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="mlund" data-source="post: 4290178" data-attributes="member: 50304">It plays too much like a video-game is lazy, vague, and dismissive short-hand. Site specific examples of video games and features that are exclusive to video games rather than general game theory if you want to make a valid point. Video games cover an extremely broad set of mechanics and implementations.Catan Online vs. World of Warcraft vs. Knights of the Old Republic vs.  Angband mark some huge gaps that lend themselves to generalization.Heck, most of the early video games that built up into MMO games were straight rips from D&D and D&D-style systems. Of course, we've seen more revised released of Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior franchises then we've seen of D&D.All this talk about aggro-control being "video gamey" seems extremely silly to me. For 30 years war games and RPGs have struggled with the innate problem of simulating simultaneous actions in turn-based games. When everyone is acting at once, people can react to one-another's movements, blocking one's path around say - the fighter - to get to the Wizard. In turn-based games people end-around the Phalanx all the time and head straight to the city.Come on, people, the old end-around has been a problem for decades for everything from Diplomacy to Squad Leader to D&D 3.X to the latest-and-greatest edition of Civilization.In games where it was a critical flaw, game designers have been trying to spot-weld some sort of fix into the system - and it usually failed. I remember weird machine gun rules with Squad Leader and Overwatch Tokens in Warhammer 40K. Attacks of Opportunity were a step in the right direction in 3.X, but they still fell short. Marking by the Defender Class is an upgrade of the Attack of Opportunity principle from 3.X - it does not alter the "A.I." of the "Mobs" like a modern MMO ability would. Instead it presents a reactive physical threat from the Defender character that the Monster (played by the DM) has to cope with and make decisions around.That level of reasoning and motive is beyond what MMORPG logic is capable of. That's because 4E is D&D, with a Dungeon Master supplying the motivations, personalities, and priorities of the monsters and NPCs in a responsive and adaptive fashion.- Marty Lund</blockquote>

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