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<blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 4937735" data-attributes="member: 22424">It's possible as long as everyone involved is a PC. As soon as you get NPCs in the mix, you're tightly constrained by the behaviours that the programmer envisaged when putting together his adventure.For example: Imagine we have a tribe of Lizardfolk guarding a MacGuffin. The player of the Bard says, &quot;I'll try to persuade them to just hand it over!&quot; Being as this is a fairly unusual choice (the most common would be to attack), this wasn't envisaged by the adventure writer.In D&amp;D: The DM makes a ruling, assigns a difficulty, and the player rolls. Unless it's a bad DM, he at least gets to make the attempt.In an MMO: No joy. It wasn't an option the designer envisaged, so it can't be done.The nature of the computer program is that there will always be limits of this sort. And the moment there are NPCs in the mix, we hit the problem.So, the MMO simply cannot replicate the same sort of unbounded play that the presence of a DM provides to the tabletop game.The basic point I'm getting at is this: there are things the computer is really good at (handling the math, special effects, combat), and things that it is inherently bad at (handling NPCs, improvising, creating anything new). It would be a poor choice to try to compete with the machine against its strengths; go for the weaknesses instead.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="delericho, post: 4937735, member: 22424"] It's possible as long as [i]everyone[/i] involved is a PC. As soon as you get NPCs in the mix, you're tightly constrained by the behaviours that the programmer envisaged when putting together his adventure. For example: Imagine we have a tribe of Lizardfolk guarding a MacGuffin. The player of the Bard says, "I'll try to persuade them to just hand it over!" Being as this is a fairly unusual choice (the most common would be to attack), this wasn't envisaged by the adventure writer. In D&D: The DM makes a ruling, assigns a difficulty, and the player rolls. Unless it's a bad DM, he at least gets to make the attempt. In an MMO: No joy. It wasn't an option the designer envisaged, so it can't be done. The nature of the computer program is that there will always be limits of this sort. And the moment there are NPCs in the mix, we hit the problem. So, the MMO simply cannot replicate the same sort of unbounded play that the presence of a DM provides to the tabletop game. The basic point I'm getting at is this: there are things the computer is really good at (handling the math, special effects, combat), and things that it is inherently bad at (handling NPCs, improvising, creating anything new). It would be a poor choice to try to compete with the machine against its strengths; go for the weaknesses instead. [/QUOTE]

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