Reader Elench dislikes EQ2 so much that he wishes it would die a swift death. Heartless Gamer wants to wipe EverQuest from the pages of history. Keen wants to zap Star Wars Galaxies.
Seems everyone has some certain game that holds a dark corner of their heart captive.
It took me a lot of thought before I finally realized that there was, in fact, one game that should have never been made, that constrained the MMO industry in untenable ways against which nearly every modern MMO still struggles.
A game that, if it had never been made, would have made today’s games different and far more enjoyable.
You’ll have to click through to find out what game that is.
There are some MMOs I just didn’t enjoy. Star Wars Galaxies I found slow and uninspiring; the mechanic of running long distances so I could strafe tree stumps for awhile for money was about as far from a Star Wars experience as I could imagine, so I tried dancing in a cantina, but that was largely people who had macro’d their characters to dance, play instruments and do specials while they were off doing other things. I know people found things to like in that game, but playing SW:G just left gaping holes in my life where time disappeared to no good end.
FFXI Online had the most punishing grouping requirements of any game I have ever tried, with their three-level group limit beyond which experience would tank; the need to find areas with large numbers of similar mobs and little competition in order to get good experience; and the absolute requirement to only user CERTAIN abilities at CERTAIN times in order to do the best damage to keep the flow of experience smooth. When it worked, it was amazing, but it didn’t work often. Plus, like many Asian games, it was saturated with farmers and gold (er, gil) spammers.
I don’t think either of those games should be expunged from the pages of history.
I certainly don’t think Everquest or World of Warcraft should be retconned out of existence. Both were extremely important games in the genre, and both will serve as an inspiration — and a warning — for games to come, regardless of how much they are loved or hated today.
I’d go back even further.
I’d wipe out Dungeons & Dragons. Not the MMO — the pen and paper game itself.
I’m sorry, Mr. Gygax, but the MMO world would have been better off if you had never had the inspiration to turn storytelling into numbers, tables and rolls of the dice.
By quantifying heroism, D&D cheapened it. No longer could mighty heroes beat unguessable odds in their quests for wealth and adventure. Now those odds were entirely guessable. You could no longer be stronger than a horse, unless you subtracted the horse’s strength score from your own and rolled a d6 to check. Mighty wizards could no longer blast back a swarm of goblins; instead, they could sear 2d4 of them for 2d8 hit points of damage each, maximum four, in a two meter radius from the center of their attack.
Now that legendary deeds could be reduced to a small number of figures scratched out on a character sheet, storytelling itself could be reduced to a decision tree ruled by chance, and even a computer could easily do the job.
Computer programmers took that one concept, basic to D&D — that everything could be reduced to math and chance — and made from it an industry that is now so entirely riddled with numbers that they themselves have become the driving force in MMOs. Raise your strength from 539 to 540! Have an intelligence score of 871 but fervently wish for a new hat that would bring that to 873, because then your spells would hit for five more points of damage against mobs with ten million points of health.
We’ve missed our chance to be heroes and legends and turned instead into accountants, balancing risk and reward and running analysis on opportunity cost.
Without the inevitable attraction that a neatly quantified Weltanschauung would have to the socially awkward, role playing, divorced from math, might have spread to the world in a different way, one more focused on plot, story and adventure than numbers and dice and the thought of doing something so intensely social as adventuring would have been thought an odd thing to try and do on a computer.
In fact, here in the 21st century, when computers are now finally powerful enough to, perhaps, bring this level of storytelling to players, the legacy of D&D has left us instead in a world of cookie-cutter games more or less exactly the same as each other, when your character is nothing but a set of numbers and all your actions ruled by chance.
We would all have been better off had Dungeons and Dragons never been written.
20 thoughts on “What MMO would I unmake?”
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Holy cow. Nice startling choice, but I couldn’t disagree more. Gygax to me, and the cumbersome hack & slash rules he created, was more about imagination than mechanics.
It’s unfortunate that mechanics map better to computer code than imagination, but I can’t fault Gygax for that. I think that, despite the advances in video games over the last 30 years, they still have a long way to go before they’re mature. It’s up to the developers, the designers, and the audience to imagine something more compelling than what we’ve got right now, but I don’t blame Gygax for that.
But you do, and that’s cool, because different opinions are what makes the world go ’round.
I’m the kind of person who finds silver linings, though, the eternal optimist about everything except Brad McQuaid. And if I was held at swordpoint and forced to choose a game to unmake, I guess I’d have to pick Dark & Light. Not because of their concept, though, just the execution.
Actually, I don’t blame Gygax. Later in life, he more or less backed away from the numbers and emphasized the storytelling; even he knew, I think, that the industry had taken his ideas far from home. He always felt gaming should be mediated by a dungeon master who could bend or ignore the rules if it made a better story. No, it isn’t his fault what people did with his ideas, so I’m in total agreement with you.
But without D&D as a crutch, computer games perhaps would have gone more along the ways the Infocom text adventures were going — where story was everything. Instead, story died and numbers won.
I didn’t even consider Dark & Light, but it’s interesting you’d pick that one. It wasn’t all that influential. I’d been looking forward to it at one point, but the advance press was so incredibly bad that it thankfully, immediately died. Unfortunately, its lesson that wide expanses and vistas of nothing couldn’t substitute for content didn’t arrive soon enough to save Vanguard from making the same mistake.
I’ve played an astonishing amount of D&D.
I note that the most fun I ever had was in campaigns that didn’t use miniatures, and ignored the majority of the rules. If you wanted to intimidate something, you said the words you wanted to say, and the DM decided how the monsters responded.
D&D ‘evolving’ to where you say ‘I roll my intimidate skill’ and the DM says ‘the monster resists with a fort save’, combined with the ‘tactics’ style miniature combat rules with feats, attacks of opportunity, 5-foot steps… the current D&D rules seem to be trying to turn table top RPGs into a CRPG, whis is the most bacwards thing I ever could have imagined. It’s also why, despite buying the 3.5 rules, I’ve never played them. I’d rather play 1st edition, thanks.
I don’t think you can blame Gary and Dave so much. If you look at the old rules, they weren’t the masses of skills and charts that the game became.
That’s scary to unmake D&D, Tipa. You would possibly wipe every MMO and RPG out of existence and in the process many fantastic games. I can see the underlying reason, but before I could accept such a radical change in even a hypothetical setting, I need an alternative.
As Rick Said, “It’s unfortunate that mechanics map better to computer code than imagination”. I’m almost positive that even without D&D the computer age would have brought about an identical system. Why? Because numbers are the basis for our every day lives. Back in school I remember asking “when will we ever use this again?” and I’m weirded out to realize how important numbers and math have become. I do however shudder to think what it would have been like had the coders gone at it alone without a basic idea provided by D&D – that could have sucked.
If you’re ready for MMORPGs to be like Kings Quest, then unmake D&D.
That’s right. I would wipe out all these games. Or perhaps, at least, delay them for awhile. King’s Quest, Myst, Zork, Grim Fandango — you do realize that the rise of stat-based games killed the story-based game market? Killed it entirely and danced on its corpse. For awhile, a short while, they coexisted, and now they are gone, and aside from Uru, perhaps, we never had a glimpse of what MMOs might have become if they hadn’t been built on D&D’s algebraic foundation.
Can you find any traces of a story in the games you play? MMOs have turned us all into small, unimportant cogs of some greater machine over which we have no influence. We’re like ants fighting over breadcrumbs, never looking up into the sky or seeing the wider world.
Whatever happened to the games where we could be heroic?
Killed off, every one.
Our current view of what is acceptable in an MMO is a travesty. Being different is beaten down. You must have the correct spec, do things in the approved way, and any deviance from that is beaten from you until you conform.
No, that wasn’t a property of D&D, but it has been one of the games it inspired. That is the legacy I want to erase. A flawed inspiration. People took away only those parts of D&D that were convenient for them to code and ignored all the ones that made the game special.
There are RPGs where you can be heroic, but MMOs have difficulty with this concept.
Planescape: Torment
Lunar: Eternal Blue
Wild Arms
Ultima IV
Arcanum
Now, I’ve only played two MMOs, really. WoW, and Guild Wars.
The majority of my Guild wars play was with a group of friends in real life. Guild Wars, by being 100% instanced for all practical purposes, as well as not being a game I ‘finished’ (so nothing was ever on ‘Farm’) actually had continuity and heroics.
When I killed a boss, the guy stayed dead. Because even if I went back to where he was, I didn’t have the quest to kill him. And I generally didn’t backtrack anyway. And the missions actually did a good job of making the PCs seem really important… as if you and your buddies were the only ones that had ever done this particular thing before, and that you’d never need to do it again.
I didn’t play alts in Guild Wars PvE. All of my alts were purely PvP builds. If i’d put anything on Farm or actually played the PvE game more than once (once… heh, I never got halfway through PvE before going to pure PvP) then I guess it would be the same…
But if you look at story based games, those require the player to be a major player in the world. You are the Avatar. You are the savior of the universe. You are the immortal. You are the hero that escorts the goddess through the mortal realm.
What’s more important though, is that you really are special. Of all the people in the game world, you and your group are IT. You’re the ones. Everything rests on you.
In WoW, you aren’t the one, and you never will be the one. You’re just like the other 9,999,999 heroes out there, and all of you, gosh darn it, are heroes.
When you play in a world with 10 million heroes, being a hero isn’t really heroic. It’s just the daily grind. And MMOs can’t escape that, because unique, 1-time content is what makes you a hero.
WoW could do things better… it’s patently silly that I can kill a boss, wait for him to re-spawn, kill him again, wait for re-spawn, and kill him again. And stand there, taking a screenshot surrounded by three corpses. It’s annoying when I kill a quest boss, explore his castle, then have to kill him again on my way out. It’s ridiculous that I accept a quest to go find a guy, someone else next to me turns the quest in, bringing the guy with him, and I have to go find him anyhow… HEY, HE’S RIGHT HERE.
So, MMOs, when it ccomes to stories that matter, is a 100% dead end street. Because you can’t have a world where everyone is a hero, because then no one is a hero. And no one wants to play a game where they are a mondane, just so the chosen few can be awesome.
I can’t see how you fix it, really. Then again, not my job 🙂
I swear, despite my last two posts, that I do know how to type. I should stop multitasking when i don’t have an edit button 🙂
Sorry ’bout the typos.
Somehow the real world can have seven billion people in it, and yet we all face challenges and can be heroes and do it by all being very different from one another. We all have our own stories. Our stories mesh; mine is meshing with yours right now.
We’re *immersed* in better ways to do it. Stats and dice rolls are a pitiful abstraction of reality. D&D told us that Gandalf could never be a powerful fighter and also a wizard. D&D told us that Conan couldn’t be both a fighter and a thief at the same time. D&D told us that normal people only have 1-3 hit points, and you had to be careful with them or they would surely die.
They added cantrips, the ability to multiclass for humans, all sorts of things to make up for that one initial mistake of suggesting everything you could do was a matter of choosing the correct numbers and rolling some dice. That mechanic is so artificial and divorced from how people think that it has done more, I think, to drive people away from MMORPGs than anything else.
If you’re a thief looking for a secret door, the DM should be able to judge whether you see it, based on its type, age, who set it, etc, and give you a yes or no answer, instead of you rolling a critical fail which says you DON’T see this secret door — even though you’re an expert thief — and also you accidentally poke your eye out.
The other thing was insisting that everything interesting about you could be encoded in your class and level. Again, later editions of D&D fudged that a lot, but it’s just a finger in the dyke.
When playing a MMO, wouldn’t it be great if we just made our character, selected a bunch of things we know how to do and perhaps how good we are at them, and then everything from then on was a test of our skills? Let’s say to go from here to that island, I need to have the swimming skill at average level, or my negotiation level at basic to hire a boat, or my raft-building skill at above average, or an animal empathy skill at expert along with a basic knowledge of dolphin communication?
There were games out there that DID work like that (and D&D swallowed those up with its Feats system), and almost any of them would have been a better basis for a game that told a story and let you be unique and meet challenges in your own way, and not only that, allow characters to move from game to game, or even to places like Second Life and back perhaps.
All those avenues were shut when fledgling game designers decided the D&D way was the only way.
If you wiped out D&D there probably wouldn’t be any MMORPGs. The genre simply wouldn’t exist. D&D was the starting point for pretty much all other PnP RPGs, and PnP RPGs are the foundation of all MMORPGs. Without one, you wouldn’t have the other.
Could it be argued that someone would have come up with a similar idea eventually? Certainly, but there’s no guarantee. The advantage of wiping out a game like Star Wars Galaxies is that nothing else would change, except a bunch of people would have avoided wasting large chunks of time. Wiping out D&D? There’s no telling what we’d be left with.
I don’t disagree with your unhappiness regarding the mediocrity of our ‘heroes’ in MMORPGs, but I think it has less to do with D&D roots and number crunching and more to do with the MMO genre. You can’t have thousands of people playing in the same world where everyone is the ‘hero’. The very nature of MMORPGs dilutes the concept of hero in order to maintain gameplay.
I also don’t disagree with your dislike of enforced classes, the use of levels, and so on — it is very restrictive, breaks immersion, and takes choices away from the player. Again though, those are just gameplay mechanics that provide a structure to the game. D&D may have invented the ideas, but even without D&D there would be something similar in MMORPGs (assuming they even existed).
There are games out there that don’t have those structures — Second Life, A Tale in the Desert, and a few more I’m sure. However, without any numbers or mechanics, they’re less like games and more like virtual sandboxes. As silly as it seems, placing limitations on what players can do and assigning them statistics to define their character provide the foundation of a game that can generate actual gameplay. You have to handcuff a player in order to motivate them to get the handcuffs off. The trick with MMORPGs of course, is that the handcuffs never really come off. Your level 70 warrior is vastly more powerful than when he was level 1, but overall is still just as limited. But maybe if you get just one more purple it will be different . . . and so people keep playing and playing and playing . . .
Ok, now I’m just rambling.
I can see your point about D&D making the RPG/MMO industry obesessed with stats instead of storytelling. But since even in the days of MUDs the DIKU games were more popular then the story oriented ones I’m going to say that killing off D&D would be a mistake. Quite frankly without number based systems most people don’t have enough imagination or patience to do the gameplay you describe. I think most people would find it tedious and the genre as a whole would flounder by not having sales. Sure conneissuers could still pick up the rarely made games like Grim Fandango and Psychonaunts but there would be no growth like we’ve seen with DIKU based games.
Having every object represented by a number and every action represented by a virtual dice roll makes it easier for people to relate to role playing. People who have too much experience with the current popular RPGs/MMOs may wish for a change but you have to remember most people are still new to the genre. I think if the only games out were free form and story based then fantasy would never be gaining the mass appeal its starting to achieve currently. Look at the rise in popularity of fantasy books, movies, and games which can all be easily traced back to D&D and its influence.
Mass appeal first then specialization and refinement.
If I ever have another kid, I’m naming it Graktar.
That name rocks.
@Relmstein — yes, the MUD era was too soon for it. We needed better computers. We have them now. But now everyone thinks the DIKU model is the only model there is. They don’t realize just how many potential players are turned off by the monomaniacal emphasis on making their numbers go up slightly.
Ten million players is *nothing* compared to what’s out there, once they get rid of the old model. We have that MMO thing down pat. Now let’s talk about the RPG part — the part they forgot.
Every kid I know tells stories. Introducing that child to WoW would be child abuse — replacing their stories with no story at all, replacing creativity with tedium. But give them a medium in which they can create their own stories, and their own people, and interact in only creative ways with those around them, and play a unique part in a GAME world — not a sandbox world — which challenges each player individually or together — that’s what we’d have today, right this minute, if MMOs had been inspired by Zork or Colossal Cave Adventure instead of D&D.
We can still have all that but we’re just going to have to get that D&D monkey off our backs if it’s ever going to happen.
Let’s take a look at the secret door issue.
In basic set D&D, ‘by the rules’ you had a 1-in-6 chance to spot a secret door if you were looking for it, no chance just walking by. Elves had a 1-in-6 chance to spot one walking past, and a 2-in-6 if they were actively searching.
I had campaigns with the following styles of DM:
1) You are pursuing the fleeing kobolds. They turn a corner. When you get there, you can’t see them anymore, and the corridor goes at least 100′ before branching. Elves roll a d6 and tell me what you get.
2) You are pursuing the fleeing kobolds. They turn a corner and you hear a door open an close. You see a wooden door.
-after opening the door-
Inside is a room with an archway to the south. the room is dusty and doesn’t look like it’s been used… but the thief notices that the dust is disturbed along the west wall.
-upon examing the dust, and saying they are searching for a secret door-
Ok, everyone roll a d6. Tell me if you get a 6, and you Balor, tell me if you get a 5 or 6.
3)You are pursuing the fleeing kobolds. They turn a corner and you hear a door open an close. You see a wooden door.
-after opening the door-
Inside is a room with an archway to the south. the room is dusty and doesn’t look like it’s been used… but the thief notices that the dust is disturbed along the west wall.
-upon examing the dust, and saying they are searching for a secret door-
The wall has bas relief figures along the floor and ceiling. one of the figures is cleaner than the rest.
-they examine more closely-
You think this figure is probably important… the elve’s infravision notes that it’s warmer than the other stone, in fact.
-party member pushes, prods, pokes-
Nothing happens, until your finger reaches the eye socket of the figure… you fell it give.
-I press it in, now!-
You feel the eye press in… it clicks and the door starts to open. However, as you keep pressing the button, you feel it give way completely and a sharp prick hits your finger…
-OH CRAP should have examined it for traps…-
Note that D&D gives you the framework for all three of these… the core issue is the DM and the players. A DM that uses just the barebones framework of the system was a bad DM, who just let you ‘roll play’. It was the DMs who were descriptive, and basically ignored the framework and instead gave you all the tools you needed to play was a much better DM.
But, Computer games don’t have DMs. the computer is the DM. If you want to do something, you have to follow the rules, and there’s no way around it. When presented your basic ‘kill quest’ you can kill the wolves and get the sword, or you can not kill the wolves and not get the sword. You can’t try to trick the quest giver, steal the sword from him, tame the wolves and show him they can be an ally against the defias, use meat to bait to the wolves to the kobold camp, poison the wolves, etc…
that’s the basic failing of Computer roleplaying games, is that they are on rails. You can either ffollow the rules, or ignore the rules, but you can’t make up new rules as you play (much like the DM who said ‘you meet up at the doors of a keep’ and when the players say ‘hey, what’s in the woods over there’ and he replied ‘nothing. go in the keep or not, that’s the module.’)
MMOs add on the fact that the persistence of the world, combined with the mass players, lack of DM, etc… that it’s basically just a monty haul campaign. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s fun for what it is. I don’t think that D&D is the culprit, so much as computer games in general. I’m not saying a skill based sandbox couldn’t work… it certainly could. But I also think it’s got a lot of its own issues.
I’ve managed to meander a lot and have gotten off point. I’ll try to make my next reply more coherent 🙂
No need, we totally agree.
If what I had said originally was, I wish D&D had not been the major influence in the design of modern MMOs, as it has been, would that have been better?
I played D&D and loved it. I just think that it should have stayed as a social gathering than as the way to suck the living souls of computer players.
If we were going to design a story based Fantasy game, one in which it’s more than just an IRC room with avatars, we need a framework. The less restrictive and simple the framework, the better.
So let’s start with skills. You have a list of skills… running, riding, swimming, sowrdsmanship, reading, languages. You might pick these willy-nilly, or you might have to do a bit of character design… is your character male or female, elf or dwarf or human or mixbreed, urban or outdoorsy? let’s say you pick a human, urban, poor character… you’ll have skills like ‘sneak’ and ‘steal food’ and ‘climb walls’, and maybe even basic math. While on the other hand my upper class human from the farmalnds will have horseback riding, farming, swimming, animal husbandry, etc…
Once you’ve got your basic skills for who you were, you get to ‘spend’ points to improve those skills, or pick up others. You wouldn’t be restricted from things, but your choices could make your points be more or less efificient as you got out off your ‘core’.
you wouldn’t have classes, or numbers… you might have titles for skills, ‘unskilled’, ‘apprentice’ etc.
You’d have to have skills of a certain level to do certain things. Perhaps having them at a low level would still allow a chance at success… without some randomness, the ‘game’ isn’t going to be very suspenseful, after all.
Now that you’ve got a character, with skills that are hopefully sensible and relevant to the world, you need a world.
And other people.
And now you need something to do. I mean, sure there’s fun to be had in wandering around and seeing if you can climb that wall or pick that lock or hit that target, but you need a reason to be there. The reason could be ‘become expert in my chosen field’ and you’d do thinks to ‘skillup’.
Or it could be ‘save the world by destroying this evil artifact’.
now we start getting to the real issue… assuming the game is robust enough to have a LOT of goals, and a lot of paths to realize these goals, and challenges preventing us from meeting these goals, we start to get to an issue. *I* want to save the world. To do that, I need to go to the elven council and claim the mantle of artifact-bearer. And I need people that are ok with coming with me, to heal, tank, etc. And you guys don’t all have to be ok with that… you could want to take it from me, or just be going in the same general direction as me.
but then you put me in a group of 5,000 players, and more than 1 of us wants to be that artifact bearer. What does your game do?
Allow us to coexist… giving us both artifacts, and allowing both of us to destroy it, therefore both saving the world? (And in doing so, the world is never really saved, because more will be coming).
Allow us to coexist, but make it a race, first one to the pit wins? And new players will never even have the chance?
Allow us to coexist, but instance us such that we never actually see each other and can have no effect on the other groups world?
Don’t allow us to coexist? that goal is called, you pick another one?
We quickly get to a point where for there to be meaningful, heroic goals in the game you have to instance it down to a tiny group, or simply have so much content that you can throw it away after one use on a server. Neither is feasible.
So, if you don’t have world-changing things happening that the players directly influence, is it really heroic? If you only let people have moderate control over things, then it’s easier to code for but less meaningful.
And even then, unless you’ve got GMs willing to modify things on the fly, you’re still on rails.
The entire framework of games (even Zork and Grim Fandango) is that you’ve got rules… you can experiment, but only as far as it was coded for. You can’t break those bonds.
The framework *is* the game. You can have lots of fun in a sandbox world that is ‘anything goes, do what you want’… but stories have to have authors, and in a computer game, we’re either all going to be playing the same story (making player impact nil), or playing different stories that can intertwine (making the game require so much GM direct influence as to be impossible).
I don’t see any other way for an MMO to handle it… one is what we have, the other isn’t feasible.
Unless I’m missing something core to your idea?
While I agree with everything you’re saying Tipa, I have little hope for the gaming industry.
RPGs are not the only element in gaming that is suffering, it’s absolutely every element.
Every year younger and younger audiences are focused on by sacrificing any type of story for flashy graphics. Graphics are big money to younger audiences because younger audiences by majority have shorter attention spans.
Go back to the beginning of the video game time-line and look how rapidly new systems are coming out. It’s rather sickening. There is virtually no time to create really good games before the next system is already out. Just because some new technology was discovered does not mean we should make a brand new system based on it. So what if the next generation console is X times faster, without a game to put into that console it’s no better than a doorstop.
I’ve been watching games slowly lose the element of good story for a long, long time and every year I get more depressed about it. One such game I was really excited about was Bioshock. Having played System Shock 1 and 2 (the game’s predecessors) I was very excited to see this next “spiritual successor”. The first two games have amazing stories and even some RPG elements, particularly SS2. There were extremely promising developer videos and documentation that got me so excited.
Having heard all the boastings that this would be a “completely open-ended game based exclusively on player’s choices”, I was ravenous to see it. And then they made the decision to release it on XBOX simultaneously. Suddenly, my in-depth and immersive experience was dumbed down to the point where I was just obeying the commands of an automatic compass. I never once had to think about where I was going, and it was absolutely unnecessary to think about any sort of tactics, unless you count minor attention paid towards ammo consumption as “tactics!”. Fun Fact: I don’t.
This was not the game I had been promised. And numerous other games are similarly disappointing me – and it’s happening more and more often every year. I am looking at Fallout 3 with an extraordinary amount of cautious and a miniscule amount of optimism. Developers like making money more than they like making games these days.
It’s just so depressing that although gamers and developers alike realize this, no one wants to shoot Old Yeller no matter how rabid he gets.
Of course adventures should have authors, I want to play a game. If I wanted to just hang around and look cool, I’d play Second Life.
Let’s say I were a quest designer. I design it so that it could be accomplished with, say, five ranks of horsemanship, two ranks of concealment, three ranks of fire magic, two ranks of healing, five ranks of elven lore and a rank in appraisal.
So one person who had all those skills would be expected to complete this adventure alone. Heroic, right? You’re the hero. You and I don’t have all those skills alone — my horsemanship is only rank 2 and yours is rank 4; I know all about elven lore but you focused on dwarf, and we each just know basic concealment — but together we could finish this adventure. See how this scales? You and me and three others, first day in the game, basic skills all, get together and do this as a group.
It’s scalable and based on what you know, not your stats. Maybe instead of a rank in spellcasting you choose to raise ranks in strength — so tasks that require “Strong” rank, you can do without finding someone beefier to help.
Raids could require a hundred ranks of ice magic, fifty ranks of strength and so on. Nobody would have to be a cookie cutter spec; no content would be beyond reach if you had enough people with the correct skills, I suppose. Leveling would be a thing of the past. If you wanted to spend all that time training up every skill, you could, and maybe you would. Or maybe you’d invite your friend who has never played to make a character with a couple ranks in bows to help you take on a foe. No levels means casual players are never shut out! High skill players don’t get to do anything low skill players can’t do, they can just do it with fewer people (or even solo!)
Now that I think about it, EvE Online uses a somewhat similar skill system, though their missions tend to be fairly cookie-cutter. We’d want better ones.
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Should have said click for response. I am stupid
Bold and compelling! I wouldn’t want D&D to disappear, its just absurd that we are all still playing virtually the same game (with flashier visuals) 35 years later.
D&D is about story telling at its core, but what elevates it it from a simple choose-your-own-adventure book is the game tacked on–specifically a simulation of a fantasy dungeon adventure. All simulations have large amounts of numerical figures flying around and colliding, from a sophisticated flight simulator used by nasa which calculates true to life physics down to an RPG deciding how much “strength” is required to break down a wooden door. Its unavoidable: all simulations are going to require variables in place that decide how the action is going to play out, because face it, in a Game, unlike in Literature, you can’t win just because you’re the good guy.
The crucial part of D&D that made it easy to forget about the simulation and just immerse yourself into the story was a good DM. That is what is missing from MMOs. Even though PC games like NWN and Vampire: Masquerade exist which allow players to create their own campaigns and then accompany other players with an invisible, all powerful DM client, the experience is impossible in an MMO. Theres just no way that you could staff enough people to make it happen. So what is the solution?
MMO designers need to do their best to program a game smart enough to replicate a DM experience, at least from the gameplay standpoint. This comes from such design concepts as having a hyper detailed world (so you could explore anywhere and anything) SOME semblance of NPC AI (which most MMOs have virtually ZERO at this moment) multiple paths and outcomes to dungeon-type encounters and quests, and finally (maybe the most important) more intelligent decision/outcome determination with less reliance on RANDOM ROLLS.
Hyper Detailed World: The complaint often heard is that MMOs are “on rails.” I can’t argue with this because on one side of the spectrum, some games will allow you to deviate from the beaten path while its almost really never to your advantage, and on the other end some games don’t even allow you to swim under water or even jump, or pen you in with invisible barriers. A fully explorable world with actual stuff in it to look for makes for a bit more of a DM experience, because a good DM would be ready for players to wander off the pre-planned route.
The AI in MMOs is non-existent. Why do you think PVP is so popular? Because fighting monsters that all behave exactly the same for 50+ levels is boring. Even the end game bosses follow a relatively simple scripted battle routine that is known, documented and proliferated within weeks of the content being available. I can understand a bear or skeleton having easily predictable behavior, but an intelligent bipedal creature like a goblin or human bandits should have some semblance of intelligence in combat, and certainly a 10,000 year old dragon should not be so easily put on “farm status.”
This is a really complicated issue and I don’t want to hijack Tipa’s site and write all about here, but I believe the solution is to create more intelligent AI, including the obscuring or outright removal of the damage “trinity.” Its been 35 years–we have the technology, we can rebuild the tired old standard. Smarter, less predictable, better. A reasonable replication of intelligence brought to the table further adds to the DM-like experience.
There needs to be more creativity to quests and dungeons besides “kill this many” or “pick up this many.” On top of this there should be more outcomes to how quests can go down besides “You did it,” “You died trying,” or “you gave up and skipped it.” Take the typical Kill the Orc Chieftain style quest: in current MMOs the outcome is either kill him, or don’t kill him–
Expand on killing him: Do you massacre the entire village? Do you cautiously approach the guards at the gate and state that you want to challenge the chief in 1 on 1 combat? Does the village offer you the title of chieftain if you win or do they just scatter to the 4 winds?
Expand on not killing him: Does he just kill you? Does he offer to compromise and stop raiding the countryside if you help him with some other quest? Does he immediately recognize the talisman of his cousin whom you killed/befriended and immediately fear/respect you? Does he ask you to switch sides and kill the humans who sent you? Does he take you captive and start you on a jailbreak quest?
These are all likely outcomes in a creatively penned and DM’d D&D campaign that you would almost never see in an MMO. If you did see any of these, it only have ONE of the more creative outcomes (ie: capture, compromise, etc) and it would probably be lauded as one of the cooler and more fun quests in the game, despite having no real chance of any other outcome.
Finally, there needs to be more human-like intelligent decision making and outcome determination by the computer. What this I mean by this is that some of the most.. How can I say this.. Sterile..? MMO experiences that make the world feel artificial and leave a bad taste in your mouth–are because of “bad luck” from random dice rolls.
How many times did you run Strat Undead to get the drop you wanted from the Baron with no luck? My wife has been running KZ since it first opened and still hasn’t even SEEN Light’s Justice drop from the prince. What self respecting DM would EVER let you make the trip all the way to his house, pick up the pizza, doritos and mountain dew and still make you play for hours at a time each week without getting a reward. Why would you even bother to show up again after a few weeks of that? More intelligent loot code would make a world of difference. It could only generate treasure that can be equipped by the group or avoid duplicates that are already being used by the group, stuff like that wouldn’t take a thousand lines of code to create and I don’t think it would make the game too easy or completely trivialize the process of treasure gathering.
Similarly what kind of DM would be sadistic enough allow your group to lose when after an epic struggle against the dragon, its down to one player left alive and the dragon is one good hit from death. The DM is there to decide which outcome is more adventurous and fun: The players all die and “wipe on 1%?” Or the little halfling rogue’s who is the last one standing notices a soft spot in the dragon’s armor and desperately fires his very last arrow to hit that spot and the pow, dragon thrashes around violently, collapsing a section of the cave before dying in a writhing heap of yadda yadda you get the idea. As of this writing I’m not completely sure how you implement this into the mechanics of a computer game but I’m sure I’ll come up with something between now and when I get around to making my own game. 🙂
So I guess I’m basically saying, keep D&D just build a better DM robot and throw out most of the dice while you’re at it…