Why Play D&D?

[Mal Malenkirk]

Why play D&D when World of Warcraft exists?

Because of beer.

If you are playing a game with four or five buddies, drinking beer is just sensible.

But if you are alone in your basement, playing a computer game wearing only your underwears and cheetos stains... drinking beer is a cry for help.

Now, we all know that life needs beer so you need to drink. But you have to drink responsibly. So drink with friends who are in the same room as you, who aren't imaginary or named 'Badasskiller95'. Drink while playing good ol' tabletop D&D.

 

[Impeesa]

Because of beer.

If you are playing a game with four or five buddies, drinking beer is just sensible.

But if you are alone in your basement, playing a computer game wearing only your underwears and cheetos stains... drinking beer is a cry for help.

Now, we all know that life needs beer so you need to drink. But you have to drink responsibly. So drink with friends who are in the same room as you, who aren't imaginary or named 'Badasskiller95'. Drink while playing good ol' tabletop D&D.

What if you've had a beer with your friends at the same table, then flown 1000 km back home to play games with them? Where does that fall? I think the majority of my guild has done that... once you've been there, is it okay to cut out some of the travel and just have a few beers while you all game together connected by voice and virtual presence alone?

Not to single you out, there were a few other posts to the same effect, but I can't help but feel like comments to the effect of 'cheeto stains' are a little pot-and-kettle. Not in the sense that I think you're projecting (although I do get that impression sometimes from these sorts of discussions), just that if you're going to go on the saddest stereotypes of your target, do the same out of fairness for your own group - and as D&D fans, that's not flattering territory for us, so let's maybe just stay away from there.

If you want to talk realities, our guild of maybe 60-70 active players (approximating here) has seen at least 6 members get married* in the last year or two (those are the ones I remember off the top of my head), just to throw a counter-intuitive little factoid out there. Hardly alone in the basement, and one hardly needs to be to have a few beers and do a few battlegrounds. In fact, I can think of several more who've been married for longer, a couple of which have kids. The demographic breakdown probably looks pretty similar to here, actually, once you correct for the age skew that comes with a ~10 year old forum for a ~36 year old hobby compared to a 6 year old computer game. Maybe you can still sell your point without resorting to such methods, I don't know. I'm kind of replying to both your specific post and the general sentiment of a few others at the same time here.

Closing thought: I guess in my mind, the tabletop vs. long-distance/computer gaming thing is being set up in this thread as a false dichotomy along the lines of roleplaying vs. min/maxing. Why do we do this?

*not to each other!

 

[Hussar]

Closing thought: I guess in my mind, the tabletop vs. long-distance/computer gaming thing is being set up in this thread as a false dichotomy along the lines of roleplaying vs. min/maxing. Why do we do this?

Because everyone needs someone to look down on? It's the Geek Heirarchy at work.

 

[Mal Malenkirk]

Closing thought: I guess in my mind, the tabletop vs. long-distance/computer gaming thing is being set up in this thread as a false dichotomy along the lines of roleplaying vs. min/maxing. Why do we do this?

You put an awful lot of thoughts into countering a beer based argument...

I guess it means you agree with me that beer is one of the best thing in life. Good, now I feel closer to you. Close enough to offer you this bit of advice; Never take beer based argument at face value, they are always facetious. Just take arguments about beer seriously.

So if I explain to you how the best way to run an economy is using the 'Beer Standard', there is no need to quote John Smith back to me. But if you see someone argue that Budweiser, Coors or Miller is good beer... Then you let him have it!

 

[kitsune9]

I don't play MMOs because I know what my weakness would be. I know that playing MMOs would be the thing that would cause me to spend so much time that I'd probably risk my job, my family, and everything else that should be important to me while playing the game. Already my wife complains that I spend too much time with regular video games and she has a point. So when MMOs come along with their constant expansions, delving and raiding, it would only increase the problem.

D&D or gaming in general is a fixed time for me. It's 8 hours once every two weeks barring no other interruptions. The time I spend preparing is variable but I do it while working on my computer instead of playing video games or watching TV. So in the end, D&D becomes a risk management decision.

 

[Impeesa]

You put an awful lot of thoughts into countering a beer based argument...

It was more the cheetos than the beer. I know you clearly didn't have your serious face on, but the same sentiment about social aspects was expressed in other posts. Yours was just the closest when I went to reply.

 

[ourchair]

I'll admit it, I'm a mechanical gamer.

I love calibrating encounter configurations, tweaking character damage output and developing a synergistic relationship between class abilities, whether it's Star Wars SAGA or D&D 4th Edition.

And I still like playing videogames -- I pummeled away at Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 2 in one month -- and due to my aged computer, I boot up 'classic' stuff like Max Payne, Diablo 2, Freespace 2.

By all rights, I am the target of MMOs like WOW, but for some reason they don't interest me. The grind isn't as satisfying as in a single player game, where the storyline's finale is the light at the end of the tunnel.

So why do I play D&D?

I like D&D because I get to have a weekly night to hang out with friends, as we pit challenges against one another. We don't try to craft an Epic Legend of the Hierarch, nor do we sing Songs of the Sorcelator.

Instead, we just laugh as we try to beat one another up and set up fiendish gambits against one another, something you just can't get from any MMO. The fun doesn't come from whether I beat them with my monsters, or whether I can acquire the most kills against my girlfriend's encounters.

The fun comes from catching up with each other, cracking jokes and us challenging each other in good fun.

 

[Hussar]

The main reason I don't like MMO's is they are so bloody slow. It takes so long to gain any degree of freedom that I just can't be bothered. Granted, my two experiences into MMO's were Ultima Online and Everquest circa 2000-2001. I spent hours just getting a few levels so I could wander around and look at stuff.

I mean, they had these (for the time) gorgeously rendered worlds with all sorts of stuff to see. I wanted to just wander around, look at stuff and talk to the NPC's. But, every time I went into a more dangerous part of the world, I got killed by stuff that was virtually impossible to run away from. That and the day/night cycle in Everquest was just so limiting - I spent so much time wandering around in the dark. Oooh fun. Not.

So, I wind up spending hours and hours doing crap I don't want to do - grinding levels - just to get to the barely competent level of where I can finally do what I want to do - engage the world, spend a very short time wandering around the parts of the world that I can finally safely see, then I have to do it all over again.

No thanks. Not for me. I don't play games to do stuff I don't want to do. I don't do it in RPG's, and I'm certainly not going to do it in a video game.

Life is too short to play games you don't like.

 

[Haltherrion]

The main reason I don't like MMO's is they are so bloody slow. It takes so long to gain any degree of freedom that I just can't be bothered. Granted, my two experiences into MMO's were Ultima Online and Everquest circa 2000-2001. I spent hours just getting a few levels so I could wander around and look at stuff.

Not advocating you try them again (they have other faults these days) but one reason WoW succeeded was it addressed some of the shortfalls of the earlier systems. I tried EQ about the same time and after four hours of killing bats so I could get to a level where I could do something useful, I quit. Very stupid way to start you off in the game. WoW has a bunch of nice starting areas and a fair amount of effort into early quests (some of the better ones in the game actually) and makes leveling a character much more fun. It has loads of other problems, though.

Without rehashing the other WoW issues, the general problem I see with WoW and many other systems is that they were actually designed, at least initially, around the experience of leveling your characters and seem to have been essentially surprised when everyone got to max level and demanded more things to do. Thus the creation of raids and gear that is far more determinant of what your character can do than the character itself (a naked level 80 WoW character is essentially useless; a well geared 80 might do 10x the damage of the naked character.)

I think MMOs might become interesting when they focus on characters exploring a huge world and not characters maxing out their level and gear. The only way to really get huge is to allow players to create content. It would require a method of identifying trusted content creatores and trusted content raters/screeners but it is do-able. Coupled with that, it would probably need a gear system that has stuff wear out so that rather than being focused on getting the next even better thing, you are focused on maintaining your gear, sometimes getting something really cool but knowing that cool thing will go away sooner or later. This will move the player focus from "I gots the coolest gear" (in WoW-land this translates into "my gearscore is higher than your gearscore", I kid you not; there are add-ons to show you gear score) to enjoying the setting and building up credit/contacts with PCs, NPCs, and organizations.

I'm sure MMOs will get there some day and then I really fear for tabletop gaming because the boundaries will be very blurred.

 

[Jhaelen]

WoW has a bunch of nice starting areas and a fair amount of effort into early quests (some of the better ones in the game actually) and makes leveling a character much more fun. It has loads of other problems, though.

Yup. One of those problems is that it takes _ages_ to get from place a to b. One of the early reviews I've seen aptly called it 'The Running Game', since that seemed to be all the player was doing most of the time.

Guild Wars provided a way better solution for this and until they released their last expansion the game was perfectly playable and enjoyable for someone with a limited amount of time to play.

Unfortunately, they then decided it was really more beneficial for the publisher of a MMORPG to become an enourmous time sink for the players.