Henry said:
And to counterpoint:
Indeed, it has less to do with rules, and more to do with perceptions. The original question was about taking ideas from CRPGs, not just rules. The more you take from CRPGs, the more possibility that you begin to restrict what makes tabletop fun in the first place -- the social component and the "collaborative chaos."
I can only imagine two different ideas that a tabletop RPG can take from a videogame: rules and inspiration for settings, plots, and characters. I don't see how rules can possibly affect D&D in negative manner, and inspiration is
always a good thing. As such, I don't understand your argument at all. You are going to need to elaborate on this a lot more.
One cannot take the "anti-CRPG" backlash in a vaccuum -- it often goes hand-in-hand with the debates on "DM as final authority" versus "taking the DM out of the equation." When people get in arguments about rules minutiae because everything is so spelled out, and then people see a peek behind the curtain where Aggro rules were, at the least, briefly, tested for D&D 4e to give guidelines on who a monster should be upset with, it causes that same dread that the designers are listening more to the people who want to reduce DM involvement as much as possible than they are to the people who want DMs to have more involvement with the rules decisions at the game table.
In other words, people are just using electronic RPGs are a scapegoat/buzzword in a fight about other debates about preference in DMing style. In this case, can you clarify why it is videogames that are the problem, instead of "he is playing the game like it was a movie" or "he is running the game like it was a book"? Videogames are far more open-ended and flexible than those mediums, yet people on these boards love taking ideas from books and movies, but hate videogame inspirations. It seems nothing more than an unjustified prejudice to me.
(As an aside, no matter how many mods and rules changes to a computer game, without at least one real-time GM handling rules problems and player decisions, it will always be finite.)
I never argued that the options of a videogame were infinite.
I just said that they compared to a game of D&D in openness. You see, so long as a game of D&D is run by a human being with finite inspiration and preparation time, and is playing for a group of people with certain preferences, characters, and limits on inspiration, a game of D&D is just as finite as anything else in possibility. You would need a game of D&D being run by omniscient beings in order to get an infinitly open experience.
And while boardgames and wargames were more finite than RPGs, it's what RPGs grew OUT of, not into. In my opinion, it would be a regression, not an advance, to make Tabletop RPGs too much like computer RPGs.
Your logic contradicts itself in these two sentances. D&D evolved out of boardgames and boardgames, but videogames evolved out of D&D. If you want a good demonstration of this claim, check out
this link (make sure to check out all three parts of that article). As such, wouldn't D&D taking inspiration from videogames be an evolution, rather than a regression?
Also, you are showing your own bias of D&D superiority here... I reject that entirely, myself.
I'm personally all for seeing designers grab a neat idea from a computer game - maybe it's a monetary system, or maybe it's a cool power that would make a great feat or spell. But I can definitely see that if D&D ever started talking about "monster spawning points," or "aggro rules," or "how to handle monster trains," I'd say it needs to put on the brakes and stop the insanity.
As it is, even the per-encounter resources shift, though fun too, makes me a bit leery, as it changes a very important assumption in-game about pacing and strategy that's been around since 1974.
Of course, monster spawn points, aggro rules, and monster trains are all artifacts of a particular subset of videogames, and exist because of the requirements and problems of the medium itself, rather than being something that would ever be ported over to a different medium.
The per-encounter shift, though, is something that has absolutely nothing to do with videogames, and has everything to do with making a change based on the particular needs of D&D as its own medium. There is no preference among videogames for per-day or per-encounter balancing. I can name many videogames that use either or both of those different systems, and make them work well. However, per-day balancing is something that creates balancing problems in D&D campaigns that are not built around dungeon exploration (like every one I have ever played in), and from what I hear, disrupts the flow dungeons just as much. Meanwhile, per-day balancing works great in videogames, because the game design can enforce the dungeon as a setting, and prevent the kind of abilities which would lead to abuse. As such, the movement towards per-encounter balancing
has nothing to do with videogames.
I think you are just leery of
change, rather than the influence of videogames.
