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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4109185" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think it would be better to say that it isn't necessarily true.  But I also think it would be better to admit that peoples fear about D&D copying from computer games (rather than the other way around) is that cRPGs have always been fundamentally more limited in scope, emmersiveness, and freedom of play than PnP RPGs.  It isn't just the one aspect of linearity in a cRPG that worries people.Many of the mechanics of cRPGs have to do with the limitations of being a game that isn't run on imagination.  Imagination is far more powerful than any computer code and will be until we have strong AI capable of imagination, just as animation was far more powerful in what it could portray than live action until cgi came along and could do animation that looked like live action (and even then, its not clear that animation isn't still more flexible).  A cRPG can't run on imagination and the actions of the participants are limited by what the programmers can put into the game.  As a result, cRPGs have evolved game play expectations and mechanics designed to deal with those limitations.  The fear is that by importing the game play expectation and mechanics from cRPGs, you will also be implicitly importing the limitations that created those mechanics.  I personally think that indeed you will be importing those limitations, and that unless players and DMs are careful to remember that their game runs on imagination and not just rules, you'll end up with games that play alot like turn based tactical cRPGs rather than traditional RPGs. And the irony of that is that the people who created cRPGs were doing there best to import the experience of playing a pnp RPG.Probably.  Because porting something from a narrow canvas of a computer to the broad canvas of the human imagination is inherently limiting.  The process of innovation in computers resembles making the game more like a PnP game (terrain deformation, living worlds, etc.).  But that adaptation is always winnowing down the limitless possibilities of imagination to what you can make possible in a computer.  I've been involved in processes where this went wrong, and really smart people didn't realize how badly a PnP mechanic would adapt to a computer environment.  The process of adapting a computer mechanic to a PnP game is trying to take something that was designed to be rigid and limiting and trying to figure out how to make it broadly applicable.  I should not be surprised if it is possible for this process to go badly wrong as well.</blockquote>

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