NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wulf Ratbane" data-source="post: 3698897" data-attributes="member: 94">Me too. RD's right more often than he is wrong, and even when he's wrong he's worth thinking about.Jeez, I can't think of a more apt description of my game group.Our group is eight 30-something guys, almost all married, engaged, or partnered up; no kids. Various outside interests, a lot of sports, a lot of drinkin'. Typical guys. I don't think there are a lot of video gamers amongst them, so I have no idea how successful an MMO would be at pulling any of them away from my group.Almost all are former D&D players from childhood. Why they played then, why they left, and why they came back, I don't know-- but I do know that our game sessions typically feature: socializing, avatar empowerment, strategic thinking, and group strategic thinking, in roughly that order.Nobody-- nobody-- is here to tell a story. A good story that arises from one of our game sessions is a fortunate circumstance, at best, but certainly not the motivation for playing. I would describe myself and my players as Power Gamers-- but with personal investment in our Avatars. For as lightly as we take the game, nobody at the table takes the loss of our Avatar lightly. It sucks. It feels like "losing."Interestingly enough to your point, I had one hardcore WoW player join my group, and he left almost immediately after his PC died (around 2nd level).As a designer, I would focus on delivering that "alternate Power Gamer" experience-- rapid empowerment, meaningful decisions, strategic thinking-- with a "gritty" and consequential "game reality." That is why I maintain that D&D would be a better game if it focused on that portion of the game that most strongly delivers this kind of play: the Sweet Spot, roughly defined as levels 2-8. (1st level is that portion of play where the player becomes emotionally invested in the character, and so it falls outside the actual sweet spot of play.)The best game prolongs or extends that sweet spot for the maximum real-time duration (measured in the number of game sessions moreso than in hours of play), because this delivers the longest social aspect of the game.</blockquote>

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