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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tallifer" data-source="post: 7647707" data-attributes="member: 84661">These articles are being closely examined and discussed over in the Wizards' forums as well. I posted there my opinion that massively multi-player on-line roleplaying games can never truly replace tabletop roleplaying games:"I think Tabletop Roleplaying Games will continue to survive and find new players. This is because they alone offer the fullest scope for roleplaying and the imagination. "I played one Massively Multiplayer On-line Roleplaying Game, Dark Age of Camelot, for about four years. The world felt incredibly real and it was exciting to intereact with so many other people. However, the very nature of computer games meant that the vast majority of the player base was decidely not roleplaying. They were just people playing a PvE or PvP game with various "toons." Roleplaying guilds had tiny memberships. Furthermore, there was very little real interaction with the fantastic world:unlike in D&D where the players talk with the unpredictable inhabitants of a world through the dungeon master, the inhabitants of Camelot could only utter packaged blurbs of inane text about a quest. This took all the wind out of the sails of anyone trying to take a voyage into an imaginary world."It does not matter whether I play OD&D, Fourth Edition or Aces & Eights, tabletop roleplaying offers a different environment which has yet to be matched by the MMORPGs. Part of the problem is that MMORPGs are extremely expensive to create and manage, so they can only appeal to the broadest base of players, those uninterested in roleplaying."Since writing that, I have had an additional thought. Both players and dungeon master can dynamically and easily change their fantastic world in a tabletop campaign.In Dark Age of Camelot, the company in charge added a substantial expansion at the end of the game's second year. The necromancer class was introduced into Albion. Albion was hitherto the realm of the good guys, the Arthurian paladins, clerics and shining knights errant. Many roleplayers were aghast at having necromancy as part and parcel of their Tennysonian Idylls. Now of course many roleplayers disagreed, but the point was that there was no working around it. Necromancy was henceforth part of Albion: hunting parties and guilds and warparties almost all had necromancers. The next expansion introduced the Heretic. All of these things added to the roleplaying options for some, but UNLIKE in a tabletop campaign, roleplayers who did like Shadow-peanut butter in their White Knight-chocolate had no way to opt out.</blockquote>

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