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Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Video game influences on pen and paper rpgs

I love video games, especially fantasy mmo's. Naturally, this leads to me including stuff from mmo's I like into my games. The easiest stuff to steal is place names. Just wandering around WoW will net you a ton of towns and mountain ranges and rivers. I also like to convert the occasional monster into my games. They can be fun, and my friends love seeing something like a murloc pop up, as long as I don't overdo it.

While I have no interest in playing a game set completely in the World of Warcraft, I see no reason why I shouldn't use the cool stuff. Where I will have issues with it, is when it affects the actual rules of a game. Having power slots that can be upgraded, tank/dps/healer roles spelled out, etc., irritates me. Yes, I can see how it would actually be helpful if I was just learning D&D or something similar on my own. But I'm old and cranky, so I don't need that in my games. It's my own little bit of curmudgeonism. :)

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Our tabletop game doesn't have the same limitation the physics engine in World of Warcraft or other MMOs do, so borrowing game mechanics and roles built around those limited game engine doesn't make sense (eg. Aggro was added to WoW because characters can not physically block an enemy from moving past them).

Borrowing names and thematic ideas seems perfectly reasonable though. :)

Norman J. Harman Jr. said...

Frogloks <- fav monster in my campaign from old school mmo called EQ

Mark Thomas said...

I've written over a dozen item / power / creature blog posts based on stuff I've found on wowhead. No one seems to notice. :)