Why D&D Should Be More Like WoW

[DonTadow]

The smartest thing that can be done to speed up character creation is to do one thing that WOW gets right: make all characters of a given race and class have the exact same set of initial ability scores, and track it that way through progression. The player need only choose race, class, Talent and gear options; the stats themselves are already optimized in WOW and it's not that hard to do so for D&D. This insures that new players don't make useless, gimped characters that can't do their job in the party; this is okay because the needs of the group always trump the desires of any specific individual.

Which is why I play d and d?

What if i dont want my fighter to be capable in strength but i want him to have a good defense? what if iwant him smart? strong willed? Leave that auto wow stuff alone unless you want d and d to focus only on hack and slash players.

 

[Moleculo]

You've brought up a lot of great strengths for WoW that I agree with, but I think it's a worthless endeavor. If I wanted to play WoW, I would go play WoW. I mean just look at how DDO is fairing against WoW. It's not just because of easily defined roles and easy-gen characters.

In any case, you points are already answered by the existence of pre-generated characters. TSR/WotC releases their boxed sets with Pregenerated characters and easy to run adventures to ease players into the game. This is much better than making the game inherently like WoW, because it doesn't intrinsically target lazy players. Newbies can start off with all the decisions made for them, and veteran players can spend time making their own custom character.

Also, the reason predefined roles work so well in WoW is because the monsters are dumb. It's easy in WoW to get the monsters to attack the tank, but who would honestly believe the lich is going to target the fighter while the cleric is raining sweet positive energy down on him like there's no tomorrow. Or why would every rogue in Greyhawk have the same ranks of profession(trader)?

WoW works so well because it capitalizes on the fact that there must be an inherent level of simplicity in a simulated game world. Why take away the inherent richness of D&D by dumbing down the game?