Well, the old Bard's Tales, Wizardry, Ultimas and SSI D&D games were like that...and were totally awesome...but they weren't MMORPGs.
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NOW LIVE! Into the Woods--new character species, eerie monsters, and haunting villains to populate the woodlands of your D&D games.
A bit tired of people knocking videogames...
- Thread starter Glade Riven
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The Shaman
First Post
Quoted for truth.
"You can program mods" actualy highlights the fact that the game can only do what you tell it to do and only after you've told it to do so.
Glade Riven
Adventurer
Sure it does. It's houseruling, only a bit more complicated.
JamesonCourage
Adventurer
Here's a strike against a game like Oblivion (which is probably the most immersive game I've played), though: no children in the base game. I understand they don't want children dying (mainly to players), but it's the details that kill immersion.
I think we should all be able to agree that a human GM is more flexible than something like Oblivion is, no matter how much you mod it. Creating entirely new countries, with entirely new complex noble courts that actually interacted and controlled the nations politics at an AI level, etc., is pretty much impossible. On the fly (for me, at least, as a completely improvisational GM), it's easy enough. You just describe it, and it's there.
The players can then interact with NPCs in ways you just cannot in a video game: they can forge genuine friendships, create enemies, interrogate nobles, seduce a pretty serving girl, flirt with the queen or king, capture a noble, kill everyone in the court, pledge loyalty with a heartfelt speech that people will actually pay attention to and acknowledge, etc.
You just cannot account for things in a video game that a human GM can. And that's fine. To this day, I love Oblivion. But when I play a tabletop RPG, I like it when it doesn't feel like a video game, no matter how good the game is, because it hurts immersion.
Just my opinions, though. If you like that feel, or if it doesn't feel like a video game, that's awesome. Play what you like
Glade Riven
Adventurer
True, but since there are kids in Fallout 3 & Fallout 3: New Vegas, it is plasuble that there will be kids in Elder Scroll V: Skyrim.
And yes, a human GM is more flexible, and can act a lot quicker than altering a game through mods.
And yes, a human GM is more flexible, and can act a lot quicker than altering a game through mods.
The Shaman
First Post
"A bit more complicated?" Seriously?
Can you honestly say that it's the same thing?
Yeah, didn't think so.
* Actual example from my Flashing Blades game.
I like both video games and tabletop RPGs, but I like them for different reasons and expect different things out of them.
One of the most important things for my enjoyment is for the rules to support the setting rather than diverge form it. For example, if resurrection is relatively easy to achieve in the rules, then people in the world should act as if it's relatively easy, and have a very different reaction to death than would be appropriate in a rule set where resurrection is difficult or impossible.
While some concessions to playability have to be made (realistic injury and death systems often result in some pretty short games), I don't really like playing a game where there is a strong and blatantly obvious dissonance between how the world actually works (game rules) and how characters in the world implicitly seem to think it works.
Traditionally, I think computer games have tended to accept a larger degree of this sort of dissonance, particularly in MMO games where you can't reload when you die, and people don't like completely losing their character, so they always include some kind of automatic respawn mechanism.
Also, an MMO can't really let you just say "I'm resting for 2 weeks while my wounds heal" and then skip ahead in time to continue the action, while single player games could do exactly this (I remember the old SSI gold box games where you could be resting for a lot of days if you didn't have a healer in the party). MMOs (and some other computer games as well) decided it was easier to just let the characters heal up completely in a matter of seconds or minutes between battles without even the pretence of an extended rest, because it was the only obvious practical way to handle it in an MMO.
That MMO insta-rest mechanic migrated to single player computer games, and few people complained because in most single player CRPGs you could rest as much as you wanted anyway, so it really didn't change much except for the need to click the rest button. The problem with this instant healing (and the previous single player CRPG mechanic of "press the rest button whenever you need to") is that it eliminates some of the longer term resource management elements from the game. It basically allows you to enter every encounter at (or very near) full strength. Everything is balanced on a "per-encounter" basis, and you don't have to worry much about conserving your resources.
With CRPGs, getting around this problem was somewhat difficult. No-rest zones caused players to march back to the nearest rest zone frequently, and if they were locked in and prevented from doing so, they tended to get frustrated. Time limits have generally not been done well in CRPGs, because it's hard for the computer to handle all the different consequences of taking too long on a quest.
Because of these CRPG limitations, instant-healing really doesn't seem too out of place there, since the potentially interesting side-effects of an extended healing rest would be ignored or glossed-over anyway.
Now that mechanic is migrating to tabletop games. The "healing surges" in D&D 4E definitely seem to me to be an extension of this idea. This is one of the ways that many people (myself included) think that video games are having a negative effect on tabletop games. Tabletop games with a live DM do have the capability of reacting appropriately to events like extended rests. Maybe there's not much going on, and the party rests uneventfully for a few days at the inn. On the other hand, maybe there's a war going on, and resting a few days at the inn might result in missing a critical battle where they might have turned the course of the war.
It all depends on the situation and a live DM can improvise these sorts of things in a way that a computer can't. Importing some of these "gameplay convenience" mechanics from video games into tabletop games where they're not needed can have a detrimental effect. I like having to make a hard decision about whether to head into battle when I'm already almost dead, or risk waiting to heal and possibly missing important events. I like the sorts of lively debates between players when the party is facing that sort of situation.
If my character is a troll, then I'd expect to have rapid regeneration, and I expect the lore of the game world to note the curious and unusual fact that trolls regenerate their wounds rapidly. If every race in the world can regenerate serious injuries in a short span of time, I would expect the DM to put some time and thought into what the likely social consequences of such a world would be. People would behave differently, serious risk taking would probably be much more normal, and I very much doubt you would end up with anything remotely resembling any real human cultures.
What I don't like seeing in a tabletop game is a world that includes all the fast-healing auto-respawning gameplay conventions of a MMO video game, while the inhabitants of that world still act like those things don't exist.
Both 3.xE and 4E D&D seemed to take some inspirations from video games (3E took the XP level advancement table and feat progression table straight from the original Fallout games), and some of these inspirations I liked, while others, not so much.
I generally tend to prefer classless systems, so out of all editions of D&D I like 3.x the best because the multi-class system allowed you to basically pick and choose relatively freely as you advanced, rather than choosing a class at the beginning and being (mostly) forced to stick with it as you progress.
In general I'd rather use the original core classes and feats and build unique characters out of them rather than adding new (and increasingly specific and narrowly focused) classes and feats, but that doesn't really support a steady stream of rule books. While I think the original 3.5 core rulebooks are a bit too limited, I think the 3.5 core books plus the first series of "Complete Warrior, Arcane, etc" books is about the right level of customisability, if you eliminate all the pre-made prestige classes and just create your own setting-specific ones for specific groups and organisations (as prestige classes were originally intended).
In fact, I'd actually be tempted to eliminate some of the base classes, like paladin, and turn some of its class abilities into divine feats that channel "turn undead" uses. A paladin type character could then be made as a fighter/cleric with the appropriate feats. I'd also be inclined to eliminate ranger as a separate class, since that character archetype could be relatively well approximated as a fighter/druid or barbarian/druid (with maybe a few rogue levels as well). Basically, I don't want a separate class for each character archetype I can imagine, I'd rather have a few classes representing general skill sets that I can mix and match to build the archetype I'm looking for.
Very few video games (other than classless games or D&D 3.x based ones) that I've seen seem to have the degree of flexibility that 3.x had, and MMO games in particular seem to take a relatively rigid approach to classes (for balance reasons), so to some people, the shift of D&D to a more rigid class system in 4E is perceived as being "video-gamey". To be fair, 1E and 2E were just as bad in this regard, and 3.x was just a pleasant anomaly.
Before 3E was released, I had gotten quite bored of 2E and moved on to other systems like GURPS, but 3E provided enough customisability in the multi-classing and feats system to bring me back to D&D. I've tried 4E a few times, but I just didn't like it. I've also played the 4E-based Ravenloft board game, and thought it was quite fun, but there was no concern about whether the behavior and attitudes of the NPCs makes sense in the context of the rules of the game, because it's just a board game, not a role-playing game.
-Kasoroth
One of the most important things for my enjoyment is for the rules to support the setting rather than diverge form it. For example, if resurrection is relatively easy to achieve in the rules, then people in the world should act as if it's relatively easy, and have a very different reaction to death than would be appropriate in a rule set where resurrection is difficult or impossible.
While some concessions to playability have to be made (realistic injury and death systems often result in some pretty short games), I don't really like playing a game where there is a strong and blatantly obvious dissonance between how the world actually works (game rules) and how characters in the world implicitly seem to think it works.
Traditionally, I think computer games have tended to accept a larger degree of this sort of dissonance, particularly in MMO games where you can't reload when you die, and people don't like completely losing their character, so they always include some kind of automatic respawn mechanism.
Also, an MMO can't really let you just say "I'm resting for 2 weeks while my wounds heal" and then skip ahead in time to continue the action, while single player games could do exactly this (I remember the old SSI gold box games where you could be resting for a lot of days if you didn't have a healer in the party). MMOs (and some other computer games as well) decided it was easier to just let the characters heal up completely in a matter of seconds or minutes between battles without even the pretence of an extended rest, because it was the only obvious practical way to handle it in an MMO.
That MMO insta-rest mechanic migrated to single player computer games, and few people complained because in most single player CRPGs you could rest as much as you wanted anyway, so it really didn't change much except for the need to click the rest button. The problem with this instant healing (and the previous single player CRPG mechanic of "press the rest button whenever you need to") is that it eliminates some of the longer term resource management elements from the game. It basically allows you to enter every encounter at (or very near) full strength. Everything is balanced on a "per-encounter" basis, and you don't have to worry much about conserving your resources.
With CRPGs, getting around this problem was somewhat difficult. No-rest zones caused players to march back to the nearest rest zone frequently, and if they were locked in and prevented from doing so, they tended to get frustrated. Time limits have generally not been done well in CRPGs, because it's hard for the computer to handle all the different consequences of taking too long on a quest.
Because of these CRPG limitations, instant-healing really doesn't seem too out of place there, since the potentially interesting side-effects of an extended healing rest would be ignored or glossed-over anyway.
Now that mechanic is migrating to tabletop games. The "healing surges" in D&D 4E definitely seem to me to be an extension of this idea. This is one of the ways that many people (myself included) think that video games are having a negative effect on tabletop games. Tabletop games with a live DM do have the capability of reacting appropriately to events like extended rests. Maybe there's not much going on, and the party rests uneventfully for a few days at the inn. On the other hand, maybe there's a war going on, and resting a few days at the inn might result in missing a critical battle where they might have turned the course of the war.
It all depends on the situation and a live DM can improvise these sorts of things in a way that a computer can't. Importing some of these "gameplay convenience" mechanics from video games into tabletop games where they're not needed can have a detrimental effect. I like having to make a hard decision about whether to head into battle when I'm already almost dead, or risk waiting to heal and possibly missing important events. I like the sorts of lively debates between players when the party is facing that sort of situation.
If my character is a troll, then I'd expect to have rapid regeneration, and I expect the lore of the game world to note the curious and unusual fact that trolls regenerate their wounds rapidly. If every race in the world can regenerate serious injuries in a short span of time, I would expect the DM to put some time and thought into what the likely social consequences of such a world would be. People would behave differently, serious risk taking would probably be much more normal, and I very much doubt you would end up with anything remotely resembling any real human cultures.
What I don't like seeing in a tabletop game is a world that includes all the fast-healing auto-respawning gameplay conventions of a MMO video game, while the inhabitants of that world still act like those things don't exist.
Both 3.xE and 4E D&D seemed to take some inspirations from video games (3E took the XP level advancement table and feat progression table straight from the original Fallout games), and some of these inspirations I liked, while others, not so much.
I generally tend to prefer classless systems, so out of all editions of D&D I like 3.x the best because the multi-class system allowed you to basically pick and choose relatively freely as you advanced, rather than choosing a class at the beginning and being (mostly) forced to stick with it as you progress.
In general I'd rather use the original core classes and feats and build unique characters out of them rather than adding new (and increasingly specific and narrowly focused) classes and feats, but that doesn't really support a steady stream of rule books. While I think the original 3.5 core rulebooks are a bit too limited, I think the 3.5 core books plus the first series of "Complete Warrior, Arcane, etc" books is about the right level of customisability, if you eliminate all the pre-made prestige classes and just create your own setting-specific ones for specific groups and organisations (as prestige classes were originally intended).
In fact, I'd actually be tempted to eliminate some of the base classes, like paladin, and turn some of its class abilities into divine feats that channel "turn undead" uses. A paladin type character could then be made as a fighter/cleric with the appropriate feats. I'd also be inclined to eliminate ranger as a separate class, since that character archetype could be relatively well approximated as a fighter/druid or barbarian/druid (with maybe a few rogue levels as well). Basically, I don't want a separate class for each character archetype I can imagine, I'd rather have a few classes representing general skill sets that I can mix and match to build the archetype I'm looking for.
Very few video games (other than classless games or D&D 3.x based ones) that I've seen seem to have the degree of flexibility that 3.x had, and MMO games in particular seem to take a relatively rigid approach to classes (for balance reasons), so to some people, the shift of D&D to a more rigid class system in 4E is perceived as being "video-gamey". To be fair, 1E and 2E were just as bad in this regard, and 3.x was just a pleasant anomaly.
Before 3E was released, I had gotten quite bored of 2E and moved on to other systems like GURPS, but 3E provided enough customisability in the multi-classing and feats system to bring me back to D&D. I've tried 4E a few times, but I just didn't like it. I've also played the 4E-based Ravenloft board game, and thought it was quite fun, but there was no concern about whether the behavior and attitudes of the NPCs makes sense in the context of the rules of the game, because it's just a board game, not a role-playing game.
-Kasoroth
The comment "this feels too videogamey" sounds like a passive-agressive backhanded insult to videogames, whether you meant it that way or not.
Also I agree with other people when they say it can be vague when someone describes something as too "videogamey", is it too restricted in scope of activities? Is it to focused on combat? Does it break verisimilitude for no good reason? Odds are in using the term "videogamey" you've simply annoyed someone that likes videogames and confused the topic. You may not like videogames, or think that they're too limited in their nature, but please be courteous and don't use passive-aggressive insults, intentionally or not.
[PSA]Just don't use weasel words like "videogamey".[/PSA]
Also I agree with other people when they say it can be vague when someone describes something as too "videogamey", is it too restricted in scope of activities? Is it to focused on combat? Does it break verisimilitude for no good reason? Odds are in using the term "videogamey" you've simply annoyed someone that likes videogames and confused the topic. You may not like videogames, or think that they're too limited in their nature, but please be courteous and don't use passive-aggressive insults, intentionally or not.
[PSA]Just don't use weasel words like "videogamey".[/PSA]
Well its not. There is nothing inherent in the statement to do with judging videogames at all.
[PSA]Don't project your own preconceptions on the words of others.[/PSA]
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But there are a sizable number people that do hear that, and in using that term you're saying things you don't mean;what you think you said isn't as important as what people think you said-the former is reflection, the latter is communication. If you keep using the term, well, you'll just annoy and irritate some people, including some you may want to deal with. "I didn't mean that" generally doesn't work with things that people think are insults, so be careful.
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