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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5922908" data-attributes="member: 58197">[size=+2]D&D IS NOT A COMPUTER GAME.[/size]Sorry. I seem to be seeing the "It works in CRPGs/MMOs!" thing a lot recently.In an MMO, there is basically one thing you do while adventuring: You kill stuff. There is no social interaction (except between players) and very little exploration. So you do whatever you gotta do to get the PCs back in the fight as fast as possible. Anything that goes on out of combat is a distraction. Attrition over time is a bad thing; you want to keep the game at maximum intensity.In a tabletop game, however, there is a lot of stuff that happens outside combat. There are NPCs to talk to, and there are unknown settings to explore. There is an open-ended world where PCs can try anything they can think of and the results of their actions stick. Furthermore, when combat does occur, calculations that an MMO server can perform in the blink of an eye require physical dice, paper and pencil, and slow human brains to process.What all this adds up to is a game that is necessarily much slower-paced than any MMO, and one where in-game continuity plays a much bigger role. In an MMO, the boss you kill today will come back in a few minutes to be killed again. In D&D, that boss is dead for good (or until some necromancer turns it into an undead horror). Maintaining that sense of continuity, of actions having lasting consequences, is vital to what makes a tabletop game fun. And part of that is that if you get torn up in a fight, you don't pop back up at full strength ready for the next one. You are hurt and have to deal with that. Maybe you avoid a fight you would otherwise have charged into. Maybe you try to talk some of the bad guys into a short-term alliance. These are options you don't have in an MMO.Bottom line, if you want the MMO experience, why are you playing D&D? It's a terrible substitute. The servers are agonizingly slow and error-prone, the graphics are crap, and you can't even log on most of the time--you have to wait until the "Your Local DM" server is available, which happens only a few hours each week. D&D is never going to work as an MMO and should not try. Instead it should play to its own strengths.</blockquote>

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