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="WizarDru" data-source="post: 4290184" data-attributes="member: 151">Therein lies the rub, however: saying it plays like a video game is a terribly imprecise statement to folks like myself, who have been playing video games for longer than we've been playing D&D (in my case, over 30 years).  Is Wizardry a video game?  How about Wizardry VIII?  World of Warcraft plays significantly differently from Viking, even though both have leveling up procedures, combat moves and an item and gold system.  God of War is a video game, but I don't think it plays like D&D very much.  Call of Duty 4 has a leveling and perks system along with weapon choice and Mass Effect features NPCs, skill trees, leveling, quests and even alignments.  Why even Soul Calibur II featured a quest mode with different weapons and the ability to improve your weapons over time.Even just limiting ourselves to the RPG and action RPG realm, we have games as diverse as Knights of the Old Republic, D&D Online, City of Heroes, Okami, Resident Evil 4, Final Fantasy and Penny Arcade: On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness.  To a video game fan such as myself, claiming that D&D plays like a video-game is so imprecise as to not really hold a lot of meaning.  To you, it may be very obvious what you mean...but without knowing what YOU think 'plays like a video game' means, the phrase lacks any sort of clarity to a general discussion.If I say that D&D feels very 'literary' to me, what information does that convey to someone who doesn't know me?  Does it mean I think it's very verbose?  That it presents storytelling like a novel?  That it simply evokes the mood of fiction I like?  that it's overly intellectualized?  The term 'video-gamey', like the term 'anime', is a loaded term that is usually used as a derogatory, but without enough detail to lend it weight.  It is a stand in for 'art' or 'pornography', in that the viewer knows it when he sees it, but the definition is often very subjective, making it hard to use as a classifier.The funniest thing about it is that we have this conversation EVERY SIX MONTHS, but with a new edition, suddenly 3.0/3.5 stopped being "video-gamey" and 4e appears to have taken it's place.  My .sig reference comes from a previous discussion wherein the label was applied to 3e.  And I still maintain the truth of it; most video games garnered many of their core underlying concepts from D&D.This is not to say that I don't think the claim has merit; I do.  Just like 3E made me think they'd incorporated stuff from GURPS and HERO, 4e is clearly influenced by the success of systems like WoW and other MMOs.  I personally don't think that makes it play like a video-game (any more than having hit points does, for example), but that's a subjective opinion.I just simply think that without having a clear definition of what 'video-gamey' is that we can all agree upon, it's not a terribly use label.  YMMV.</blockquote>

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