To give you something to chew on, here's a comment Furdinand left on a post at Massively:
I remember thinking when Ultima Online and Everquest first came out that games were on the threshold of bringing the pen and paper RPG experience online. Big, open worlds to explore with random danger and adventures. I expected that we would eventually see something like a living room Forgotten Realms campaign with hundreds of thousands of players and DMs.
Now it's 2011 and D&D is on the threshold of being an offline WoW instead.
---
Added Marketing by Raph Koster to the Really Interesting Links.
Your posting speed has become mental lately, I could barely keep up! so enjoy the break! =P
ReplyDelete/wave
Since I started the blog, I have become a lot faster at writing, Syl. I need about 30 minutes for a post.
ReplyDeleteAdd the fact that my blog-time competes with my MMORPG playing time. And since there aren't any reasonable MMORPGs right now ..
I just reposted that quote on the internal forums for my day job. I'll leave it up to your imagination why I did so. :)
ReplyDeleteBecause you're working on this guy's ten-year-old vision and now just have to figure out a business model that combines low entrance barriers with a separation of the paying and the playing process ? ;)
ReplyDeleteI wonder if the new WoW inspired D&D tabletop game will have a random friend finder system that calls people on your Facebook contact list?
ReplyDeleteD&D actually has a dungeon finder. It's called "Encounters" and it is run at local gaming shops all over the place on some night of the week where you just show up and play through an encounter with random people.
ReplyDeleteAlso, the business model is now subscription. Pay a monthly fee and you get access to all of the rules ever printed online.
But all that said, I just started playing D&D again after about a decade and it's great. Fights move much, much faster and you don't spend the whole time looking things up in rulebooks. Plus I could just tell my players, all unfamiliar with the system and one of whom never played any edition of D&D, to make characters and they did so in little time and with no assistance. If you want to role play there are fewer rules to get in the way and if you want to smash monsters it just runs more smoothly.
Though I think that people are sort of correct to say that D&D has been turned into a tabletop MMO, it actually just seems better (except that it is missing a two page excerpt from Gygax's dissertation on polearms).