Back to the roots

Twice a month I'm spending the evening playing pen and paper roleplaying, Dungeons & Dragons v3.5. My character is a wizard, now level 8. The other players are all also playing WoW, but on different servers, and not all with the same intensity, we got everything from the ultra-casual to the Blackwing Lair raider. So we play D&D, swap WoW stories, and have a good time. And I was thinking how different the experience between WoW and real roleplaying is.

Yesterday's D&D story was that we had to foil an assassination attempt. So my mage cast a Disguise Self spell on himself to look like the intended victim, cast a Stoneskin, and lay in the victims bed to draw out the assassin. Worked like a charm, but then we still had to fight and kill the assassin, who was rather tough.

The first big difference between WoW and D&D is that disguising as the victim was just one of many possible ideas to start the fight. In WoW there is not much room for creative solutions. Any assassination story in WoW would be an event where you speak to somebody, triggering either the assassin arriving, or you having to escort the victim past the assassins location. Even on a roleplaying server there isn't much opportunity to roleplay interaction with the environment, you can only roleplay inter-character situations.

The next big difference is the time scale. A group of adventurers killing a single assassin of higher level than they are would take less than 1 minute. In D&D it took us about 2 hours, because the players act one after the other, and the telling of players actions and DM's response, plus rolling a lot of dice, takes time. My mage took over a year to level up to level 8, but has a lot less "kills" than a level 8 WoW mage, who can get to that level in one evening.

Another big difference is positioning. Since the third edition, D&D has gone back a bit to its tabletop roots, and the placement of your characters on a grid is very important. There are zones of control, different forms of spell areas, concealment, cover, and other factors that make fighting an assassin in a house much different from fighting him on an open field. WoW doesn't have much tactical combat like that, there is no equivalent of a fighter blocking a doorway in WoW, you would just run right through him, without him even getting an extra attack or something. I suspect that one reason why people like raid boss fights is that they are basically the only fights where it actually matters where you place your character. Related to that is that in D&D my mages fireball has to be carefully placed, to not burn my friends, while in WoW a mage can do an AoE spell right into the middle of the melee and as if by miracle hit only the enemy.

The "roleplaying" and the time scale will always be different between a pen & paper game and a MMO. But I hope that combat will become more tactical in future games. Something like a "zone of control", where you can't move in and out without penalty is definitely necessary, the current WoW PvP looks extremely silly with people hopping around in plate armor, running through their enemies and similar unrealistic moves. I don't know how popular mages would be in WoW if their fireballs were able to hit their own group. :)