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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lord Zardoz" data-source="post: 3983544" data-attributes="member: 704">Here are my thoughts:I agree that every character should be able to contribute to combat.I will disagree with this in part.  Azeroth is not what I would call a living and vibrant world, though I do agree that it is deep and interesting.  What gives the world that feeling is that every part of the world the player can choose to explore is fleshed out.  I think that D&D campaign settings usually do a good enough job in the broad strokes (place names, general descriptions), but they do not do enough in terms of creating usable NPC's.  The exception would be the Birthright setting, which has a wealth of NPC's that a DM can pick and choose from, usually giving you an idea of who is who in every kingdom.Where D&D has an edge is that when the players defeat a powerful villain, the campaign worlds state has changed.  When you do that in World of Warcraft, you get a loot drop, then you go back a week later and do it again.D&D does need to do a better job of providing tools for a DM to generate NPC's to flesh out areas of his world that the players unexpectedly visit.I disagree on two fronts.  First, in Wow, a first time newb will get to spend alot of time doing advanced pest control.  Second, it is a video game, and not subject to the schedules of your friends as much.  Also consider that at the late game, I have seen friends spend about 30 minutes trying to organize and plan out an attack on a large dungeon monster, when the actual fight only last either 8 minutes (if they succeed), or less than 1 minute (if they get wiped out).  Also, if you rule out going solo, your still limited by your ability to find a group.I can agree that fights where you can pit PC against PC are rewarding.  However, I do not think that having easier PvP at a D&D game is a good idea.  In WoW, your running up against strangers, and the consequence for a loss is mostly trivial.  In D&D, you do not generally respawn easily after death, and outside of contrived situations, whoever kills your pc can generally take your stuff.  Not exactly fun.Total agreement.  D&D would benefit from being simpler to explain.  I think that the D&D Initiative may help here, since in that form, the game will gain the benefit of obscuring alot of the manual calculations.Total disagreement.  Most D&D crafting type stuff is best done away from the table.  It may be fun for the player doing it, but not for the DM or the other 3 guys who actually want to go out and kill stuff.  The only reason it works in WoW is that no one else is made to wait while you go off and craft stuff.I also disagree here, but I will concede that the 3rd edition Magic Item Christmas Tree and the better integration of ability scores is at fault for much of the apparent problem at the moment.  3rd edition fixed the problem of non extreme stats not mattering.  It also made the decision to try to use the stat bonuses for more things, such as modifying spell casting ability and saves.  It then made the mistake of allowing a variety of bonuses to stack (which I suspect was a sloppy fix for AC not scaling with level).  This led to easy magic item design, where you could just have an item grant a bonus to some stat, and be sure that you could get several benefits.  However, the power of those items was exaggerated, so they became the most sought after.For basic magic items, you are somewhat correct.  But for most artifact level weapons, or intelligent weapons, your assertions are inaccurate.  Even at lower levels, there are plenty of interesting magic items that do not work that way.  Boots of Striding and Springing, Ring of Swimming, Cloak of the Bat, Slippers of Spider climbing, Figurines of Wonderous Power, Sword of Dancing, or even a Horn of Fog.  Does World of Warcraft have either intelligent items or horns of fog?END COMMUNICATION</blockquote>

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