Gundark said:
I've been thinking about the monsters and how they are protrayed in WoW vs. D&D. What I mean is that in D&D say Gnolls pretty much dissapear after 6th-10th level. In WoW the Gnolls grow in level with you as you go to different areas.
There's a couple reasons for that. As a matter of tradition, monsters like orcs and gnolls have always been INTENDED as low-level threats, not as threats that scale easily through all levels of characters. In the past it's required that they appear
en masse in order to challenge characters beyond low levels. In past editions people have simply tacked on a wad of hit dice to try to make them continue to work beyond low levels. In 3E we can advance monsters or give them character levels - but it still doesn't mean it's a good idea to try to make them continue to scale as a threat that way because they STILL aren't designed in the first place as a continually-scaling threat - they've just been translated from old editions to 3E.
It's now understood that constantly scaling all and sundry monsters exactly to the PC's levels and capabilities ALL the time produces a campaign that seems
artificially scaled to the PC's rather than a world that actually has a life of its own. In other words, some monsters
ARE just weaker than others and it's a good thing that the game works that way. While it CAN work in isolated circumstances, to unthinkingly have the PC's fighting all the same old humanoid monsters at 20th level that they were fighting at 1st level is a bit wacked.
It always bothers me that certain low level monsters drop out of the game (D&D) after a certain level. However the WoW method seems to wreck with the "reality" of the game.
One of the things you have to remember about a MMORPG like WOW is that it
is MASSIVELY multiplayer and thus has certain design requirements that your casual game of D&D on the weekends does not. That is that it has to challenge characters from the lowest levels to the highest levels, everywhere in the game and do it 24/7/365 in REAL-WORLD-TIME. That means that you need "shortcuts" like simply taking the same monsters and scaling them up to provide a proper range of opponents to the degree that is needed. Your own dining room game is INSANELY more personalized and intimate - which means that you don't NEED to continually shovel combat opponents at THOUSANDS of characters in real-time.
I enjoy WOW as much as the next guy but I chafe when people insist that it is a ROLEPLAYING game in the same sense that my dining room game of D&D is. Roleplaying in a MMORPG is limited to PC-to-PC roleplaying - at best - and most of that is verbal. Your characters actual movements and activities still cannot be ruled to affect the other characters except as the programmed game-rules will allow - which is virtually NIL. You can't talk to NPC's, deal with monsters, or interact with the world except in INSANELY limited, tightly scripted ways. They often give a fair IMITATION of roleplaying in those areas - but it's JUST imitation. When you get right down to it, WOW (like every other online "RPG"), is simply a stylish treatment of the cycle of combat, increase power, combat something stronger, increase power again... etc. There is no interaction with the world except according to the prescripted events. And freedom of movement in a game world shouldn't be mistaken for the kind of interaction with a game world that comes with a living, breathing, reacting and improvising DM. Being able to say anything you like to another player character doesn't mean that that character can do anything but talk back at you.
Would the WoW system bother you in D&D? Would seeing a tribe of 12th level Gnolls utterly bug you? What is your opinion?
Yeah, it bugs me because it DOES wreck the perception of reality in the game. If the PC's are running into the same number of 12th level gnolls when they themselves are 14th as the number of base level gnolls they encountered when they were at 1st level, well... where were those 12th level gnolls then? I could design a campaign that would feature gnolls of EVERY level and have it make sense, but I can't help but think that my players would nonetheless be REALLY tired of fighting gnolls ALL the time.
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