D&D and World of Warcraft (Not a Rant)

[I'm A Banana]

On the other hand, though, the things that WoW does well, it tends to do much better than D&D can. If the powers that be have some idea that they'll make D&D more like WoW and somehow compete with WoW, they're on a course for disaster. Better to look to the things that D&D can do well that WoW can't (such as the ability to go "off the map", as it were), and use those as the competitive edge.

So, a short list of things that WoW (and other CRPG's) don't do well that D&D can either emphasize or otherwise prey on:

#1: "Ownership." My D&D game is going to be totally MINE. *I* get to say what's cool, who's in power, what races there are, how they interact, what their histories are, etc. It takes place in a world *I* make up, with characters that *I* created. With WoW, it's a shared environment, and you don't get to decide, for instance, that the night elves are lame and cut them from the world (though you could always avoid the part of the world that night elves are in, chances are you'll see or hear about one or two in your journeys).
4e Status: Solid. They've got a really strong "metasetting" and tone this time around, but I think it will take quite a bit of effort to stop people from doing their own thing with them, and I don't think Wizards is interested in stopping people from doing their own thing at all (they'd just like to give you a good baseline).

#2: "Modding." Related to #1, I can fiddle with D&D as much as I want to make it brand spankin' new. I can make a new monster, a new race, a new class, and I can post it online or share it with my friends or (now with the OGL) even publish it myself. I don't just get to change the game, I get to GROW the game. I can't change WoW. The most I can do is post a suggestion to the message boards, but there's no way that I will just be allowed to make and add a new class that all the players can then start using.
4e Status: Okay. Gleemax and the DDI and the SRD show that they know their community is key, but a focus on being "software ready," Gleemax's "all your posts are belong to us!" policy, and a strong core design for a specific setting and mood make this something of a step back from 3e's "skeleton system." There will still be modding, but they seem to be trying to control and corral the modding community, which is undoubtedly a mixed success (I get everything important from Gleemax over here at EN World, why the heck would I need to go over there?)

#3: "Stories." D&D can be a very narrative game. It works if it's not, but a narrative plays to it's strengths. It can be interactive storytelling, where the characters and the DM riff off of each other to create wonderful shared tales of adventure and derring-do. WoW makes a stab at this, but largely falls up short: the stories are there, but are related only by static NPC convos, hoops you need to jump through, and the ever-present "kill 30 orcs so I can move to the next zone and kill 30 pallette-swapped other orcs, so I can eventually move to the final zone and kill 300 Dire Mega Ultra Battle Orcs, and their Big Boss, and then just kill lowbies for $15/month" grind. In D&D, I can be the world's last great hope for survival, and if I fail, the world can truly fall, and my next character may have to struggle against an ascendant evil. In WoW, there is an "if everyone's special, no one is" kind of mentality, where it doesn't matter where the endboss hides, he can't do anything to hurt you from there anyway. This also relates to the "everything is boring until level 40" problem in WoW, where certain types of quests are reserved for higher levels. In D&D, I can be 1st level and be a world's hero.
4e Status: Okay. I doubt they're going to play it up much, but I don't think anything they're doing will *remove* the ability to do this, so people who were will keep doing so and people who weren't won't be persuaded to do so.

#4: "Action." Believe it or not, the best D&D games are more action-packed than any pitched WoW battle I've ever been in. This is accomplished largely through players talking about what happens: their characters weaving, dodging, screaming battlecries, taking blows...in WoW, you've got the pretty flashing lights and colors, but your mind is occupied with the logistics of battle, the strategy of your abilities. This is good for fast-paced instant combat, of course, but it leaves something to be desired in the cinematic angle when you just stand there and glitter a lot. WoW battles can be exciting, but they won't be as full of running jumping aerobatics and visceral descriptions as a good D&D battle. "Sparkle sparkle blargh" is the general course of a WoW battle.
4e Status: Very good. Adding mobility to combat is a good idea, and I think the streamlining of the abilities leaves less in the way for descriptive action.

....those are just some ideas off the bottom of my head. Just a few. I'm sure there are more.

 

[I'm A Banana]

They (monsters) are being constructed, as far as I've seen so far, to be purely combat oriented.

I don't see this as a videogame issue (though there could be a good case for that...), but I agree it could be a problem. I've said before that monsters in D&D need to fill several roles, only one of which is "XP Speedbump." They need to populate our worlds, be believable characters, and have fully fleshed-out mythos. They need to be independent of the characters, and have a context that isn't just "hi, die, bye!"

The one thing that MMOs can do is simply log the hours of gaming in a controlled environment to see what works and doesnt work. There is no hiding a weakness of a class or a mechanic or a rule in MMOs. There are thousands of people online playing it all the time in a way the D&D just doesnt get tested. And the lessons learned from that is invaluable.

I think this has more to do with D&D's modability and ownership than play hours. It is rare to play D&D out of the box, because it is so easy to tweak it (and you are encouraged to). If you don't like something, think something's weak or overpowered, you tweak it. This means there isn't really so much one shared version of D&D as there are millions of versions of D&D which all share to one degree or another some sort of relationship to at least three core books.

I mean, how many people actually use encumbrance rules from....freakin'...ANY edition of the game? If encumbrance existed in WoW, people would begin griping about the many problems with it. But because so few people use it in D&D, you don't hear much about it's problems...people just weed it out.

 

[Gloombunny]

Out of curiosity, why are you tired of that?

Because it's incorrect. Almost every time people complain about something in 4e being too videogamey, it's something that was in tabletop RPGs - often in D&D itself! - long before any video game used it. Sometimes it's something that's not even in video games at all to any large extent.

If there was a significant number of players on every D&D forum who kept complaining about how the sky is green, I'd get tired of that too.

 

[Reynard]

If there was a significant number of players on every D&D forum who kept complaining about how the sky is green, I'd get tired of that too.

Really? if there were a significant number of people complaining that the sky was green, I think I must at least look up.

 

[Gloombunny]

Really? if there were a significant number of people complaining that the sky was green, I think I must at least look up.

And if you did look up and saw it was still blue?

 

[hong]

And if you did look up and saw it was still blue?

That would indicate that a green sky was a unique attribute of D&D, and should be preserved as one of the things that D&D does better than anyone else.

 

[Rykaar]

So, a short list of things that WoW (and other CRPG's) don't do well that D&D can either emphasize or otherwise prey on:

#1: "Ownership." My D&D game is going to be totally MINE. [snip]

#2: "Modding." Related to #1, I can fiddle with D&D as much as I want to make it brand spankin' new. [snip]

#3: "Stories." D&D can be a very narrative game. It works if it's not, but a narrative plays to it's strengths. It can be interactive storytelling, where the characters and the DM riff off of each other to create wonderful shared tales of adventure and derring-do. [snip]

#4: "Action." Believe it or not, the best D&D games are more action-packed than any pitched WoW battle I've ever been in. This is accomplished largely through players talking about what happens: their characters weaving, dodging, screaming battlecries, taking blows...in WoW, you've got the pretty flashing lights and colors, but your mind is occupied with the logistics of battle, the strategy of your abilities. [snip]

I excerpted most of the above because it really nails the advantages of D&D. I'll take issue with #4 in a minute. First a disclaimer: I've been a WoW player for almost 3 years, and have logged almost 2,000 hours into the game (yep, I'm still waiting on the "life" I ordered...I think it's been delayed again). I've been a D&D player for almost 30 years and have logged far more hours between playing the game, thinking about it, and discussing it.

I started EverQuest in its earliest days and lasted about 2 months before the sickening aspects of the game killed it for me. I walked into a town that had a big bad gnoll who was renowned for dropping a magic tomahawk that my ranger wanted. Well, over 60 people were standing around waiting for him to randomly appear--and some had been there for more than 12 hours. I closed my account that night and vowed "never again for MMO"

But WoW pulled me in, hook line and sinker. It's what you can do if you don't have a D&D group that gets together as much as your free time requires them to. It's all about YOU (and possibly some real life or in game friends) exploring the world and at least pretending that your actions matter, even though another person five minutes from now is going to kill the pirate boss and return a shipment of spyglasses to the goblins of Ratchet.

But like Kamikaze Midget stated it, what WoW isn't, is a world that revolves around you. Even the main story points are mass encounters in very dangerous dungeons against bosses that drop legendary loot--and you'll go back and kill them again in a week so other people in your "raid party" get good gear too.

But let's be honest about something before we look at 4e as somehow turning D&D into WoW. In what way are "Living" campaigns personal? By their very nature they're prefabricated settings that a group of sometimes randomly shuffled players get dropped into for a few hours. That's pretty much "Pick Up Groups" in WoW, and the setting is just as unconcerned about who you are and what you've done in that case. Someone else is doing the exact same thing in their version of the setting, and others will be doing so tomorrow.

And with gear that artificially boosts your primary stats to ridiculous levels (I'm thinking about the headband of intellect, or whatever it's called) you're really in a mode of defining your character as much by his belongings as by the nature of his personality or personal skills. Can't blame 4e for that either.

Gleemax is a concern to me because it seems like a unified technological means of strongly tempting players into the "Living" setting mindset, but buying the paper rules, and allowing flesh and blood DM's to bend the world to suit the tastes of themselves and their players is how 4e will always be much more personal and fun than any MMO.

Oh, but regarding #4 above? I love raiding, and when you're "progressing" to new content and not "farming" stuff you've done before, the excitement and tension is far more than just the "strategy of your own abilities". But I'll play D&D before WoW anyday