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<blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 4937000" data-attributes="member: 22424">This is the point where the analogy breaks down. The key difference between wargames and RPGs is that wargames are, to a very large extent, entirely mechanical. As such, a 'pure' translation to the computer screen will replicate the play experience very well indeed.RPGs, on the other hand, have a mechanical core, but around that have a strong shell of interactive storytelling and improvisational acting. They also traditionally have a much more unbounded set of options to them - in a war game each unit has a very limited range of things that it can do; in an RPG a character can at least attempt any action within the bounds of human (and sometimes non-human) capability. That cannot be readily translated to the computer screen. Playing WoW is a very different experience to playing a tabletop RPG in anything but a fairly constrained hack-and-slash manner.Find the things that make their game different from the computer equivalent, and play up those elements of the game. Making the new edition of D&amp;D play more like WoW is a losing strategy - you'd be playing against the strengths of the computer, in an area where they simply do better. You can't win that way.(That said, there are things to learn from WoW and other games. I'm certainly not one to claim that anything WoW-like is bad. And neither am I necessarily claiming the D&amp;D 4e is a WoW clone, since I don't have enough experience of either to make that comparison. But I will claim that going down that route would be a losing strategy.)</blockquote>

[QUOTE="delericho, post: 4937000, member: 22424"] This is the point where the analogy breaks down. The key difference between wargames and RPGs is that wargames are, to a very large extent, entirely mechanical. As such, a 'pure' translation to the computer screen will replicate the play experience very well indeed. RPGs, on the other hand, have a mechanical core, but around that have a strong shell of interactive storytelling and improvisational acting. They also traditionally have a much more unbounded set of options to them - in a war game each unit has a very limited range of things that it can do; in an RPG a character can at least attempt any action within the bounds of human (and sometimes non-human) capability. That cannot be readily translated to the computer screen. Playing WoW is a very different experience to playing a tabletop RPG in anything but a fairly constrained hack-and-slash manner. Find the things that make their game different from the computer equivalent, and play up those elements of the game. Making the new edition of D&D play more like WoW is a losing strategy - you'd be playing against the strengths of the computer, in an area where they simply do better. You can't win that way. (That said, there are things to learn from WoW and other games. I'm certainly not one to claim that anything WoW-like is bad. And neither am I necessarily claiming the D&D 4e is a WoW clone, since I don't have enough experience of either to make that comparison. But I will claim that going down that route would be a losing strategy.) [/QUOTE]

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