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

EVE

[mboverload]

EVE Online can take note of 1, 2, 3....and 6 and 7.

=(

Unreal expectations for a single GM

[Universal Nerd]

I can understand clearly what he means, the world of online RPG - be it WoW or a NWN-Persistent World - is very compelling, especially when role playing is an important part of the game. It's clear that PnP games lack the visuals, special effects and dynamic movements of a MMO world.

That said and taking his advice into consideration, one problem still sticks out. Most pen and paper game have one GM while online games have, at least, a team of GMs - most aren't actually online all the time but they're all developing new content and quests for adhoc/preplaned parties of adventurers.

A PnP game needs to be scripted by the GM and conducted by him and that takes time and preparation, something that not all of them have.

Combat, in games, is decided in seconds (against weaker foes) but in a tabletop game, it might take a few minutes to squash a group of goblins, not to mention that combat has to be worked one player/monster at a time since the GM can only give full attention to one thing.

Good advice, but not very easily implemented without a computer with a NWN-like Aurora Toolkit to create your own fantasy world in.

Re:WoW is not a panacea.

[aapold]

And, of course, once you reach 60, you do these for reputation purely on top of the runs into molten core to get your purple set. I hope you like loot gambling, because it is a week between instance resets, and it can be up to 4 weeks for some people to get 1 extra bit of purple gear if they play all the time.

Which would be the case if you left it to just that. Any reasonably organized guild creates a point system (on ours its called "DKP", dragon kill points) which govern the rules of instances like Molten Core, Onyxia, Blackwing Lair and so forth. Every item that can drop in there has a point value. All items that do drop are put in a vast pool which are divided amongst the 40-odd people that attended (if attendence is partial, partial credit is given.. it is all controlled via add on modules). When the pieces do drop, no one rolls (its not on any of the rolling methods, a trusted master looter is used. The item is announced, those with enough points to "buy out" the item can then roll (using /rand) to determine which gets it. Usually far less than the entire run. Then anyone with not enough, but positive gets a crack if no one wanted to buy it, then negatives, and so on. He who gets the loot pays that many points, possibly into the negative.

The net result is that even if you go, and don't win anything, you earn points that will eventually get you the items you want.

Its still work and not quite the high fantasy experience, but at least its not a crap shoot. Most competent guilds get to the point where they can roll the bosses in short order, and its just the timer that controls how often you can do it. Good thing, too, because there are more enjoyable things to be doing than repeating it ad nauseum.

Response to 9 Lessons

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Everything should be fun

Agreed. However, grinding X number of monsters because you were told to for a reward instead of grinding X number of monsters for the XP and drops does not make it fun.

2. Details matter

Generalities of gameplay matter more. The group or die mentality of the end-game is a hold over from a lame scramble to cover lack of content in early EQ that should have been designed around a long time ago rather than perpetuated like pointless mazes in text adventure games.

3. Travel should be easy

Travel should be interesting. They only have to make it easy because the travel in between is boring. It would help if they didn't purposely put each part of a quest in different areas just so the travel in between makes it longer and seem more "epic." Rather than have you travel the same routes hundreds of times give players interesting things to do along the way.

4. Item management should be simple

Item management should be non-existent. I shouldn't be spending *any* time manipulating items around as it has nothing to do with gameplay. And if you do want to put it in as some sort of limiting factor, how about taking size into account? You can't carry 10 more flowers, but hey, you can carrying that dragon's head no problem.

5. Every class should have lots of things to do

Agreed. Clearly written by someone that has not gone on raids where every class gets to do one thing. Over. And over. And over. If anything it should be written as "Every class should have unique things to do" but that doesn't hold true in WoW for all classes either.

6. Style should shine through

Gameplay should shine through more.

7. Everyone should leave every session jazzed about the game

You clearly do not constitute everyone. Ending a session after giving up with a 2 hours wait in queue for battlegrounds or looking for a pickup raid or getting tired of said pickup raid after the 8th wipe does not constitute jazzed.

8. It's okay to make changes after the campaign begins

It's better to do it right the first time.

9. Err on the side of being over-the-top

Especially when it comes to bandwidth and server capacity. Doh! Or better yet, how about don't err. Or at least don't make err's that other companies have made in the past.

Anonymous to avoid karma like the plague.

Oh, 9+ characters lvls 6-60. And done. See you in the next game that is fun until it is played out.

still lacks the 'role' in mmorpg

[Achoi77]

I've had a WoW account since launch, played the beta, been to a few end game raids, and when reality set in, I've realized I was averaging around 5 hours a night every day, so I forced myself to quit after all the Molten Core raids netted me nothing except for lack of sleep.

Before WoW, I played Anarchy Online for about 6 months. I dont know what playability is like now on that, but in the initial months the networking issues and memory leaks caused the game to be virtually unplayable. I can't beleive I played AO for that long.

Before AO, I was an avid EQ player. I've logged on much much more time in EQ than WoW, but progression was much slower, but I've felt that the community in EQ was much more tight knit than in WoW (likely due to an attraction towards the older demographics of gamers). Gear in EQ was much harder earned, and people will recognize the hard work an individual went through in order to earn that epic weapon. I still miss EQ and the community it generated.

Before EQ, I was keeping up with the status of Origin and awaiting the release of Ultima Online. I think I've had the worst gaming experience with UO (in terms of stats), always being frustrated, always being PK'd (this was before OWO split the servers to PK and non-pk), trying to mine some metal, make some armor, cut some wood, all the while trying to stay alive and not lose hours and hours of work to some gang of punk kid tankmage player killers. Hopefully I'll earn a few bucks in order to get some basic gear so I can go out to adventure and kill some orcs, check out the other towns. And make sure I'm with enough people so I don't end up being another victim of someone looking for a cheap kill for easy loot. If you weren't careful, people can break into your house and strip it clean the next time you log in. Life in UO was a bitch, and you had to play HARD in order to simply survive. Wimps were relegated to the cities and barely left the borders.

My fondest memories of all MMORPG's are all from UO, but I've had the most fun playing WoW (the same type of fun I experience when I play Counterstrike). WoW is an extremely polished online game. But IMHO, WoW has even less roleplaying elements than it's RTS predecessors (you know, warcraft). WoW is simply an FPS draped in RPG elements. If you plan on PvPing in WoW, you better know your combat gametheory (and have all your action commands binded to shortcut keys for quick access). If you plan on PvEing in WoW, the better you know your combat gametheory against mobs, the faster you can grind. If you plan on joining end game raids, the smoother communication you have amongst your raid group, the less likely chance you have of wiping. Enough gametheory and time devotion will grant you certain notoriety in your local WoW server as a powergamer.

In UO, you weren't well known in your local server unless you were VERY famous (i.e. Hulkamania, Xavori, Imanewbie). All the powergamers wore cheap robes over their insane gear in order to hide their 'true abilities.' There was an element of distrust and deception in UO, and visual clues gave away nothing. But simply due to the fact that your actions can affect the servers you were on means there was a level of immersion that exists in UO that doesn't exist in current MMORPGS. For example, players got together to create their own player run cities. They built everything themselves, the buildings, furniture, everything.

The problem with permanence in the world is that it's easily exploitable. For several months, there was a land shortage as everybody and their mother went to plant their own house on any plot of land they could find. The number of houses were so many it began to affect gameplay against the rest of the world (random mobs that spawn in the world started to spawn in the houses, which were of course locked, which means you wouldn't run into it). Future MMORPG designers saw that and decided that players cannot have their own houses in the world. That's the start of it. They've whittled down everything that made a rolep

I wonder if they'll ever make it

[mdarksbane]

It would be nice if someone combined the scale of WoW with some of the advantages of tabletop gaming.

I mean, have a full time staff of the sort of people who work at the renn fairs actually playing the major NPCs and monsters.

Imagine that if your raid got to the lower depths of Molten core and instead of a scripted encounter there were actual players behind the monsters.

NWN has a DM mode you can do, but I haven't heard of anything like this applied on an MMO scale. I can just see a lot of room for a more real experience.

Heck, even make a it a tiered system where valued members of the community can enter the lower npc ranks with different functions in return for a waive of the monthly fee.

I just see all of the great player-created worlds that blend almost seamlessly in some MUDs I've played, and I can't help wondering what neat things you could do to match those with a modern MMO.

Flavour quests are nice.

[Inoshiro]

"But the quests I've done this session included curing a sick girl who went right back to sleep, killing some people because they were stomping on the grass, keeping some courier from getting robbed by highway bandits, and fighting crocodiles for handbags. None of these were particularly "over the top." None even left any impression on the world at all. They barely registered an impression on me."

These I view as flavour quests. Much like the flavour text of the goblins (stationed at the Lordaeron ruins) who ask you to bring back some nice meat from Orgrimmar, they add a certain sense of being in the game.

The big thing working against this is how none of it is at all randomized or meaningful in the greater scheme. Everytime any character of the correct level happens through that path, the same girl will be there who is being attacked by bandits. Everytime. There is no time you will come across the same NPC who is happy because someone else saved her (or will even mention the name of the person!). Your actions have no lasting effect on the world, making the MMO part of WoW be neutered into playing the Warcraft 3 RPG levels with a world-chat system.

I don't think it would be so hard to increase the # of quests about 4x, and then make it so that they run on different, random timers, so that each playthrough (since all your alts are exactly the same) could have a randomized encounter, or that you could interact with the consequences of other people's encounters.

Perhaps the entire world could be set on a 4-month timer, where everything boils to a head. Over time, as it reset, things could be changed as well. A chance to spend 4 months carving my name across a continent, regardless of my level, would certainly provide me with incentive to play (much more so than the creative guild loot point system the other replier mentioned).

WoW has a lot of potential because the company seems to have more in mind than just killing rats in a tunnels, but so far it's been Diablo on a much larger scale in terms of gameplay. I find myself appreciating Gradius and Ikaruga much more after playing WoW for most of 2005 -- they're short and sweet :D

You'd be surprised

[Moraelin]

You'd be surprised how many people _are_ too unimaginative to be a good GM.

And it's not just some 14 year old GM-ing in his spare time with his buddies, but there are some big names in the MMO industry who don't get those points either.

E.g., having recently reactivated my EQ2 account, it amazes me that Sony just doesn't get it either. You can tell that, in all that clueless thrashing through random changes to the game, they're _desperate_ to copy whatever magical element WoW has, and preferrably one-up it. But they just don't get it.

You can tell looking through their change logs that they expect it to be some lone disparate element (like "hmm, maybe our crafting was too complicated?" or "hmm, maybe we could simplify the classes too?") that they can stick into the non-unified heap that is their game, and instantly have a WoW equivalent. They just blatantly don't get for example point 2 on that list: details matter. There is no magic amulet you can stick into a heap of disparate parts and instantly have a polished product. Yet that's just what Sony is feverishly trying to achieve.

And even when someone points out to them that lack of a unified vision, like Penny Arcade did recently about the EQ2 graphics, they'll just get a flame email from SOE telling them to STFU if they don't have their graphics in a major commercial game. Again, like Penny Arcade got.

And just to give an example of why PA is right, it's not just that Sony stuck together graphics that don't belong together. It's that they also ran it all through some "look what we can do!" shaders and whatnot that just make it all worse. E.g.,

- the more I play it, the more it becomes obvious to me that they _must_ have some depth-of-field effect, because the graphics just go blurry with the distance faster than mip-maps and filtering should cause them to. At any rate, faster than in any other game. Playing the game makes me feel like I've suddenly gotten a bad case of myopia.

- the textures may be right, but just about everything has a gloss effect that just doesn't belong there. Everything looks like the same kind of molded plastic once any kind of dynamic lighting enters the scene. Whether it's a rock or tree or a deer or a weaver's loom, everything looks like plastic.

- water surface effects also snag the edges of objects in _front_ of the water and smear them around (basically incompetently written shaders again)

- and while I'm playing on a very high end machine, I still can't help wonder about the idiocy of using exclusively shaders for texture details instead of detail textures, and offering no fall-back to detail textures. So basically there is no middle ground. Everyone who doesn't have a high end machine won't see it as slightly worse graphics, but will see it all looking like _ass_.

- the lower part of any breastplate or long coat is attached to the pants model, not where it belongs. Why does it matter? Because if you wear pants that aren't from the exact same set, it looks like your coat changes colour in the middle. (And the recent "fix" of just giving newbies a sorta "disguise" vest that overrides the pants, gloves, sleeves and everything, is just another way to feel wrong. It tells me that someone finally realized the problem. Except instead of fixing the actual problem, they've just tried sweeping it under the carpet at least for levels 1-9 with a cheap quick-and-dirty hack.)

That's just some of the details noone paid attention to after more than a year in the graphics department alone.

But the list of wrong or inconsistent details goes deeper and pervades every single aspect of the game. E.g., only now they seem to have finally fixed fish so they swim _in_ the water, instead of hovering _above_ the water. E.g., only now fish actually stop at the border of the water instead of chasing you on land too. But the list is mile long, so I'll stop here.

And that was just point 2. Rest assured that they missed most of the other points on that list by a mile too. I just