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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Remathilis" data-source="post: 4031137" data-attributes="member: 7635">To be fair, this has less to do with "wasting space" and more to do with the limits of artificial intelligence vs. human creativity. For example: Lets say you have a guard who requires a certain token to gain access to whatever he guards. A video game designer can only program "so many" reactions to the character's actions. It might take into account walking past, talking to, or combat, but it cannot take into sneaking past, having an actual conversation (as opposed to a dialog box or dialog tree), lying, distracting the guard and allowing another to sneak in, waiting for a change in the guards, finding another doorway in, using magic to circumvent the guard or door, etc. Its simply impossible for a computer to account for ALL of those possible ideas (much like how some poorly written D&D modules do not account for PC creativity), unlike a DM, who can either try to account for some of those contingencies or react on the fly to whatever plan the PC(s) come up with. MMOs have a further problem: As a persistent world that hosts an entire game from levels 1-whatever, it has to provide a consistent game experience for all players (and characters) to experience. Onyx always has to be there for whatever group of characters challenge her, otherwise (if the world was truly non-static) the first group to ever do a quest would gain the spoils and new players would be screwed. This leads to a static, unchanging world by virtue of the fact the world HAS to be the same for my level one character as it was for your level one character or else it would not provide a consistent play experience for the thousands of players. D&D is typically played in small groups and is unaffected by what other groups or players do. So I can model my world based solely off my players actions and change it dynamically to fit their actions without taking into account some new player who will join tomorrow or what your D&D group did last week. (In this regard, regular linear video games do a better job of simulating the idea of PC actions affecting the larger world.)Because, IMHO, these are problems only exist in video games because of the lack of a human "game keeper" to act as arbiter and storyteller. This will NEVER be a problem in PnP D&D, since the game will always require a dungeon master. Even the Virtual Tabletop will have a human, thinking DM who only must worry about his group of characters (vs. everyone else on the VTT) will do. Because of this, I don't consider this to be a particularly valid criticism of D&D, fourth edition, or any video-game influence on it, for no other reason that even the most slavishly devoted to RAW DM must, by virtue of his position, react in these two parameters to fulfill his job as DM, the rules cannot (nor will not) be able to do this job for him.</blockquote>

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