D&D 4E What D&D 4e Should Learn From World of Warcraft

[Fenes]

In D&D, you can change the world. An NPC you save or kill makes a difference. An invasion has lasting effects.

In WoW, the world is static. You cannot even kill one goblin permanently - or dig a hole.

 

[Nahat Anoj]

1. Everyone has special abilities to use in combat.

Agreed.

2. Azeroth is a deep and interesting world. Even for those who weren't into the Warcraft series and don't know anything about the world's history and development, it's at least clear that it's a living, vibrant world that has a realistic feel derived from its evolution over time.
Unfortunately, the 4e direction seems to be away from this.

Have you been reading the same 4e stuff I have? Sure, they've come out and said that there won't be a PoL map, but in this edition more than any other 4e is really trying to build an assumed setting. Sure, they probably could (I believe should) make a default setting in the PHB, but it really feels to me that with 4e WotC is trying to leverage the best bits of D&D lore.

3. Instant action.

One of the articles says that a group of low level PCs was able to fight a dragon, so I do believe instant action will be a part of 4e.

4. PvP.

Well, people have always been pitting characters against each other. In any case, I don' think PvP is the major draw of MMOs. YMMV, of course.

5. WoW is easy.

I agree. I believe that 4e should strive to be ridiculously easy to play, but have lots of options that lead to complex situations.

6. People can do what they want to. Some people like to just fish in WoW. Others are obsessed with their crafting skills. The latest crack I heard on a Wizards blog along the lines of Craft/Profession being lame makes me concerned that they "don't get it."

Well, I'm not so sure they're going to ditch the crafting rules. It's just that they are going to focus on "adventuresome" skills.

7. Phat lewt.

Loot is important, but it should be personal. I'd rather have lots of unique magic items than several copies of the same magic items.

 

[Thanee]

So in that there WoW game can I take a shovel and dig a hole?

How breakable is the terrain?

If I want a boulder moved, can I use the Strength that rips apart bosses to move it?

If I want a more defendable location, can I dig out my own lair?

I think you kinda missed the point there, Frank.

Bye
Thanee

 

[ruleslawyer]

Sorry to disappoint you, but WoW IS a detailed setting on par with Eberron but suffers due to the amount of monty haulism that takes place in the campaign world as well as most players lack of interest in the setting's fluff.

If most of the setting's details weren't trapped within the context of the Warcraft Games, the MMORPG and their expansions, I'm pretty sure it would fill out several volumes beyond those dozen books that were produced by Sword and Sorcery Studios.

On par with Eberron, maybe, but that's in part due to the compactness of the available setting materials for Eberron? The Realms? Not even close.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

On par with Eberron, maybe, but that's in part due to the compactness of the available setting materials for Eberron? The Realms? Not even close.

Well, you might be surprised. While there are fewer novels and comic books (although they do exist), it's a long-running franchise that has had a lot of work done on it over the years. Instead of Ed Greenwood running a series of articles on Wizards.com about roofs in the Realms, Blizzard's artists have had to work it all out for the various races and the results are seen in the game.

A good example: They recently added banks that all members of a guild can use. Each culture in the game that has a bank (more than just the player races) had to have a guild bank graphic designed, and each does a remarkably good job of reflecting the culture's approach to what a bank vault would look like for them. The goblins' guild bank looks nothing like the dwarves', but each is immediately recognizable for what it is.

Repeat with mounts, houses, wallpaper (!), mailboxes and countless other items.

And I disagree with the notion that players don't care about the lore: Even people who would never play on a roleplaying server get highly outraged when Blizzard "screws up the lore." People know the lore and pay attention, even if they aren't, as a rule, enthralled in the star-crossed relationship of peasants in the Elwynn Forest. (My wife liked that one, though, and there's lots of similar stories in the game, most notably one added to Theramore to complete a long-dangling murder mystery.)

 

[ruleslawyer]

As I remarked above in my initial response, the nature of the beast dictates that while WoW has the advantage of an immediately immersive visual environment, it cannot possibly have the ability to match the 40 years of lore that were put into the FR books.

For instance, those banks are cool, and the amount of detail put into their look is unmatched within the (generally pretty pathetic) FR artwork, which doesn't even really bother to show much about the setting, visually (Eberron is much better in this regard). However, compare with, say, the entire chapter of lore on moneylending systems, different trading slang, business structures, and forms of agreement in Power of Faerun. Now add in the related stuff in FR1 Waterdeep, Lands of Intrigue, etc etc, and you'll see what I mean.

This is *not* a slam against Azeroth, but rather a basic acknowledgement that D&D does allow an effectively unlimited setting because of its medium. It's like saying that no film trilogy could adequately encompass everything there is to know about Tolkien's Middle-Earth; not a slam against Peter Jackson, but rather an acknowledgement that JRRT penned vast volumes of lore that would, to be frank, come off as tedious if you had to experience them in the serial medium of film.

D&D has the advantage of allowing the DM to introduce and memorialize as much lore as he or she feels like, and to give the players a *sense* that there will always be more on the horizon. It also gives the DM a larger set of lore from which to pick and choose, in part because the DM can chuck in non-WotC IP; I can crib from Homer, Thomas Covenant, Looney Tunes, Sandman, or whatever.

 

[helium3]

I think the OP's got some good points. Some of your comments seem to be missing his point, though.

2. Azeroth is a deep and interesting world . . .

A couple of posters have scoffed at the idea that Azeroth is somehow "deeper" than the Forgotten Realms and other D&D settings. I haven't played WoW for more than about 30 minutes (which I enjoyed, btw) so I can't comment on the "depth" of the world, but that's almost not the point.

I'm not even sure if this was the OP's actual point, but how I'm reading that section of the post is that in some fundamental sense, everything in Azeroth (as in other non-generic games like Dark Sun) fits in with some sort of central "theme" that the world has. Everything that exists, is there for a reason.

The designers of 4E, on the other hand, are intentionally trying to create a shallow world as the default setting for the core books. The intent is to leave lots of space for gamers to come in and fill in the blanks with their own material, but the actual result may be that 4E drives its players back towards a more war-gaming focused style of play. The current edition of D&D already does that unless you have a group that really tries hard to not let that happen.

3. Instant action. In WoW you can go kick some ass with a moment's notice. 4e will float or sink on this one depending on how much complexity they put into the combat system and how many fiddly modifiers someone has to keep in mind and "but if I move here..." lengthy board-dilemmas they can avoid.

The OP is right on the money here. One of the things that turns potential players off of RPG's in general (and frankly I think there are A LOT more potential players out there than gamers are willing to admit to) is how much of a pain in the butt the game is to play unless you're willing to dedicate massive amounts of time to it.

If WotC managed to do the DI right, they could make a lot of progress towards making the game accessible to folks that would normally be interested in playing an RPG. Unfotunately, I suspect they're going to royally screw it up.

4. PvP. Sure, there's non-PvP servers, but everyone knows they're for noobs.

I'm not sure what the designers could do to encourage this sort of play experience, but I agree it certainly can make the game more interesting. In my experience, encounters where I've been able to hand one or more monsters to a player lacking a participating character have been far more exciting. I've never played in a game that was all about PVP though, and I think the posters that have responded with "why not just play DDM in that case" sort of have a point.

5. WoW is easy.

This is key. Whether the other posters want to admit it or not, D&D is a game that implicitly requires technical mastery of the rules. The designers say they're going to downplay this requirement, but little of what I've seen so far seems to back up this claim. This is another place where the DI could help, as "noobs" could play the game remotely until they got the rules mastered to the point where they were ready to play in a "live" game. Again, too bad WotC is likely going to flub the whole thing.

6. People can do what they want to. Some people like to just fish in WoW. Others are obsessed with their crafting skills.

Some posters have scoffed at this idea but I think that the OP is absolutely right in this case. D&D is entirely about combat because the rules are entirely about combat, which means that most characters end up being one dimensional battle machines. Nothing else that a player could do in the game world really has any impact or importance because they lack the crucial ingredient that makes them relevant. They don't result in the player being rewarded with significant amounts of XP.

In particular, I'll harp on crafting. As the OP points out, some MMO players are obsessed with crafting? Why? I dunno, the same reason that some people like to cook or assemble model airplanes I suppose. The problem is that in D&D, crafting is like a vestigial organ, it's there but it doesn't really do anything.

In my idealized version of the rules there would be more complicated rules for the resolution of actions not-related to combat and the resolution mechanism might not even involve rolling a d20 and adding modifiers. Then, in a little side-bar with the "variant rules" heading there would be some mechanics for how to resolve the situation with the role of a d20 (and for little to no XP.)

Phat lewt. The 3e magic item economy where they're just about "same as cash" makes it very difficult to hand out cool magic, especially if it's not a pure power optimizer. It just gets sold and rendered into a raft of +1 items.

Again, making specific items matter more would likely lead to a richer play experience that appeals to a larger group of people. The rules don't inherently support treating items as anything more than disposable trinkets and as a result, it doesn't happen without a lot of conscious effort on the part of the group.

 

[FadedC]

Just two of my own opinions.....

1) Wow has an amazingly rich story and world for a computer game, however this may only translate to pretty good when compared to other mediums. However alot of the best parts of the WoW stories were always how it was presented, often in other warcraft games such as WC3. Some of the cut scenes, cinematics, things like were really powerful were really powerful when you see them on the computer in the context of other parts of the game, but may not seem like anything special when boiled down to a simple world history section. It's kind of like how if you tried to describe the original star wars movies to somebody they probably wouldn't seem that special.

2) WoW has that easy to learn, hard to master thing going. As was stated even a 5 year old can create a lvl 1 warrior and kill wolves. But said 5 year old is not going to do very well with a lvl 70 warrior, and even most adults will have a hard time truly mastering the 40 or so abilities he has. The amount of understanding required to play is low, but the amount of understanding required to play WELL is extremely high.

 

[Corinth]

Unfortunately, the 4.0 design team failed to do one thing that would've greatly sped up D&D character generation and development: eliminating both random rolls and point buy stat generation, instead replacing them with fixed stats by class and modified by race (and then fixing all random variables, like Hit Points, instead of just a few), leaving just gear and ability choices for practical customization (and even then fixing both at 1st level just to speed up creation). Being able to do click two buttons, fill in a name, and then get going is a big strength for WOW and it should be just that easy to do in D&D: choose class, choose race, pick name, write down handful of gear/abilities and go.

 

[Ranger REG]

Unfortunately, the 4.0 design team failed to do one thing that would've greatly sped up D&D character generation and development: eliminating both random rolls and point buy stat generation, instead replacing them with fixed stats by class and modified by race (and then fixing all random variables, like Hit Points, instead of just a few), leaving just gear and ability choices for practical customization (and even then fixing both at 1st level just to speed up creation). Being able to do click two buttons, fill in a name, and then get going is a big strength for WOW and it should be just that easy to do in D&D: choose class, choose race, pick name, write down handful of gear/abilities and go.

Eww. What happens in WoW, stays in WoW.