Why D&D Is Better Than World of Warcraft

[mxyzplk]

So in my recent post, "What D&D 4e Should Learn From World of Warcraft", a lot of people brought up a number of objections involving ways that D&D is better than WoW/MMORPGs, and also ways in which MMOs are bad. I totally agree, though all of that is irrelevant to the point I was making in the post - saying that there's some things that D&D could try to learn from WoW doesn't mean that WoW is "better" or that D&D doesn't have areas where it excels over anything MMORPGs can currently and possibly could ever match.

There's only so much chasing after something else you can do and be successful. I think another good way to look at the D&D 4e/WoW relationship is to figure out what D&D's strengths are that WoW (and other CRPGs/MMORPGs) *can't* easily match, and work on them.

As an aside, my company is a big believer in the Marcus Buckingham "Now, Discover Your Strengths" management philosophy. Simply stated, it's more effective (and easier) to develop someone's strengths rather than focus on shoring up their weaknesses. The reasons are simple. If a person can improve 30% in something, if it's something they are already good at that's more net improvement. And if Mozart can't do math - well screw it, he's Mozart.

I think you can look at D&D in the same light. It's never going to be as effective a tactical combat game as pretty much any computer game, from Diablo to World of Warcraft. Doing all the math etc. is the computer's strength, you can't beat it at it. However, there are great things about D&D that WoW has a hard time with, and by focusing on those you can get something that's not "WoW for weirdo geeks without computer access" but something that has a competitive advantage, that's better in many ways.

Allow me to quote from the most recent issue of PC Gamer magazine (Feb 2008, p.100):
"Yet computer games will never match tabletop games for offering open-ended role-playing experiences. It's just not practical, or wise, to try to program a game to appropriately respond to every improbable action a player could opt to take. [...] It's just impossible for a computer RPG to try to account for all of the possible actions conceivable in the warped imaginations of RPG fans."

Unlimited Choice
You can have your character do anything you can think of! Although you may end up getting tasered. (In the game or out of it, depending on what it is.)

Creative
Rather than experiencing someone else's creation, you are empowered to create on your own. Create characters, stories, adventures, items, whatnot.

Change The World
The world isn't static and things don't respawn. If you really want to burn down that inn (and you have the juice to get away with it) - it's cinders.

Customizable
You can change the rules and setting easily to your own preferences - no modding skills required.

Immersiveness
You can get into your character and truly role-play, without people interrupting to yell about Chuck Norris (depending on your gaming group).

Cinematic
Though the graphics of MMORPGs are nice, the human imagination is always more powerful.

What do all of these boil down to? Harnessing the participants’ imagination.

So here's the big question. How do you leverage that?

Well, I'd at least say that the current direction - battle maps, minis, highly defined rules - is not the right way to do that. There are certainly RPGs that leverage the participants' imagination more. Feng Shui is highly cinematic and allows very slight player authorship, but is way more "fun" to play in a given session. Other games like octaNe give the players even more direct creative participation into the game and story. Of course, D&D is never going to be able to tolerate that high a degree of creative input. But what are some things they could do to leverage these things? Sure, many of them can be maximized by a good DM, but the game rules (and related fluff) can certainly contribute (or detract).

Some ideas.

1. Try to craft the rules in a way such that someone can always try to do something (especially some nonmagical combat action). Relevant feats etc. may negate heavy penalties, but someone should always be able to try. 3e did a pretty good job of this out of the gate - disarms, grapples, sunders - although as splatbooks came out there tended to be more "you can only do this if..." feats and abilities.

2. Though there need to be rules to balance it, encourage players to create their own spells, magic items, craft their equipment, etc. I saw way more player-created spells in the 2e era than I ever saw in the 3e era.

3. Teach people some damn role-playing. OK fine, so sure, if people don't want to get into that they don't have to, but increasingly the "examples of play" read a lot more like "I rolled 8, did I hit?" than "I hack furiously at the wererat!" I own something on the order of 1000 RPG products and there are many games that, just in their core rules, set a stage that promotes role-playing. Again, without that D&D is always going to lose out to some computer thing that can "automate" the rules.

4. Discretionary XP awards. In 2e these were all over the place, for role-playing and for creativity. In every 3e game I've ever played it's strictly done by table lookup. Change that.

5. DM creativity. 3e did some good things in making some hard and fast rules for monster creation, encounter creation (CR/EL), etc. That allowed people to create within guidelines that helped their game to work. Keep that concept, and expand on it.

6. Stress player impact onthe world. From their actions driving up/down local prices, to having 'reputation' that affects who's heard of you and what they've heard.

What do y'all think - what could D&D to to specifically enhance the open-ended, immersive, imagination-leveraging aspect which tabletop RPGs have as an innate advantage over CRPGs?

 

[megamania]

There is a player of WoW that I am trying to "convert" to DnD. We have had many discussions similiar to the threads you are beginning here.

Ultimately it comes down to focus.

I am a storyteller and like ever changing and thus challenging encounters so I enjoy DMing DnD and other role playing games.

He enjoys powering up and leveling up. He recognizes the background story but it is secondary to him.



This the difference between the two- creative storytelling with power ups being secondary vs Powerups with a small idea of storyline required.


Overly generic and simple definitions and seperation but I think it is a strong one.

 

[Raloc]

So in my recent post, "What D&D 4e Should Learn From World of Warcraft", a lot of people brought up a number of objections involving ways that D&D is better than WoW/MMORPGs, and also ways in which MMOs are bad. I totally agree, though all of that is irrelevant to the point I was making in the post - saying that there's some things that D&D could try to learn from WoW doesn't mean that WoW is "better" or that D&D doesn't have areas where it excels over anything MMORPGs can currently and possibly could ever match.

I just wanted to point out that for my part in that discussion, I wasn't particularly replying to your post, but to posts that asserted that WoW does all of the things you mentioned above as D&D strengths better, (i.e., can do whatever you want, can go anywhere, etc etc.).

 

[Najo]

WOW doesn't do D&D better than D&D. It does all of the boring stuff D&D can skip (non-eventful travel, heroes not feeling like heroes or that they can't change the world, grinding reputation, crafting to raise skills etc) all of those features in MMOs are tedious speed bumps to keep people paying a monthly fee or they are limitations of the video game. The only WOW does OK is dungeon crawls and quests, and even then they both are designed to give a grinding experience and not a strong story exprience.

D&D's advantage is moving scene to scene. Focusing on the PCs as the heroes. Changing the world. Making the gripe with the Bad Guys personal. Roleplaying is open ended story driven adventure and no two sessions are the same. MMOs can't say they can do that.

The trick is two fold. 1) Remove barriers to entry for new players. 2) Make the RPG experience easy, engrossing and more fun than anything else. If you do that then the game is on fire again and striking out into mainstream recogniztion. The problem is those barriers to entry.

D&D is hard to find new players if you don't have friends who want to play. It is even harder to start DMing. There is alot of prep work and upkeep involved in running D&D. There are alot of overwhelming rules. Let's face it, D&D intimidates non & casual gamers. WOW is easy, sit down, click, click, click. Playing for a bit, then I can stop and go about my day.

Another advantage MMOs have (and likely the REAL motivation for the powergamer mentioned above) is you have a built in peer group that recognizes your accomplishments. It feels like a form of fame, and makes you feel important while you remain on top. It is a motivator for playing and a built in reward system, especially with PVP and raiding guilds that get famous.

So, D&D has to find a way to offer some of those solutions to the ego driven extrovert gamer. Some become DMs and get a rush there, some become party leaders (not the class role mind you ;P ) Some though have to have that realtime rush against other human opponents and stomp their face in. D&D hasn't solved that issue yet.

As for making the RPG experience easier. In my 20 some odd years gaming, owning a game store and working on gaming products, story driven good players tend to convert non-story driven hack and slay style players into story driven ones. I have never seen the opposite occur. That tells me, the heart of D&D is not a wargame or tactical combat (though those elements are important) it is a story driven game of adventure with characters who have motives, back story and goals to accomplish, some of which are shared and a few that might could conflict. When this happens, the game is like no other and gives the players and GM a very rewarding experience. D&D needs to make that built in, with out bogging down players leaping into a one shot game for the evening if they want.

If players are hooked immediately by story and their characters, and they run through a thrill ride of an adventure and at the end they are left wanting more, then D&D has hit the sweet spot game play wise.

Solve both these issues, and BAM...D&D is on top.

One major issue, is group inbreeding. It is very hard for new and young players to get into established groups or find a DM. This is the #1 thing hurting RPGs and their longivity as a viable market place. Followed by visual appeal/ marketing and PDF piracy. But those are other matters to deal with.

 

[Jack7]

Based on the very nature of the game (and how it is employed of course) D&D and other Role Playing Games have an innate connection to the real world which no artificially created virtual reality environment (given current computing and technological limitations) could possibly match.

For instance in role playing games, as you hinted at earlier, all interactivity is both bio-mechanical and psychologically adaptive because all involved parties, including the referee (DM) are overlapping participants.

No matter how complex the virtual environment that is artificial in nature it must forever remain scripted, until such time (if ever) as the mechanism of silvery and the milieu environment becomes intentionally adaptive and artificially and independently intelligent, and therefore potentially as flexible as human beings in that respect.

Therefore if you have, for example six independent operatives (players) in any given gaming situation, they are not only reacting to each other, not only reacting (as well as co-directing, overtly or covertly) interactions with the referee, but also creatively and flexibly shaping and countershaping the overall background environment (as well as what that implies) and the strictures by which it operates. (Or restated more simply, the environmental background is as fluid and as adaptable as the participants decide to conclude it is, no VR environment has that potential in either reality or imaginatively.)

But another important consideration is that in any given environment in which the objects (and subjects) of interaction are necessarily solidified (VR games), group interactivity becomes to some degree or another calcified around limiting psychological assumptions. But in any game in which independent imaginations are in operation (RPGs) and more or less free to some degree or another to interpret and re-interpret data flowing from any source, then each player is free to develop their own (perhaps significantly) independent qualifications and quantifications of gaming actions and events (and even characters).

For example, when we see a castle in a virtual reality game, then many possibilities of what that castle describes, as well as implies, drop instantaneously away. A visual reputation instantly limits many assumptions about what the castle means, how it appears, it's exact structure, composition, etc. (Which also means that many background deductions regarding that castle can be instantly made by simple examination of the visual image and representation. A Roman Lime looks very different from a Venetian castle and so forth and so on.) When that castle remains a basic description in the mind of the parity trying to perceive the implications of what the castle may appear as or may be, or may not be, (even given more or less detailed qualifiers in language) then the castle retains many of it's basically immense variety of possibilities. (In other words seeing a thing solidifies it, imagining a thing by contrast widens possibilities and can, if the game technique is properly employed, deepen mystery.) And whereas each player may develop a basic or core or group set of interpretational parameters for any object or character encountered, each person also no doubt retains their own individual assumptions of what the object implies based upon the interplay of their own past experience, their own imaginative assumptions, their own real world experience, and their own particular psychological paradigm. Because of this it is possible to encounter in role playing games things that are both familiar in theme and relatable to past experience, and yet totally alien "in feel" and psychological impact.

This means that role playing games can and often should be both more closely tied to reality, and yet still far more flexible as to what that reality implies, because the mechanism of interaction, both with in-game events, and with other players, is the imagination of the individual, and not a pre-scripted or preconceived virtual environment more or less wholly constructed by a third party from a limited set of possibilities.

Therefore role play achieves two separate but inter-related effects which virtual reality can at best only mimic in scripted form, and it achieves these two effects simultaneously: it creates artificial and to a large degree independent and individualized worlds of the imagination, and it creates a psychological condition which forces each player to relate their own imaginative assumptions to their own previous and real world experience in order to function effectively in-game. Then it forces these varied interpretations of both reality and milieu, real and imagined, to interact with each other both through the general gaming environment and through the interactions of the various involved players.

Artificially generated, pre-scripted, computer environments are therefore "hard" in this sense and their flexibility and rate of adaptation and fluidity is necessarily limited by their very form, whereas role playing is extremely fluid in comparison, but never as solid or easily graspable.

 

[Raloc]

WOW doesn't do D&D better than D&D. It does all of the boring stuff D&D can skip (non-eventful travel, heroes not feeling like heroes or that they can't change the world, grinding reputation, crafting to raise skills etc) all of those features in MMOs are tedious speed bumps to keep people paying a monthly fee or they are limitations of the video game. The only WOW does OK is dungeon crawls and quests, and even then they both are designed to give a grinding experience and not a strong story exprience.

Exactly. I know at least personally, that D&D is primarily a story-driven type of play, with the combat/tactical rules primarily being relegated to resolving the most critical fights. I've never played it any other way (well, maybe at first it was more of a dungeon crawl, but I've not found that to be as rewarding) and I can't very well go back. Until there is literally super-intelligent ( > than human intelligence ) AI, computers will not have the ability to give you the same experience. Even then, you have the problem that you'd need art and code to do all those things, and it just would not be fast enough to produce it on the spot.

 

[TwinBahamut]

D&D and WoW are apples and oranges. Direct comparisons between the two are almost meaningless because of this fact. D&D is a game built around a small group of people playing a game together (usually in person), and all game content is controlled for a small number of people. WoW is an online game that is built for entertaining thousands of people at once, and game content is built to match that objective.

Frankly, any attempt at saying one is absolutely better than the other is futile. World of Warcraft is a different game than D&D that needs to be judged by different standards than D&D. Of course WoW will not hold up to D&D if both are judged by how much they are like D&D. D&D would suffer horribly if it is judged to how much it is like an MMORPG.

In the end, World of Warcraft is a game that entertains millions of people. These millions of people are probably quite happy with the game, and it is nothing but an insult to those people who enjoy that game for you to say that your game is better than theirs, that you are having more fun than them.

It is really no different from someone barging into ENWorld (or at least posting on a different messageboard) and saying how HERO Champions is better than D&D because D&D does not handle superhero games as well as HERO Champions, with the implication that superhero games are obviously superior to medieval fantasy games.

 

[Doug McCrae]

What do y'all think

I think rules-lite games that encourage roleplaying and creativity don't sell.

 

[Doug McCrae]

As an aside, my company is a big believer in the Marcus Buckingham "Now, Discover Your Strengths" management philosophy. Simply stated, it's more effective (and easier) to develop someone's strengths rather than focus on shoring up their weaknesses. The reasons are simple. If a person can improve 30% in something, if it's something they are already good at that's more net improvement. And if Mozart can't do math - well screw it, he's Mozart.

I think you can look at D&D in the same light.

What works for an employee - specialisation - doesn't work for a roleplaying game.

WotC's market research shows that all players want a number of disparate elements to be in place. These are:

* Strong Characters and Exciting Story
* Role Playing
* Complexity Increases over Time
* Requires Strategic Thinking
* Competitive
* Add on sets/New versions available
* Uses imagination
* Mentally challenging

 

[Jack7]

D&D and WoW are apples and oranges.

I believe he (or she) said that by negative implication, if you read the original post in context. The intent did not appear to be comparative analysis to explore similarities, or to rank differences per se, but rather by comparative analysis to develop some methodology by which assets in D&D could be more fully explored and/or exploited.

I totally agree, though all of that is irrelevant to the point I was making in the post - saying that there's some things that D&D could try to learn from WoW doesn't mean that WoW is "better" or that D&D doesn't have areas where it excels over anything MMORPGs can currently and possibly could ever match.

I think rules-lite games that encourage roleplaying and creativity don't sell.

I think you have a point, to a degree. And I think this is because if everything is left to the imagination then no point or process of true interaction can develop, because each person becomes effectively isolated from the "group parameter(s) of operation."

However, that being said, if you configure any game, not just a role playing game, in such a way that the rules become so overly complex and burdensome that it defeats the very purpose of play, then interactivity also breaks down and the game will slowly atrophy through weight of its' own innate sense of entropy.

A balance then is needed, in any game or gaming system, between the liberty to exercise play in a free and comfortable and exciting manner (fun), and the necessity to provide enough form and structure that both individual and group goals can be realistically achieved.

But again I don't think the point was to say abolish rules, but change the focal point and manner of employment.