Why Play D&D?

[Haltherrion]

Unfortunately, they then decided it was really more beneficial for the publisher of a MMORPG to become an enourmous time sink for the players.

Without user created content to entertain the masses, the MMO guys are forced to make things take time. There's your running part (although personally I never had issue with that) but there's also the reputation grinds (go kill x,000 of this or that) and the dungeon grinds (we're making the odds of the gear you want so low you need to run this 10, 20, 100 times), etc.

There are other ways to entertain

 

[JRRNeiklot]

You use your brain a lot more in a tabletop game than you ever would in WoW.

Wow. You are so wrong here, it's not even funny. In WoW, you have to be hit capped, expertise capped, there's spell hit, crit cap, soft caps, hard caps, gemming, running sims to see which gear upgrade to get. More math than I care to do. I spend way more time researching the game than I ever do playing it. That said, it still can't even compare to face to face tabeltop gaming, and I'll gladly blow off raid night for my D&D game.

 

[Hussar]

JRRNeiklot - Yeah, I'm not an MMO player, but I did play Ogame for a few months. That bloody thing uses SPREADSHEETS. Yeesh.

But, yeah, the huge, gaping time sink that is MMO's of any stripe keeps me out of them. I just don't have the time to do that.

 

[Dragon Sin-Camealot]

A personal preference like most things. It's not something that happens automatically. I play a fair share of games as it is. If I get around to that particular game maybe you'll see me play it.

 

[Haltherrion]

Wow. You are so wrong here, it's not even funny. In WoW, you have to be hit capped, expertise capped, there's spell hit, crit cap, soft caps, hard caps, gemming, running sims to see which gear upgrade to get. More math than I care to do. I spend way more time researching the game than I ever do playing it. That said, it still can't even compare to face to face tabeltop gaming, and I'll gladly blow off raid night for my D&D game.

I've played a ton of wow and I've done the research for those aspects of the characters, figured out proper gemming, enchanting, yada, yada. It's a lot to pick through but I never felt it stressed my brain much.

There are entire websites devoted to tweaking out that last 0.1 dps on your character but I remembering doing much more interesting and original analysis looking at the deviation on psionic powers and such. And I'd take working up an interesting campaign setting (and can spend months on those ) or character background as more stimulating and challenging.

On the hardcore analysis front, for my current disk world with the sun orbiting just outside the disk, I worked up a complex spreadsheet with VBA to create thermal maps. But that didn't allow for arbitrary mountains so I worked up a C++ program to do sun-on-horizon, heat maps, etc. Far more than I ever did in WoW and I had 6 80s and raided.

More at The Almanac - Affliction

 

[Impeesa]

On the hardcore analysis front, for my current disk world with the sun orbiting just outside the disk, I worked up a complex spreadsheet with VBA to create thermal maps. But that didn't allow for arbitrary mountains so I worked up a C++ program to do sun-on-horizon, heat maps, etc. Far more than I ever did in WoW and I had 6 80s and raided.
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Based on this, it's probably fair to say you're as much of a corner case among D&D players as the guys who actually gather data and program the simulators are in the WoW community. There's always a full spectrum, ranging from people like you on down to the people in either game who play the same character for 3 years and still somehow don't know what their basic moves do.

 

[Haltherrion]

Based on this, it's probably fair to say you're as much of a corner case among D&D players as the guys who actually gather data and program the simulators are in the WoW community. There's always a full spectrum, ranging from people like you on down to the people in either game who play the same character for 3 years and still somehow don't know what their basic moves do.

I am sure I am an outlier and your point is valid- in WOW very few players do the analysis for hit caps, etc, they just look up what someone else did. (I did that myself but that's partly because I see little value in analyzing wow to that level, especially when every little patch modifies the analysis.) Having played a lot of both, I think you use your brain more in D&D. At least your basic math skills are continually refreshed

 

[Blackbrrd]

I am as much a computer gamer as I am a RPG-player.
Playing computer games is something I can do whenever I want for how long I want. I prefer games like Diablo 2 and Titan quest to games like WoW. I played AoC for over a year, but once the only thing left to do in the game was raiding or pvp I got bored. Diablo 2 and the similar games let me loot, something most RPG-players enjoy.

I play roleplaying games to play a character something a lot easier if you don't have constraints like a game-engine. Sure you can roleplay in a computergame, I did it for a while in ALFA | A Land Far Away using the NWN engine. It was fun but I would have prefered to be role playing without a game engine and with a DM. (There are DM's in alfa, but they are constrained by the game-engine).

 

[ourchair]

Wow. You are so wrong here, it's not even funny. In WoW, you have to be hit capped, expertise capped, there's spell hit, crit cap, soft caps, hard caps, gemming, running sims to see which gear upgrade to get. More math than I care to do. I spend way more time researching the game than I ever do playing it.

I agree!

I'll admit that I'm not the big videogamer anymore, but as someone who still remembers the days when adventure gamers, role-playing gamers and strategy gamers would call action games dumb simply because they didn't demand explicit brain work, it's unfair to say that pen and paper games require more brain work than MMOs.

Sure, you can even map the explicit amount of math that either type of game requires, as marcq has cleverly done, but applying a quantifying argument against it is unfair, and heck even argue that rpgs demand the brain uses its imagination, but OMMV.

You can play MMO's brainlessly and you can play PNP-RPGs brainlessly. You can play MMO's with thought and PNP-RPGs with thought. It's not a fixed 'brain-tax'.

 

[Derren]

MMOs are very confined, restrained. Its a closed environment wish a very structured play experience.

But isn't that exactly what D&D tries to become? Structured and linear?