Why is the WoW influence a bad thing?

[mmadsen]

I just don't get why it would be a bad thing for 4e to take on some of the good/fun aspects of WoW.

People are people, and they do not look at the individual aspects under discussion and ask, "Would these elements be good for D&D?" They look at the other product -- be it World of Warcraft, or an anime movie, or GURPS -- and they say, "I don't like that! Keep it out of my beloved D&D!"

 

[Rechan]

People are people, and they do not look at the individual aspects under discussion ask, "Would these elements be good for D&D?" They look at the other product -- be it World of Warcraft, or an anime movie, or GURPS -- and they say, "I don't like that! Keep it out of my beloved D&D!"

"You got chocolate in my peanut butter!" "YOU GOT PEANUT BUTTER IN MY CHOCOLATE!"

I wonder if, when Skills and Powers came out in 2e, there was a great big outcry of it "not being D&D".

Although I am curious what could be adapted from GURPs. I mean... it's just so different.

 

[STARP_Social_Officer]

I don't play WoW. I don't want to have to start just because the designers tell me to. I'm not particularly worried, but if I was worried about anything it'd be 4E becoming too similar to WoW. It's not supposed to be the same - it's supposed to be a very different gaming experience. If it's too similar we might all just as well go play WoW.

 

[Rechan]

I don't play WoW. I don't want to have to start just because the designers tell me to.

WotC will never tell you to play WoW because then you're not paying WotC for D&D books.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

The move away from Vancian spellcasting is IMHO a good thing. It's a sacred cow that needed to die a long time ago.

I personally wouldn't put it quite that way. It may have lived longer than it could/should have. By which I mean it might have been better to do with 3E what they are now doing with 4E. Problem was that at the time they were producing a new edition to save the game from retail oblivion. To have eliminated the Vancian backbone of the magic system might well have been too much for players of the time to accept. It would have had its champions but might have been a deal-breaker as well and 3E HAD to succeed solidly.

The intervening years and the other improvements brought by 3E really were not kind to the Vancian system. I think a Vancian system is fine, even superior for a SIMPLE game system, but as D&D became ever more complex those Vancian limitations became crippling.

So, I wouldn't say IT needed to die as the system could have been designed to work BETTER with it, not fight against it. Nor would I say that it needed to do so a LONG time ago, as I think it has been perceived rightfully as being just a little too integral to "what D&D is". But, I like the potential that opens up by reducing its domination rather prominently, and I think that works better NOW than it did previously.

 

[Zurai]

I don't play WoW. I don't want to have to start just because the designers tell me to.

Not to be offensive - really, I don't mean to offend - but this attend just makes me go boggly-eyed.

How are the designers forcing you to play WoW? Even if all of their design changes were explicitly to make D&D more WoW-like, not only would it still be D&D, but it could never be World of Warcraft. As someone mentioned earlier, WoW has no real interaction with anything at all - it's all pre-scripted and immutable. There is NOTHING you can do as a player to change anything at all in the game world permanently. In D&D, by contrast, you have a DM, and the DM's job is to make changes in the environment based on PC actions.

That right there is such a quantum leap in mechanical difference that there can never be any true comparison between the two games.

 

[FireLance]

No, it's a gameplay issue. Take Red Hand of Doom, for example - the PCs are on a VERY strict time table. After X number of days, the army invades, period. If they havn't done Y adventure-related tasks, it's pretty much Total Country Kill. If they have to stop and rest after every other encounter in Red Hand of Doom, they will never make that deadline.

There's other examples, too - ghosts that re-form after a few hours, slain guards that don't check in and thus alert the fortress, that lich rolled a 1 for the number of days it takes him to return to his phylactery, etc etc.

Time tables do curb this kind of behavior, but not all adventures have them. And in my view, not all adventures should.

 

[Vradna]

I find the spin that WotC is using to highlight 4E is the main cause of this comparison, regardless if welcomed by the community or not. By trying to reclaim some of the WoW audience, WotC are generating this similarity and we may have to make up our own minds on this.

In any case, I posted before on a different thread that I do think that there are some similarities between WoW and D&D4E:

*Defined Party Roles
*Per day abilities changed to per encounter

I may be able to think of others, but it is largely a moot point.

There are a lot of things which I can appreciate will change things for the better. A lot of good ideas have come out of 3rd Edition community which WotC are learning from and are using to their best advantage: Iron Heroes, Mutants and Masterminds, True20 to name a few.

Let's take a step back for a second. I think that a lot of the community (including WotC) are failing to realise that it is less about a better or perfect system and more about the story the DM and the players are part of. In the end it doesn't matter what spin or what opinions people put on something. The number are after all, just numbers. My group will use whatever system my group chooses and no one will influence that. My group will either play 4E or they won't. The system is irrelevant.

I would hope that if WotC are hoping to attract an audience more suited to MMORPG's that the audience leaves their leetspeaking 'gamerz mentality' hats at the door. I will not be inviting anyone called 'Pwn@geW4RR10R' or 'DPSR0gu3' to play. Also, texting '315 damage on my crit and I am only level 12!' has its place, but not at my table.

Have some standards, people.

And yes, I do play WoW. Never the twain shall meet.

 

[Gundark]

I don't play WoW. [...] If it's too similar we might all just as well go play WoW.

I'm interpreting your statement to mean that you have never played WoW. If you have then you'd know that WoW and D&D are very different experiences. There are the surface similarities yes, but the game experience is different. No matter how many woW elements you stick into D&D, it'll NEVER be WoW.

 

[Driddle]

It's because the figures you move around in World of Warcraft are nothing more than carefully designed tools, without any true characterization or personality or background history. Those "characters" look cool and they make things go BOOM! but the WoW environment involves very little role-playing. It's all about snappy shorthand lingo to accomplish Navy SEAL military operations. It's about acquiring more power but rarely fleshing out your character.

Or so the theory goes. I dunno. It's what my friend heard from some guy's girlfriend or something.