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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9093427" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Though it's worth noting that both of these types of games have begun to reach market over-saturation. I want to say either earlier this year or sometime last year, we had like four different "go do farming stuff!" games announced within like a month of each other. That doesn't mean that these things have no lessons to teach us, but rather that we should be careful to account for both the fickle tastes of consumers collectively, and the twin issues of bad clones of popular games and mistaking "this specific game was popular" for "this specific genre combination was popular." E.g. generally combining action-RPG and city-building is not going to result in an interesting or coherent gameplay experience, but it unusually did do so with Act Raiser.The particularly important thing to note here is that a huge, huge part of the "tank" (and, to an extent, bruiser) vs all other MOBA roles is that it is about the economy of attention, not about some absolute threat list which must always focus on the numerically top spot. Meaning, "tanks" do their job in MOBAs by being a dangerous but difficult to kill threat. High defenses, high maximum HP, crowd control effects, punishments for attacking them, punishments for ignoring them...and what does all that sound like? The Defender role in 4e. "Taunts" are exceedingly rare in 4e--but Marks are commonplace, and the Marking mechanic is all about the economy of attention. What risks will the Marked target be willing to take? Which is the safer bet, attacking the high-defense, high-HP Defender, or trying to geek the mage and risking both failure to actually do anything AND punishment from the Defender?"Tanky bruiser" just means drifting Striker--and that, too, reflects some of the same ideas that went into MOBAs. Note, for instance,  that the full flowering of these design ideas was pretty much simultaneous with the launch of 4e, since DOTA1 launched two years before and LoL launched two years after. There are avoidance Defenders (Swordmage), high-HP Defenders (Warden), inherently tanky-bruiser Defenders (Fighters), etc. There are light and mobile Strikers (Rogue, Storm Sorc), high-HP/regen Strikers (Barbarians, particularly Rageblood), super-accurate Strikers (Avenger), long-range/"carry" Strikers (Ranger), etc. And support characters aren't dull, monotonous affairs. They're actually quite fun (I recall very much enjoying a support-heavy Malfurion in the few Heroes of the Storm games I played.)Though this comes with it a second lesson, not in what is done but what is not done: The risk of shallow experiences which do not grip you.A very long (non-ranked) LoL match takes 45 minutes to an hour. A short one can be as little as 20 minutes if the enemy team performs particularly poorly (whether through bad luck, bad plays, or bad behavior). With such a narrow time window and rapid game turnover, you need characters that are easy to get into and easy to get out of. D&D doesn't work like that. Indeed, I would argue it can't, and trying to make it so would break it.I've been playing more LoL casually lately, as I've met some folks who play, and a champion I like aesthetically (Aurelion Sol) semi-recently got a rework. His old design was...clunky at best, very unintuitive, and not particularly rewarding even if you played it well. The new version, while losing the One Weird Trick that he previously had, is significantly better, and in fact one of my favorite champions to play. (I like scaling champs, and Aurelion Sol is neat because he doesn't just scale for damage, he also scales for area and range, which really matters as games wear on!) He became much more standard, much easier to slide right into--much less to catch on, so to speak.But that process cuts both ways. There's nothing to hold on to later. No depth and little complexity. 90% of games, you'll buy the same items, and only swap out 1-2 depending on the context. You'll always have the exact same suite of abilities. This, again, is good--great, even!--within the context of LoL, where matches are meant to be relatively short.In the contest of D&D, where even for very old-school-minded players a single character should last several weeks if not multiple months of once-a-week, multi-hour sessions...having nothing to catch on can be a pretty big problem. People slide in...and the slide right back out again, having gained little to nothing from the experience. Finding the way to balance these two concerns--making it easy to get in, but also easy to get hooked, to stick with it, to feel rewarded for doing so--is an extremely tricky design problem.This is why I talk as much as I do about how "approachable" a game is (how easy it is to get into the game) and how much "depth" it has (how it leverages its parts to provide an engaging experience.) Different players want different amounts of engagement--what is just right for one player may be stultifyingly boring for another and vastly too complex for a third. The lesson to take from MOBAs is not that every character should be dirt-simple so that it can be fully explored in 25-45 minutes; it's that every game should focus on upping approachability while preserving a selection of different options for depth.</blockquote>

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