mxyzplk
Explorer
Calm on down there.
OK, now, there's certainly nothing wrong with looking at other popular things in the fantasy genre and determining what it is that makes people enjoy them, and figuring out "how can I get me some of that!"
The problem is, many of the things 4e seems to be borrowing from WoW aren't really the things that make it great, but instead the things that are design limitations. A simple example is respawning monsters and instanced dungeons. These are a "necessary evil" to make a game work in a massively multiplayer environment. No one wants that in D&D. In my opinion, character roles are similar - necessary in WoW only because you have to put together pick-up groups of the same level on short notice, and there's no such thing as "rolling up a 20th level character", you always have to grind from level 1. With the possible exception of large RPGA events, which are governed by rules that facilitate them, that's not a frequent need in D&D.
But what are the things that make WoW such a runaway hit that D&D 4e *can* learn from? Here's a list that come to mind, in no particular order.
1. Everyone has special abilities to use in combat. 4e is on this track with the "Book of Nine Swords" direction. Other MMORPGs have had much lamer combat - swing, swing, swing - and that's one key reason they're not as popular as WoW. Ah, I fondly remember killing mud crabs just in order to eat in - whatever MMO that has blocked its name mercifully form my mind. Yay powerz.
2. Azeroth is a deep and interesting world. Even for those who weren't into the Warcraft series and don't know anything about the world's history and development, it's at least clear that it's a living, vibrant world that has a realistic feel derived from its evolution over time.
Unfortunately, the 4e direction seems to be away from this. Except for the Basic Set, D&D has shied away from having a setting tied to the core rules, even though alternate campaign settings need a whole raft of new races and rules to make them work. The rules are never setting generic - they prescribe a life for halflings that is different from Dark Sun halflings, for instance - but don't ever make setting specificness work for them.
In my opinion, D&D needs to do the same - whether it's Greyhawk or the new "fallen Empire of Norath" discussed in Races & Classes (well, maybe not that, as lawsuits from Everquest as they own trademark on "Norrath" are inevitable), but something. Having a core setting doesn't make having alternate settings any more difficult than it is now, and at least the products might make some kind of sense together (the fluff in Bo9S versus fluff in other books makes it really hard to credit them being in the same milieu). It worked well for the D&D Basic Set - the Known World (later given the gayer name of Mystara) was fun. Everyone knowing the name of Bargle was cool. In the recent Dungeon Magazine Adventure Paths, people were impressed to meet Tenser. "That's *the* Tenser? Daaaaamn." They're flushing even the little bit of that which remains for "points of light." Bad decision.
3. Instant action. In WoW you can go kick some ass with a moment's notice. 4e will float or sink on this one depending on how much complexity they put into the combat system and how many fiddly modifiers someone has to keep in mind and "but if I move here..." lengthy board-dilemmas they can avoid. Frankly, I enjoyed the old 1e/2e style of very seldom using minis; incorporating them as much as in 3e has slowed down the game and it needs to be sped back up somehow. I've considered using a chess clock on some of these players! Now, they do seem to be on the right track here with simplifying the monsters, and making it so genning stat blocks and writing adventures isn't an exercise in masochism.
4. PvP. Sure, there's non-PvP servers, but everyone knows they're for noobs. This is sticky - I'm not sure the best way to incorporate PvP into D&D. But I have had some relevant D&D experiences - there was one time I was running "Four from Cormyr" in 2e and half the party got turned into vampires; the other half were holed up in a ruin in a swamp that had a chapel undead couldn't enter. We ran a good number of sessions with half the group in each adjacent room trying to get the better of the other. I tell you what, everyone showed up on time and had put a lot of thought into the sessions! I've also frequently used the tactic of bringing in a gamer friend to run a major bad guy in a climactic encounter; having a real dedicated intelligence behind them adds a lot of extra 'zing.' The DM can usually never go as gloves-off because of the complicated group power dynamic.
5. WoW is easy. My 5 year old loves to run her dwarf around the newbie area. I have friends whose wives would never consider playing D&D but they play WoW. The complexity has to be kept down. In WoW the complexity grows but at a rate people can keep up with it. They don't need to plan out their character's level progression from first level (as everyone in my D&D group feels compelled to, to make sure they can get into the right prestige classes etc). Level 1 should be SIMPLE. Heck, even the point buy of stats is stultifying - back in the day people rolled 3d6 down the line and they liked it. It was fast and you didn't need to know much about the game to get started. The toughest chargen decision you have to make in WoW is which class outfit makes your rack look hawtest.
6. People can do what they want to. Some people like to just fish in WoW. Others are obsessed with their crafting skills. The latest crack I heard on a Wizards blog along the lines of Craft/Profession being lame makes me concerned that they "don't get it." Craft/Profession skills should be more useful and fun, not less. It always struck me as ridiculous that they used 'realistic' rules such that it took you a week to craft a sword, but you could toss together a magic item in a day. I want to build something. I want to pimp my armor.
7. Phat lewt. The 3e magic item economy where they're just about "same as cash" makes it very difficult to hand out cool magic, especially if it's not a pure power optimizer. It just gets sold and rendered into a raft of +1 items. WoW has some of this but it's a lot harder to tune MMO treasure to the particular group/characters than it is in D&D. In earlier editions of D&D, people usually had a magic item they were really proud of. Man, that 1e Unearthed Arcana barbarian who got that magic sword from the Forbidden City that could cast Heal once a week - he was hell on wheels. Not so much now, it's a matter of cost optimizing your armor, natural armor, dodge, and deflection bonuses. In WoW, strangers scope you out and compliment you when they see that blue or purple item.
I could probably go on, but those are the biggest ones that come to me. Thoughts?
OK, now, there's certainly nothing wrong with looking at other popular things in the fantasy genre and determining what it is that makes people enjoy them, and figuring out "how can I get me some of that!"
The problem is, many of the things 4e seems to be borrowing from WoW aren't really the things that make it great, but instead the things that are design limitations. A simple example is respawning monsters and instanced dungeons. These are a "necessary evil" to make a game work in a massively multiplayer environment. No one wants that in D&D. In my opinion, character roles are similar - necessary in WoW only because you have to put together pick-up groups of the same level on short notice, and there's no such thing as "rolling up a 20th level character", you always have to grind from level 1. With the possible exception of large RPGA events, which are governed by rules that facilitate them, that's not a frequent need in D&D.
But what are the things that make WoW such a runaway hit that D&D 4e *can* learn from? Here's a list that come to mind, in no particular order.
1. Everyone has special abilities to use in combat. 4e is on this track with the "Book of Nine Swords" direction. Other MMORPGs have had much lamer combat - swing, swing, swing - and that's one key reason they're not as popular as WoW. Ah, I fondly remember killing mud crabs just in order to eat in - whatever MMO that has blocked its name mercifully form my mind. Yay powerz.
2. Azeroth is a deep and interesting world. Even for those who weren't into the Warcraft series and don't know anything about the world's history and development, it's at least clear that it's a living, vibrant world that has a realistic feel derived from its evolution over time.
Unfortunately, the 4e direction seems to be away from this. Except for the Basic Set, D&D has shied away from having a setting tied to the core rules, even though alternate campaign settings need a whole raft of new races and rules to make them work. The rules are never setting generic - they prescribe a life for halflings that is different from Dark Sun halflings, for instance - but don't ever make setting specificness work for them.
In my opinion, D&D needs to do the same - whether it's Greyhawk or the new "fallen Empire of Norath" discussed in Races & Classes (well, maybe not that, as lawsuits from Everquest as they own trademark on "Norrath" are inevitable), but something. Having a core setting doesn't make having alternate settings any more difficult than it is now, and at least the products might make some kind of sense together (the fluff in Bo9S versus fluff in other books makes it really hard to credit them being in the same milieu). It worked well for the D&D Basic Set - the Known World (later given the gayer name of Mystara) was fun. Everyone knowing the name of Bargle was cool. In the recent Dungeon Magazine Adventure Paths, people were impressed to meet Tenser. "That's *the* Tenser? Daaaaamn." They're flushing even the little bit of that which remains for "points of light." Bad decision.
3. Instant action. In WoW you can go kick some ass with a moment's notice. 4e will float or sink on this one depending on how much complexity they put into the combat system and how many fiddly modifiers someone has to keep in mind and "but if I move here..." lengthy board-dilemmas they can avoid. Frankly, I enjoyed the old 1e/2e style of very seldom using minis; incorporating them as much as in 3e has slowed down the game and it needs to be sped back up somehow. I've considered using a chess clock on some of these players! Now, they do seem to be on the right track here with simplifying the monsters, and making it so genning stat blocks and writing adventures isn't an exercise in masochism.
4. PvP. Sure, there's non-PvP servers, but everyone knows they're for noobs. This is sticky - I'm not sure the best way to incorporate PvP into D&D. But I have had some relevant D&D experiences - there was one time I was running "Four from Cormyr" in 2e and half the party got turned into vampires; the other half were holed up in a ruin in a swamp that had a chapel undead couldn't enter. We ran a good number of sessions with half the group in each adjacent room trying to get the better of the other. I tell you what, everyone showed up on time and had put a lot of thought into the sessions! I've also frequently used the tactic of bringing in a gamer friend to run a major bad guy in a climactic encounter; having a real dedicated intelligence behind them adds a lot of extra 'zing.' The DM can usually never go as gloves-off because of the complicated group power dynamic.
5. WoW is easy. My 5 year old loves to run her dwarf around the newbie area. I have friends whose wives would never consider playing D&D but they play WoW. The complexity has to be kept down. In WoW the complexity grows but at a rate people can keep up with it. They don't need to plan out their character's level progression from first level (as everyone in my D&D group feels compelled to, to make sure they can get into the right prestige classes etc). Level 1 should be SIMPLE. Heck, even the point buy of stats is stultifying - back in the day people rolled 3d6 down the line and they liked it. It was fast and you didn't need to know much about the game to get started. The toughest chargen decision you have to make in WoW is which class outfit makes your rack look hawtest.
6. People can do what they want to. Some people like to just fish in WoW. Others are obsessed with their crafting skills. The latest crack I heard on a Wizards blog along the lines of Craft/Profession being lame makes me concerned that they "don't get it." Craft/Profession skills should be more useful and fun, not less. It always struck me as ridiculous that they used 'realistic' rules such that it took you a week to craft a sword, but you could toss together a magic item in a day. I want to build something. I want to pimp my armor.
7. Phat lewt. The 3e magic item economy where they're just about "same as cash" makes it very difficult to hand out cool magic, especially if it's not a pure power optimizer. It just gets sold and rendered into a raft of +1 items. WoW has some of this but it's a lot harder to tune MMO treasure to the particular group/characters than it is in D&D. In earlier editions of D&D, people usually had a magic item they were really proud of. Man, that 1e Unearthed Arcana barbarian who got that magic sword from the Forbidden City that could cast Heal once a week - he was hell on wheels. Not so much now, it's a matter of cost optimizing your armor, natural armor, dodge, and deflection bonuses. In WoW, strangers scope you out and compliment you when they see that blue or purple item.
I could probably go on, but those are the biggest ones that come to me. Thoughts?
