not sure that the solution to this is to abandon these things in every case in order to focus on other matters, but I do think its worth being aware of them.

1. Status and Prestige. An MMO takes place in a shared environment, and your character has access to a lot of goods that signal your status to others. Your level, your gear, your guild signatures, all can signal to others that you are more awesome than they. Tabletop games are bad at this because the audience to whom you can broadcast your status is limited to the other players at your table, and because tabletop games tend to avoid large power disparities between characters in the same group.

2. High decisions-per-second. MMOs, particularly in combat, involve a fair amount of thinking and decision making. Granted, a lot of it is repetitious. And tabletop games can do a lot in the way of tactical gaming. But in a tabletop game a good portion of the game is spent engaging passively- listening to the DM, listening to other players, or simply waiting for your turn to act while other people have the floor. An MMO has some serious down time putting together a group, but once that's done you are very engaged in the process. You have many abilities, often with independent recharge rates, or you have a mana supply that is consumed and replenished in multiple ways, and you juggle a massive amount of information and options at once in real time. This can be quite difficult, which is the reason that high level raids can vary in success so much based on the skill of the players involved.

3. A sense of community. Many MMOs can support an actual community of players in which different roles and jobs are inhabited by known characters with reputations and established presences. Not every MMO does this, but no tabletop game does this.

 

[Doug McCrae]

This was experimental in WotLK and was, quite frankly, the best thing to ever happen to the MMORPG genre.

Agreed, phasing is awesome.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

On the WoW issue, if anyone finds these descriptions of the plot compelling, I would advise waiting for the next expansion (Cataclysm) to try the game.

Right now, the leveling experience is very disconnected from the meta plot of the game and the early zones are relatively poorly "narrativized" compared to the most recent expansion. Cataclysm includes a rebuild of most zones (due to, well, the Cataclysm). This promises to make many of them more interactive and story driven since they will have all the tools like phasing available.

As for what MMOs, and WoW in particular, do well.... pick up and play. "Oh, look, I have an unexpected 2 hours of free time tonight, I can log in and my guild of 50+ people will almost certainly have enough cats around to run some dungeons." I used to be a raid leader, as well, but that took just as much planning as D&D, if you wanted to do it right. So we had scheduled nights, I wrote strats and posted them on the guild forums, and all that. The advantage over D&D there is that I can play with my RL friends in Germany, Seattle, NJ, right across town, and a few other places (as long as time zones cooperate). That is relatively hard to do with D&D unless you're willing to lose 90% of the experience (IMO, YMMV) to do pbp or whatever. For me, D&D is made or broken by the face to face interaction.

That larger pool of people can also be a problem, of course. One of the many reasons I'm not a raid leader anymore is that I wanted one kind of raiding and the other officers wanted a different kind. With a guild of 50, 100, 150 people.... lots of room to start cliques and have disagreements.

 

[blargney the second]

Okay, why does that stuff not get talked about more? That sounds really frikkin' cool.

It is really frikkin' cool! DDO is full of awesome adventures from level 1 right through level 20. I frequently use it as inspiration for my own DMing, and a lot of it translates very nicely into tabletop format.
-blarg

 

[wedgeski]

On the WoW issue, if anyone finds these descriptions of the plot compelling, I would advise waiting for the next expansion (Cataclysm) to try the game.

(This is good advice. A lot of what the long-term players know about the game will be ripped up in the next expansion, so it'll be an excellent place for new players to come in.)

 

[Mathew_Freeman]

This was experimental in WotLK and was, quite frankly, the best thing to ever happen to the MMORPG genre. They've been fine-tuning it and will be introducing (or maybe they already have, I haven't been keeping up to date) phasing to every area of the game, including remaking all the old zones and quests to give them this level of interactivity and immersion.

My friend Sean, who used to post in here as Khynal, told me about this. He agreed it made a massive difference to how much he enjoyed the game and that it had really reignited the fun of playing WoW for him.

I've never actually played it, but I'm tempted all the time.