As Crowbar of Irony +3 said, there’s just something about sitting around a table with friends playing a shared game with a shared story that you just can’t get through a computer. Having a living, breathing, thinking person rather than a pre-programmed script running the game is a lot of the fun as it makes it easier for the game to adapt to what the players are likely to enjoy playing.
There’s also definitely a social element to it. I’ve never gotten into MMOs, but I can’t imagine sharing a server with your friends and playing through an adventure designed to be played by millions of people would be as much fun as sitting around a table table and sharing a story specifically crafted for you and your characters.
Crowbar of Irony +3: In my (brief) experience, it seems like power level depends a lot more on the players than on the classes and rules. In my group, everyone’s just there to have a good time so they don’t need to have the best, most powerful character in the room. Two of my group’s three players have character with what are considered tier 1 classes (Wizard and Druid) while the third is tier 4 at best (a Ranger). Everyone still gets plenty of “did you see how awesome I just was?” moments and everyone has a good time. (The same was true in our last game when the tier 4 barbarian regularly outshined the tier 1 cleric.)
The same goes for the “lots and lots of items” thing. It’s entirely possible to run low magic, low gold D&D campaigns where the character’s abilities are much more important than their toys (this is often the case even in “normal” games, as items are usually picked to complement the characters’ innate abilities rather than overshadow them.)
Look here, you rotten kids: back in my day you didn’t jump to a new edition to boost sales – we had something called Power Creep. You put out splat books with mostly padding but a handful of rules to make somebody’s character a little more powerful. The DM is too busy with job, school and adventure prep to check every little add-on for balance, so he’d just let you do what you wanted.
I admire 4e in many ways. It dealt with the eventual unplayability of iterative attacks, streamlined the mechanics for saving throws, made modules runnable with practically no prepwork, mostly solved the 15-minute adventuring day problem, etc. But like many people, I have the uncanny sense that this is no longer a roleplaying game.
I agree with you, Johnny Angel, though I guess I will be flamed with 10d10 fire damage if I say so over at RPG.NET. The tactical combat and class balance in D&D4E is admirable and actually quite well implemented…if it is a computer game. To me, it feels just like Descent - a dungeon crawling boardgame where a GM set up the board, resolve the dice rolls and move the monsters.
That said, I always prefer rules-lite games so I am biased.
Right now D&D4E is more than just splatbooks, but also the accessories - miniatures, grid, power cards and etc.
So yes, for people who are looking for a video-game-like experience, video games have basically supplanted tabletop RPGs. But as noted, some people are into the creative writing aspect which isn’t really available through MMOs and so forth.
Another point about pen-and-paper versus MMOs that I’ve heard came up with Champions Online; it turns out that you just can’t allow MMO players the same level of freedom in building their characters that you can in a pen and paper game. A P&P game has a human game master, who can on the fly adapt to any game breaking exploits the players comes up with; a computer game isn’t smart enough to do that. A human GM can create a house rule covering the exploit, or a tailored nemesis, or simply say “look, if I let you do that it’ll break the game and no one will want to play; how about this instead?” A computer game has to have a character build system narrow enough that exploits are rare enough that a relatively tiny dev team (compared to the number of players) can deal with them without having to hover over each individual player.
If I play a MMO, then I’m usually limited to the MMO programmers’ imaginations. Usually there aren’t nearly enough DMs to give the players their attention, unless the players are willing to send out a call for help and wait anywhere from minutes to hours.
With a tabletop session, I can do something that the DM completely failed to predict, and a good DM will work it into the story and the story is better for it. For instance, after killing an anti-paladin my cleric spoke with the dead spirit, and negotiated a raise if the anti-paladin agreed to set things right. The AP used to be a paladin, and was converted to an AP against his will, so everything worked out OK. In an MMO, I couldn’t have done that. The group would have killed the AP, received appropriate amounts of experience and loot, but nobody would have received bonus XP for roleplaying.
I’m a big fan of the old SSI gold box computer games, and I’ve done some MMOs, and they are enjoyable. But it’s sort of like looking at porn…yeah, it’s fun, but the real thing is better.
Funnily enough, I consider the Ranger and the Barbarian, properly specced, to be two of the most powerful classes in the game. Granted, the Barbarian’s susceptible to Charm effects, but with a two-handed weapon, his damage output is off the charts. And I destroyed my party once with what should have been a straight up normal challenge for them, using a ranger with two-weapon fighting, and high-crit weapons.
Back in the day, the odd thing about D&D was that it took so long between editions, relative to other RPGs. Champions was already on its 4th edition back when I played it (lord, 20 years ago).
There was Hero Quest, which was rules lite and basically a board game that the GM set up as adventure scenarios.
I’ll tell you another bitch I have about 4e – when you bring a n00b in, what do you normally do to help them get the hang of the game? You give them a fighter to play. In 4e, a fighter is just as complicated as a wizard. Basically, everybody has spells.
Yeah, I consider that to be a fairly big problem for 4E. I’ve been playing D&D, and bringing in new players, for 30 years, and that’s the approach I’d always take, too – give them a mechanically-simple class (almost always a fighter). The 4E Essentials line does simplify things somewhat (a “Slayer” fighter is a lot less complicated than an original 4E fighter), but there still isn’t an ability to do a “point and shoot” character in 4E.
I disagree that this is a big problem; What -is- a big problem is if you are bringing them in as a 12th level fighter or something. Which is something that never worked in earlier editions either.
But if your newbie is so dense that he can’t handle 5 cards laid out on the table in front of him as “The things he can do” as a level 1 character, then I don’t think he has any business playing tabletop games.
4E is an excellent teaching game AS LONG AS YOU START AT LEVEL 1.
Our barbarian was quite good but neither he nor the ranger is especially well optimized (don’t get me wrong, they’re optimized to about the same extent as the rest of the party, but that isn’t really saying much.) The fact is that these classes are generally considered weak (as I said, tier 4) but are still plenty of fun to play and can definitely contribute to the party, even if the rest of the party is high tier.
Yeah, but 99% of the tier system is “can you cast spells? Congrats, you win!” Considering how blitheringly overpowered anything more powerful than the core spells are, not to mention the system for creating your own spells… The other 1% is the ability to utilize infinite loops, which is usually due to spells.
Exactly. What I’m saying is that when people talk about casters being overpowered (often citing the tier arrangement, though Crowbar of Irony +3 didn’t) they’re generally talking about what the class can do, whereas what’s powerful in practice actually boils down to what the character does do. As I said in the post CandidGamera quoted, how much fun there is to be had with regard to power levels tends to be more about the players in the group and their mindsets rather than the raw power of the classes in a vacuum.
If only I had a D&D group… I just got a great idea for an adventure involving an overpowered wizard getting his spells sealed and having to find a way to get them back.
It can go the other way, too. When Cryptic was originally developing City of Heroes, they tried for an open, Champions-based character creation system. They discovered that not only did powergamers exploit the system to make wildly overpowered characters, regular players often ended up making terribly underpowered characters. These players make their characters, find they can’t actually do anything in the game with them, and give up in frustration.
In a tabletop game, a good GM can roll with underpowered characters, adjusting the campaign to include things they can handle. If your party is combat-weak, they get more mysteries, infiltration missions, and the like. If they’re combat-heavy, but low on sneaks, they get more frontal assault scenarios. You can’t really do that in MMOs, though some are making efforts to make the game experience more adjustable.
This is true in the main, but there are hints that it may get better. Neverwinter Nights (not an MMO, but multiplayer) had the tools to create your own content, and I believe allowed you to jump in and control specific characters, thus bringing a bit of the tabletop potential to the game. City of Heroes has the Mission Architect feature, which allows you to create and share your own arcs of instanced missions, including your own custom-designed NPCs. Both are still restricted by what the game software can handle, though, which is nowhere near the flexibility a good GM can bring to the table.
I suppose time will tell if we see more and better features like this. I don’t expect to ever see a computer game that will let me pull the sort of shenanigans I’m planning for my Eclipse Phase campaign, though.
