Is Blizzards on to something?

[dm4hire]

I recently got back into playing World of Warcraft and for those not in the know there is suppose to be an expansion coming out this year which will increase the level cap from 80 to 85, introduce new features, new races, and change the world. The name of the expansion is Cataclysm. Think Dragonlance or the more recent Spellplague for the Forgotten Realms and you’ll understand the importance of what this expansion will do to the game. My point in bringing this up is that one of the aspects that will be changing is how their talent tree system will work. From what I’ve read I’m wondering if Blizzard is finally getting something right that RPGs still haven’t got a full grasp on. Here’s the gist of what’s going to change.

Once you reach level 10, you start gaining talent points for your character which can be placed in to one of three talent trees or specializations for your given class. I primarily play a paladin so I’ll use it as my example which has the three trees of Holy, Protection, and Retribution. Holy talents increase healing abilities, Protection increases armor, and Retribution increases damage. Before this pending expansion the only way you can gain benefits from another branch is to spend points in the secondary or tertiary talent branch of your choosing. The problem is that it weakens your character to some extent. Cataclysm is going to change that. You can still spend points on a secondary or tertiary branch if you want but you’ll no longer need too. Why? Because starting with the next expansion when you focus on a given branch you’ll automatically gain a slight increase in the other areas. If you want to be better, than the default for your focus, in those other areas then you will still be able to spend points in the respective branch. The improvement is that you will no longer need to by default. Am I making sense?

The point I’m getting at is most RPGs break down when a given class (or character) tries to fill more than one roll. The player either designs the character from the ground up to fill multiple roles or multiclasses to try to fill the gaps. Multiclassing in the past was the end all way of trying to meet that challenge head on. Nothing was doe to address it until recent games with 4e being a good example. WotC actually for the first time tries to address the roles a member of a party fills, but they don’t take D&D far enough if you think about it which I think is part of the initial complaints. Even in 3.x if you played a ranger as an example you chose either to be a ranged or melee based character. The crippling comes in having to choose feats to make up the difference. Then if you wanted to heal or do another aspect not directly related being a ranger you had to multiclass.

So you see just as in the current version of WoW you have to invest your feats or skill points outside your focus if you want to cover or fill more than one roll within a party. People just don’t do one thing in life, they might have a single focus, but they still function in most other areas. So the question is; is Blizzard starting to get the design right while RPGs are still stuck with the single focus mentality? If so; how could RPGs adapt to correctly portray this? Should feats and maybe skills perhaps offer more than just one thing? Thoughts?

 

[Steel_Wind]

It's not that it's not an interesting mechanic. It's that it is trying to address a problem inherent to WoW -- which is not present in tabletop RPGs.

What WoW plans to do is to address the needs of a fluid group of players which is always changing. You need certain roles filled in a Wow raid or dungeon instance which is dictated by the reality of who is in your raid group or queue right then, right now. And later that day or the next, it changes again.

WoW is, in group terms, an extremely dynamic game in terms of who you are playing with. While guilds and a stable raid party lessens this effect within a raiding guild, it's still an issue when doing dungeon instances.

So those fluid concerns lie at the heart of Blizzard's design decisions.

In the tabletop world, those problems rarely occur. Most groups are stable and meet once a week. While there are problems of players not making it from time to time, it's not a typical occurrence for most groups.

So the need to contend with unexpected gaps in the party every session just isn't there. As a consequence, D&D does not need a "respec" mechanic. Not only would such a mechanic undermine the verisimilitude of a player character in D&D - there just isn't a pressing need for it, imo.

In short: WoW's new design will address issues peculiar to WoW that don't surface in normal tabletop play. The hyper fluidity of group dynamics you get in Wow is something you don't often experience in D&D. It's a solution for a problem we just don't have.

 

[Rechan]

Also it wouldn't make a lot of sense to a lot of RPGs where abilities are divorced from one another. Healing and Magic are separate from using typical weaposn.

Using WoW's example, you'd have a straight up fighter who, as he levels, can heal and cast magic missiles, purely because he's leveling up?

 

[kenmarable]

That's cool (from the WoW perspective, I was just debating this evening whether to solely focus in one tree or spread a bit). As for RPGs, to me, a similar thing that I really like about 4e is the "+1/2 level to everything" idea. That way everything progresses at least somewhat and you at least don't suck at anything in order to be awesome at something else.

 

[Rechan]

That's cool (from the WoW perspective, I was just debating this evening whether to solely focus in one tree or spread a bit). As for RPGs, to me, a similar thing that I really like about 4e is the "+1/2 level to everything" idea. That way everything progresses at least somewhat and you at least don't suck at anything in order to be awesome at something else.

You still suck, but you don't suck hugely.

Even with that +1/2, if you are focused on Str (thus having a 10-12 in Dex), making a basic ranged attack is still not likely to hit, regardless of your level, since the defenses of the enemies increase faster than +1/2 level.

 

[haakon1]

People just don’t do one thing in life, they might have a single focus, but they still function in most other areas.

D&D characters are virtuosos at what they do. And I really, really don't think there are a lot of people walking around who are 1st violin of the New York Philharmonic, just won the Oscar for best actor, AND spend the fall as NFL starting quarterbacks . . .

In 3e and 4e, everyone CAN do most skills, with very little talent at them -- but you need to be a specialist to perform like one.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Yes- most people who are "multitalented" are usually better than most people in a variety of things...but can't usually compare to specialists in a given field. A decathlete may be better than 98% of the world's population at those events, but probably won't be able to touch any of the records set by those who specialize in particular track & field events.

Some are top-notch in a narrowly defined area- for instance, Prince plays a couple dozen instruments, usually playing all of the instruments on a given album, and only hiring additional musicians for touring. Both Tom Glavine and John Elway were elite athletes in multiple sports...but ultimately settled on a single one to play professionally.

Some others do manage to overachieve in a couple of diverse areas. Brian May is rock royalty, but he also has a doctorate in astrophysics, apparently.

The rarest of the rare are those who overachieve in a wide array of fields.

 

[haakon1]

a decathlete may be better than 98% of the world's population at those events, but probably won't be able to touch any of the records set by those who specialize in particular track & field events.

98th percentile isn't that elite. Think of it this way. There are ~700 Major League baseball players, mostly ages 20-40, out of how many millions of males in that age range who played baseball (or softball, or wiffle ball, or other precursors) across all the countries that play it?

98th percentile would be something like one of the top 50,000 turning 20 in each year . . . not even good enough for a good college team.

I figure D&D characters are similarly a rare elite, well into the 99th percentile of the population.

Which means expecting a fighter to be as good as a cleric at healing is like expecting a pitcher to be a good power hitter -- possible, but rare enough that requiring multi-classing to "pay for it" doesn't seem unfair to me.

The rarest of the rare are those who overachieve in a wide array of fields.

Nod.

Malcolm Gladwell said (paraphrasing) that to be really excellent at something, you generally have to spend 10,000 hours practicing it -- considering that 2000 hours is a normal working year, most people don't have time to do that quickly, for more than one field. Heck, most people never get truly excellent at anything, other than watching TV.

People more often do it serially than simultaneously, I think . . . I know a former minor leaguer (A short season) who's now a good software engineer.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Well, if you look at .000001 of the population, you're still talking about 6,500 people.

What sets guys like Jordan, Gretsky, Motzart, Leonardo and Hawking apart from the rest isn't their unique, naturally given talents, its that they've had the opportunities* to realize those talents to the fullest, unlike the other 6,499 people who might be as capable as they are. AND they actually took advantage of those opportunities.**

I remember going to the Dallas Guitar show a few years ago. A Hall of Fame guitarist was there, giving a lecture/demo. He started off by asking the assembled audience how many of them first picked up the guitar to because of him or someone like him. Almost every hand went up.

He responded, "It will never happen."

There was an audible GASP!

Then he continued, "When I get up, I play guitar. Then I eat breakfast. Then I play guitar. Then I eat lunch and do some errands and the like. Then I play guitar. Then I eat dinner. Then I play guitar. Then I go to bed. Sometimes, this gets my wife pissed off..."





* For all we know, there's a woman planting rice in a paddy in Asia who has as much of a gift for physics as Einstein, but has never gone to school because her family needed her to work on the farm.

** I've been told by teachers that I have a gift for stringed instruments. I pick up things much faster than others they've taught. That's how I became 6th chair cello in the Denver Youth Symphony within a year of picking up the instrument at age 10...and 1st and 2nd were teens who already played professionally. However, I never practiced cello- or the bass or the guitar (my other instruments)- enough to reach my full potential.

 

[Haltherrion]

In short: WoW's new design will address issues peculiar to WoW that don't surface in normal tabletop play. The hyper fluidity of group dynamics you get in Wow is something you don't often experience in D&D. It's a solution for a problem we just don't have.

I agree- WoW is a different beast than table top gaming. For one thing in WoW, it is very hard to have a true hybrid, a character who isn't quite so good at any one thing but can cover multiple roles because in WoW every battle is known ahead of time and a raid leader will optimize for the strongest in any given role. One of the things WoW has struggled with is to make the hybrid classes viable without making them too strong: make a paladin as a good a tank as the other tanks and as good a healer as the other healers and why player one of the tank-only or healer-only classes?

Not sure this is going to fix the problem for them. Good for the multi-role classes, not so good for the others.

I played WoW fairly intensely for 3 years and I have enjoyable memories of it but the scripted raids and the endless grind are the anti-thesis of roleplaying. And as much as Blizzard did a nice job of advancing MMORGs with WoW in its day, it is time someone took them past WoW's massive raids ("we will just make it hard to progress by requiring armies players who are really good at 'simon says' ") and repetitive content ("for reasons that we won't reveal, we refuse to randomize instance content and world quests").

There seems little reason to me to this latest wow-twist into D&D. It seems to me to worsen an already existing balance problem.

4E seems to do a nice enough job of rebalancing the classes and in any given mix of stable characters, there should be plenty of places for everyone to shine unless the players went out of their way to pick classes that step on each other's toes.

Furthermore, with a good gaming group and ref, there is a lot more to the game than nod here or there in the rules to a particular hybrid concept. The rules set the stage but the group makes the game.