Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Garbage

I have yet to play a Massively Multiplayer game. MMO, MMORPGs, whatever acronym suits your particular fancy, the fact is that with my long interest in both video games and role-playing games, it seems on the surface that the World of Warcrafts, Final Fantasy XIs and Everquests of the world would be my proverbial cup of tea. Not so.

The release of Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO) recently has spurred people who previously eschewed MMO games into the realm of online multiplayer role-playing yet I remain steadfastly unimpressed. There must be a reason for this.

At first I simply didn’t see the point. When Everquest came out I had the (perhaps mistaken, perhaps not) impression that the whole game involved wandering around and fighting other PCs for fame and fortune. To me, doing so in a RPG environment was dumb because if I wanted to virtually kill random Internet strangers, there was Counter-Strike around to allow just that. Plus you could do it with guns instead of crossbows and that’s just more satisfying, I don’t care who you are.

Eventually though some truth began to pierce my muddled impressions but it was followed shortly by another sort of truth about Everquest which was that it was immersive and addictive. EQ’s nickname is “Evercrack” for a reason. As someone who’s been gripped by the temporary addiction of several video games in the past, this put a certain level of fear into me. The one saving grace about being addicted to, say, Metal Gear Solid or Resident Evil is that eventually you beat the game and the addiction has run its course. I’m not one to re-play many video games so once I’m done it’s all over, even if my wife can’t pry me off the couch for three weeks leading up to that point there is an end in sight.

But MMO games don’t have that same limitation, because from what I understand there is rarely a point where you “beat” the game. There is always more to do, more to see and—if that fails—more expansions on the way. Expansions aren’t a new phenomenon in video games (I played pretty much all the Half-Life expansions) but typically there isn’t enough game in the expansions to keep one playing until the next one is released. I don’t think that’s exactly the case with MMO games.

Plus, while you’re immersed in this addiction, you’re paying a monthly fee to play. Truthfully this is my biggest barrier to entry and probably the only reason why I haven’t yet broken down and tried World of Warcraft. Video games are expensive as it is and the last thing I need is a feeling of guilt if I don’t play my video games often enough.

Now enter DDO which was highly anticipated and possibly awesome. I’m theoretically equipped now to maybe give it a shot but something still holds me back, and it isn’t entirely the money for subscription gaming. I couldn’t put a handle on it until (of all people) a Slashdot poster brought clarity to the swirl of reluctance floating in my skull.

Arandir (his Slashdot posts lists usermode.org as his website) says:

You are facing two problems. The first is that it’s very hard to translate a paper-and-dice RPG to computer, regardless if it’s a MUD, MMORPG, CRPG, etc. The reasons for this are myriad.

The second problem, however, is that you might be confused as to what “D&D” actually is. It’s a rules set for apaper-and-dice RPG. It has nothing to do with milieu, setting, or environment. A D&D game could be set in Greyhawk, Forgettable Realms, Middle Earth, or your own setting. It could have every monster in the Monster Manual I and II, or it might have none of them. It might have trolls, but not the typical regenerating trolls. It could have twenty different races, or it might have just humans. The point is, D&D is a set of rules, nothing more.

Now that I’ve thought about it a bit more, my unhumble opinion is that wanting a “D&D” MMORPG is silly. There’s so much a MMORPG can offer, that wanting it limited by a set of tabletop rules is dumb. It’s like wanting a word processor to be limited to the concept of a pencil. An MMORPG can use *REAL* statistic probabilities instead of rolling a silly d20. Why use hitpoints when you can now calculate damage based precise hit location, armor covering and layering, weapon aspect, wound types, etc? Even with the grossly simplified and abstracted combat necessary for performance, a computer is still going to give you a combat experience that would otherwise take you pages and pages charts and tables in a tabletop game. And that’s just combat! Imagine would it could do for skills such as lockpicking, trap detection, spell research, weaponcrafting, ale brewing and literacy!

Yes, yes, yes. The thing that attracted me to Neverwinter Nights was that it was based on some stuff that has become sort of associated with D&D but what they really seemed to be trying to do was translate the sense of building an adventure for people to go on and then letting those people experience your idea in a dynamic way. Unfortunately I never had the time to delve enough into the DM aspects of NWN to determine if they actually succeeded, but I can at least appreciate the intent. With DDO I have to agree with Arandir and say that I understand WoW far more than I understand DDO’s concept.

Which probably ties into what I was saying about D&D the pen and paper game which is that as far as generic role-playing rulesets go it isn’t exactly stellar unless you’re using it in a way that it is well suited for, which in this case is a very broad type of combat-oriented fantasy gaming. For those rules to somehow be thought of as superior to the engine that runs WoW for example is misguided to my mind, and in fact inherently flawed as Arandir points out.

I’ll tell you what I really want in an online role-playing game: I want a system that lets people easily play RPGs remotely without having to re-abstract too many of the rules. I’m talking about something simple like a map-drawing program for GMs with tilesets for various different games (perhaps the publishers could even provide official tilesets for a fee) or settings and the ability to pin various descriptions in text to parts of the map. Then each player with the client application gets an avatar (almost like a miniature) that represents their character and an editable character sheet.

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