Lessons GMs Can Learn from World of Warcraft

Martin Ralya writes "As a tabletop RPG gamemaster, I've been thinking about what GMs can learn from World of Warcraft ever since I first logged in. After close to 200 hours of WoW time, I've come up with 9 lessons GMs can learn from World of Warcraft."

Comments

What is a GM?

[loddington]

I read the article and I still dont know.

Must be very important whatever it is.

Table Top

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, but all the things that WOW does well aren't what makes a good role playing experiance. For instance a high fantasy game where everything is epic can be just as much fun as a low fantasy game where the conquests are small and the people real.

I think the author misses the point. The strong part of a table top role playing game is that there isn't limits. Players don't have to go and kill all those bad guys to finish the quest or complete the mission in a way the GM ever imagined. To make a table top game more like WOW would be to short change players.

No, no, no, and maybe

[travail_jgd]

1. Everything should be fun
I don't disagree with this in principle, but one player's fun is another's tedium. I know a player who loves big soap operas focused on her character... not fun for the rest of us. OTOH, I don't mind combat, but the soap opera doesn't have fun -- she thinks it's boring.

And there's a difference between working with your players, and catering to them. Sometimes the lows make the highs stand out more.

3. Travel should be easy
Not necessarily. Being able to easily go from point A to point B in a fantasy game robs both places of their uniqueness.

The inability to move quickly also sets up tension. One campaign I DM'd had the players encountering a cursed artifact, which had to be hand-carried to its destination. (Teleports were randomized.) It made the game a lot easier than "OK, we take the sky cab to the big city"

5. Every class should have lots of things to do
Again, it comes back to working with players, versus catering to them. If a player is told that the game is going to be mostly role-playing, but creates an undead-slaying machine, I don't see the DM as being responsible for throwing in numerous combat encounters with skeletons.

8. It's okay to make changes after the campaign begins
9. Err on the side of being over-the-top
It really depends on the campaign, setting, and style. I definitely wouldn't say these are "hard and fast rules".

Re:No, no, no, and maybe

[SpacePunk]

There are two kinds of D&D games. Those that are fun, and those that suck. The D&D games that suck ALWAYS tend to have players or GMs that argue about the rules, and constantly refer to tables. Playing the game should never take a back seat to game mechanics. Game mechanics should be transparent, and argumentative players that are table whores should be ejected. GMs that are table whores should be beaten to death.

Re:No, no, no, and maybe

[ultranova]

If you want to tell a story, write a book. If you want to play a game, make it fast. If you do it right, you can make it fast AND tell a story. But, remember if you GM that it's not your story, it's the players story.

Why couldn't it be boths story ? If I was ever a GM, I'd propably try to get players to think up relatives and such for their characters, and then get them to the game - nothing to motivate an adventure than having the villain take your mother hostage :). So what does our noble palading do ? He can't sacrifice an innocent, but he can't deliver the destructive artifact the villain wants him to find either. So he has to play for time and try to find some way to free his mother - perhaps forcing him to hire a sneaky rogue to help him ? That might even be a reason the characters came together in the first place, and set them up to an epic quest of finding the artifact at the very start.

Or suppose some player wants to multiclass into a dragon disciple ? Of course she could simply take that class, but that is the boring way. Suppose you could tie slaying a dragon into the plot, and as the dragon lays dying, that character would suddenly recognize her dear old grandfather - maybe that's the reason why the relatively low-level party beat the dragon, it just wasn't as effective against its own relative - and realizes "I have dragon blood ! And I just killed my own grandfather !" and multiclasses into dragon disciple as a result of that realization. That kind of thing would require negotiation and setup between that player and GM beforehand, obviously - and of course the other players don't need to know about these kind of arrangements.

Or suppose that an amnesiac character is actually the greater goddess Taiia (from the "Deities and Demigods" book - read it once, and she stuck in my mind, mainly because of the neat picture) who somehow got killed a long time ago and has only now started to wake ? She would slowly regain her power during the campaign, which of course would draw lots of unwanted attention, including whatever put her into the deadbook in the first place... And, of course, there's the question of how, if at all, she would have changed from living as a human, and if it had, would it be for the better (the original Taiia is schizophrenic, to but it mildly; one of those creator-destroyer deities) ? And what will the "standard" D&D deities think about getting someone stronger than them around (Taiia's divine level 20, while Moradin and Corellon go up to 19 - and yes, they actually assigned levels to deities; perhaps they should had just made it into a prestige class ?-).

Now, I've only played computer RPGs, so I don't know how well this would actually work in tabletop ones. However, if all I want is to hack and slash, those CRPGs can propably do that a lot better than a human could, precisely because a computer can keep a track of and handle lots of details fast and easy. If I ever play tabletop RPGs, I want to try the things that a computer is bad at - flexibility and creativity.

Wow

[CableModemSniper]

If you needed to play WoW to learn these basically common-sense principles for GMs, I am going to have to flamebait and say that you were probably a mediocre GM before you learned all these "lessons" from an MMORPG.

Robust Quest System?

[SnoopJeDi]

I'm not a WoW player, but I did play a character up to level ~11 or so, and I was BORED out of my skull. I would do a quest, and while the description might have been thorough, I wouldn't call it fun or ideal. "In order to become a master ranger, go kill 10 beetles"

That doesn't do it for me. Maybe the high-level quests are fun, but then, that's not a good system, grinding up a ladded of xp and gear, the latter being hoarded by higher levels and sold at extortionary prices just to get to the fun.

I constantly compare other MMO-style games to Guild Wars, because ANet did a great job. When you start off, you're "recruited" by Sir Tydus, and told to go train to help the Ascalon Guard repel Charr invaders.

Compare that to killing beetles. I liked WoW, although it wasn't quite my style, but there are some things that just click or don't click with players. If you like it, you like it a LOT. If not, you play something else.

Despite my opinions on WoW, I think TFA points out the good foundations for a great game.