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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 5167607" data-attributes="member: 22779">Just a comment on the whole "WOTC D&D borrows from video games" thing.There was a recent interview (and I've totally forgotten all the names involved - The Truth blog or something like that?) where the dev talked about how he had learned things from video games that can be applied to PnP games.  One of the big ones was the idea of learning curve.  Bear with me, because I do think this applies here.As I understood things, the idea went like this.  In any given genre of video games, you have several fundamental basic mechanics.  If you are playing an FPS on a PC, then WASD controls your movement, the mouse controls your view, the numbers switch your weapons.  This is true of pretty much every FPS for a PC.  Once I've played any FPS on a PC, I can move over to another title and everything I learned from the first game ports over.The same is true for almost every genre, whether cRPG, RTS, or whatever.  So long as a game falls into a given genre, you are likely going to know how the controls work after the first game.4e has embraced this approach.  Once I learn how to use any character in the game, all other characters work EXACTLY the same way.  No one has radically different "controls" that I need to learn (like the spell/non spell caster division in previous editions forex - and even then, once I learn to cast like a wizard, that's different from casting like a Psion).  Now, wheel this around to the idea of the ego-gamer.  Not having a new learning curve for every class means that I can choose any class and generally use it to a similar level of proficiency.  This in turn means that any class I play will reward my actions in roughly similar manner and rate.  Everyone hits roughly the same amount for roughly the same amount of damage (to use a purely combat example).So, no matter what I play, I'm getting rewarded roughly as often as any other class.  This is a significant departure from earlier editions where I might have one spells per day and couldn't hit anything for any significant damage the rest of the time.  Now, to me, the debate isn't over the idea of whether or not rewarding everyone equally is a good idea, but rather, what's the benefit of rewarding everyone at the table differently?  The fighter gets to do his thing for pretty much the entire campaign without too much in the way of sitting on his hands.  The wizard waits half the campaign doing not a whole lot, and then really comes into his own the other half.  Does that mean that fighter players were ego-gamers in days of yore?  And now we're rewarding everyone just like the fighter used to be?I don't have an answer and I'm trying really, really hard to maintain impartiality here.  Cos I don't have an answer.  I'm just bringing up ideas.</blockquote>

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