D&D and the MMORPG

[Destil]

The key to remember is that efficiency is the biggest thing in a MMORPG. XP/Second is really all that you'll care about while leveling, and leveling is 90% of the game. Therefore you need hyper-specialized PCs.
Terms

Aggro - The amount of 'hate' a monster has built up. Monsters attack the player with the highest aggro (run over and smack 'em 99% of the time). Dealing damage increases your aggro, as does stuff like debuffing (slow for instance in D&D) and healing (healing can often be seen as dealing as much damage as you heal).

DPS - Damage per second, generally the ability to deal constant damage.

Pull - Pulling involves getting a (usually lone) monster to follow the puller back to the party to be killed. Pulling also incorporates the ability to break up monsters (i.e. keep from getting 2 ogres chasing you even when their close together). Pulling is important because spell casters generally get more MP back by sitting in one spot, or because it's simply safer to park your party away from monster spawns and bring them to you. Less popular in more recent games as AI has started to improve (more ranged attacks) and monsters are often linked and forced to spawn and move together.

Add - An extra monster. Adds happen generally because of spawning monster or poor pulling. Remember that we're dependent on only fighting 1 monster at a time usually.

Mob - Short for mobile (an old MUD term, right up there with aggro), mobs are NPCs, generally monsters wandering around to get killed.

Pet - Generally a mob that a PC controlls, often an expendable but weak tank or DPS melee type.

Efficiency roles - for your typically grind.

Tank - High Aggro, high defense, often low damage. The tanks job is to keep monsters from hitting other players. Defense and Aggro control are the the most important features. Damage is really only important if you can get it without sacrificing the two above and to help with aggro.

DPS classes - High damage, often low defense. A DPS type needs the ability to deal consistent high damage. Keeping from getting aggroed is the other concern, since defense is usually nill.

Healing - Damage and defense are rarely an issue, the real point of a healer is to keep tanks alive.

Support - Generally a support PC makes everyone else more efficient, typically with an MP regain buff. Because MP is usually the limiting factor to how fast you can kill things (hit points are easier to heal with magic). Support PCs often branch out into the other rolls listed below.

Crowd Control / Pulling - Sometimes you also need someone specifically to break up the monsters as they spawn so you can kill one at a time, or someone who doesn't need to rest who's job is specifically to pull monsters.

Aggro Management - Classes that help keep monsters on the tank, either by removing aggro caused by others or increasing the aggro caused by the tank. Typically a support or DPS as well.

Other roles - Even though the idea is that we're only fighting 1 monster at a time sometimes something goes wrong. This is when other rolls come into play, usually.

Crowd Control / Sleep / Mez - 'Mez' (short for mesmerize, the basic mez spell of EQ) is basically a sleep effect, as long as you don't hurt the monster it won't hurt you for so long. Usually the preferred way to deal with adds (along with Charm, which makes the extra monster fight for you, though often has higher risks then mez).

Nuke - Nuking refers to using a limited resource (usually MP) to deal damage a lot faster. Typically fast damage is less efficient, but sometimes you need something dead now.

Secondary Tank - Sometimes you have a DPS class (usually a melee DPS or a pet class) that can take over and tank to some degree, again with lower def (and thus less efficiently than your main tank). Again helpful with adds.

 

[Sejs]

I have yet to see anything approaching say DragonRealms or Legend of the Red Dragon, which is sad.

Now this I'm curious about, as it's an odd comment. LoRD was amazingly linear and pretty simplistic. Adventure in the woods, upgrade gear, flirt with Violet, come back tomorrow. Possibly mug someone in their sleep if you're feeling uppity.

What great standard did LoRD set that MMOs have yet to live up to, in your view?

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Several games have tried to expand the things rogues do, but again, the problem is that there's no DM, so the designers design for groups that don't include rogues. Locked doors that must be open have keys, although they're sometimes difficult to get. Locked chests only have bonus treasure in them, not anything REQUIRED. And the traps that a rogue can find and disarm are painful but never fatal. If they coded problems to only show up when there was a rogue along, that would be an added incentive to leave them home.

Honestly, I'm not sure the traditional D&D rogue works in an MMORPG most of the time, which is a shame, because I agree that most of the fun of the rogue class isn't endlessly sneak attacking. In MMORPGs, they do make excellent scouts, which is worth something.

 

[Destil]

Niggle here - it's 'genre', and MMOs are not a genre (which refers to a specific type of fiction), but a medium (like television, or a mode of delivery of content) for the most part. There's fantasy (genre) MMOs (medium), super hero, science fiction...you get the idea. And you're not going to get the sort of scale of interaction you see on MU*s for a simple reason - you can't have that many GameMasters running the show. Logistics prevent it. Comparing the MMO to something like a MUD is almost apples and organges, and definitely so when you talk true MU* RP environments.

'Genre' is pretty wildly used in gaming, even if it's not the correct denotation of the word. I'm specifically thinking about non-moderated muds, or at least ones with minimal GM involvement, as the best graphical equivalent of ones with heavier DM involvement or PC content would be some of the things I've seen done in Neverwinter.

That may be true for the game you've played, but there are some positively gorgeous engines out there. Likewise, characters differ wildly from game to game - some are very narrow, others not nearly so. It's not really a valid argument you're making, here.

Even a shadow priest is still a healer. Yeah, WoW has a much wider list of abilities available to anyone than the older games. But your mages are still mostly tissue paper-armored single-hitpoint glass-cannons (a shaman isn't a mage, of course ) or healing batteries.

Again, this differs from game to game.

I'll admit I've been out of the MMO thing for about 2 years after getting bored with WoW and there could be some more variance these days. Though do note I'm referring to the real game and not the exclusively high level raid stuff.

 

[Destil]

Now this I'm curious about, as it's an odd comment. LoRD was amazingly linear and pretty simplistic. Adventure in the woods, upgrade gear, flirt with Violet, come back tomorrow. Possibly mug someone in their sleep if you're feeling uppity.

What great standard did LoRD set that MMOs have yet to live up to, in your view?

You know, Sejs, I think you may be right here, in retrospect. I've got a few friends who are very large fans of the game, and have fond memories of it myself, but it may very well be more rose-colored glasses in retrospect.

DragonRealms, however, I'll happily defend to this day as the best game I've ever played. Yeah, it has it's own (deep) flaws, but does so many things so well...

 

[The_Gneech]

My only MMO experience is the beta of Lord of the Rings Online, which I'm currently going through. The main thing that irks me about characters in this game is that they take the "cookie cutter class" problem of old editions of D&D and magnify them tenfold. You don't even get to roll for stats.

My main character in the game is a Champion, which is something like a D&D barbarian who has all his feats poured into TWF. The Champion, in the usual MMO parlance, is a "DPS (damage per second)" machine ... intended to get into melee and tear up the foes' hit points and nothing else. I'm not even allowed to use a bow ... I can use any combination of one-handed weapons I want, but I couldn't buy any ability to use two-handed weapons of any kind until I was 10th level. I'm told I'll be able to buy the ability to use a bow at 20th level, although I can't get above 15th in the beta. There are no particular "skills" in the D&D sense to be had, except for the ability to play various musical instruments, and possibly the crafting ability. What you get instead when you level up are basically combat maneuvers.

It's taking me quite a lot to get into the frame of mind to look past this rigidity and embrace the character, but at the same time a significant portion of MMO players seem to be hostile to anything resembling characterization and roleplay anyway. Getting onto one of the "roleplay-friendly" servers has helped ... but it's going to be a while before I get used to it.

-The Gneech

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

LotRO is trying a different approach than other MMORPGs and each has a different take on customization:

EQ1 allows everyone to set their own stats (within parameters), so you can create a wildly suboptimal character by accident -- and I know quite a few people who have. You can also learn almost every non-combat skill around, although a few are restricted to invidual classes. Most customization is by gear at higher levels, though.

World of Warcraft, in comparison, doesn't allow anyone to create their own stats -- either everyone was making the exact same characters during alpha, or they were creating "broken" characters they couldn't fix later and screamed about it -- but instead, after level 10, you start getting talent points that can be used for a variety of class-specific abilities. Think of each point as being about a third of a feat, and that's about right, epecially since most of the talents are in chains or are in tiers that require a certain number of lower-level talents to be bought first. Each character can learn three available-to-everyone non-combat abilities and two (and only two) non-combat "professions." Other than talents and professions, most customization is by gear at higher levels.

City of Heroes/Villains allows choosing powers based on a heroic archetype and astonishing amounts of character costume design (and eventually multiple costumes). After that, almost all customization is on what additional powers are gained later on and how one sets up the not-gear bonuses to improve their powers, but pretty much everyone tries to improve powers in the identical way as everyone else.

 

[Dragonbait]

I have not seen much talk about Dungeons & Dragons Online on here. The rogues in that game are much more like the rogues of its namesake: They detect and disable traps, locked doors, and the like. There are traps all over the place in the DDO instances, so it's quite a task.
Other than that, all the other roles remain the same.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

And if you're looking for roleplaying in an MMORPG, you need to pick a game that actually has roleplaying servers and then pick a roleplaying guild on that server. (And ignore the folks outside the guild who treat it like a normal server, although most, IME, are pretty sensitive to the desires of roleplayers and don't step on their toes, although there are idiot griefers who specifically try to irritate the RP crowd. That's what the ignore feature is for, though.)

 

[GreatLemur]

Also, MMO's have never been able to work in that most important of aspects: the trap (hence, traditionally skilled classes (the rogue) get relegated to "crowd control" i.e. swabbing up extra minions.)

I think that's because traps aren't really particularly fun or interesting even in D&D, and in your average MMORPG--where everone can heal themselves fully just by stopping and resting for a moment--they'd be basically meaningless, unless they were some kind of particularly obnoxious save-or-die equivalents.

I think you're a bit off on your rogue analysis, too. "Crowd control"--as has been observed--doesn't refer to directly attacking minor enemies while someone else deals with the big one, so much as using abilities that paralyze, slow, confuse, or otherwise hamper large numbers of enemies at once. That's usually the job of some kind of spell-caster. The rogue-types in MMORPGs actually tend to me melee combat monsters, in my experience. While the fighter-types are there to take damage, the rogues are there to dish it out, using various types of critical hit and sneak attack-like abilities.

It's just, as Blizzard discussed during BlizzCon, it might seem more realistic for Onyxia the black dragon to kill all the healers first, but who the heck wants to play a healer in that fight after that?

Hold on, Warcraft monsters don't focus on healers? Tell that to my Tauren Shaman. OH WAIT YOU CAN'T BECAUSE HE'S DEAD AGAIN. (I know this is a bit of a tangent, but I really seem to draw more aggro for healing than for hitting. Is it just me, or are all those hyenas and crap smart enough to kill the medic first?)