Note: This essay is not meant to be pejorative. World of Warcraft not being a role playing game does not make it bad any more than Super Mario Brothers not being a sports game does. Instead I want to start a discussion on how to make WoW and RPGs more fun while recognizing the differences that make them enjoyable to begin with.

The term "Role Playing Game" is notoriously difficult to define well. A definition like "taking on the role of a fictional character" is too broad. In Mario Bros. and Halo you take on the roll of a fictional character. But no one controlling Mario or Master Chief plays the game thinking how a fat plumber or bad ass professional act. (Players may like to think *they* are the most bad ass of professionals, but that is a different story.)

On the other hand a definition of role playing games that includes only engrossing story telling and acting in character does not fit with how the word is used. It is difficult to claim that the early Wizardry, Ultima, or Rogue games had either but both are considered computer role playing games by any use of the term.

Even Dungeons and Dragons (the originator of the term RPG) does not fit comfortably in any simple definition of the term. In 1999
Wizards of the Coast did an extensive market research study of pen and paper RPG players. They found that players could be classified in two ways. From Strategic Focused to Tactical Focused on one axis and Combat Focused to Story Focused on the other. Under this scheme a "power gamer" is someone who is focused on combat here and now. A character actor is focused on acting in character, a storyteller is interested in the overall story, and a thinker is interested in the long term combat and problem solving.

Wizard's found that about 22% of the tabletop RPG players had a strong tendency towards each of the 4 categories with the remaining enjoying all evenly. Everyone shared some interest in the other segments however; there was a reason the power gamers didn't just go play Quake. The research also found that these percentages held across age, number of years playing, and which RPG they chose. [1]

If we used these distinctions for computer RPGs action oriented ones (from the Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord to Icewind Dale) would fall across the the top two categories, console or Japanese RPGs like Final Fantasy would focus on the story telling section, and so called Western RPGs like Fallout would be in the character actor segment.

However, all of them contain elements of multiple categories, or at least do not dissuade from the other categories. Wizardry required short term tactical thinking, careful long term thinking to navigate the dungeon, and people got *very* attached to their characters. The Final Fantasy series is noted for its story and cast of characters but much time is still spent in combat. Fallout and Planescape: Torment are famous for the options they offer other than combat but it is still a part of the game.

Now let us look at World of Warcraft. Combat is certainly there in both strategic and tactical forms. Spreadsheets abound to give some players that extra fraction of a percent of effectiveness while other players are perfectly happy to engage in quick fun encounters without worrying about any of that. While some story telling is there its mainly in the form of background and flavor text. While enjoyable and well written I found myself more interested in the cut-scenes of Halo (or Warcraft III for that matter) than why I was supposed to kill 20 beasties and Fed Ex this package across a continent. Killing Onyxia for the first time produces feeling of elation because of what you and 39 others accomplished together after weeks of work. The fact that you saved the world from the Brood Mother of the Black Dragon flight is only an added bonus that may or may not be noted... and she will be back next week like nothing happened anyway.

Remember I said that an "RPG" is not hostile to one of the categories above. Fallout may encourage you to talk and think, but pulling out a mini-gun and splattering blood and gore is a perfectly acceptable form of conflict resolution. Daggerfall (and Morrowind) have so little dialog that it is hard to see how character's develop, yet grown men spend hours traveling to towns to find the right outfit for their character, dress them up, and write pages of back-story to post on online character galleries. In contrast the game of WoW is hostile to playing a role.

I don't mean the players or culture is necessarily hostile. There are 'role playing' servers and people have fun on them. Instead the game (rules) dissuade one from role playing. You can't "play" a character who is a bumbling comic fool, an unthinking barbarian, a noble knight who refuses rewards, or a rogue who slips in the shadows when fighting starts. In all those cases you are doing a disservice to everyone who are playing with. Doing so would make the game less, not more, fun. Having someone take a vow of poverty doesn't open up interesting new challenges and possibilities. Instead the group has one less person able to meaningfully contribute. No one pretends that while they may know how to kill a raid boss their character does not. Player and character knowledge are one and the same. I don't think there is a single encounter in WoW that has a resolution other than reducing hp to 0. Nor can I recall anything that stays dead for more than a week.

And all this is a good thing for the people who play WoW. The game is more fun this way. The kind of persistence world attempted by Ultima Online can be disastrously unfun for new players. Working together to solve problems is fun in its own right, trying to keep straight which character knows what about the latest dragon would not. "MMORPGs" are like a new kind of board game that can be as simple as Candy Land or as complicated as chess while being playing alone or with thousands of others. That is a cool new thing, probably as new as DnD was 30 some years ago. Ironically, while RPGs are often praised for their story and emotional depth, (the death of Aeris in Final Fantasy VII is treated as a minor cultural event for the generation that played it) the emotions in WoW are real and thus the more poignant. Even Bambi's mom dieing doesn't compare to a guild you poured months of your life into splintering and friends separating. But that is the exception that proves this rule. Those things are happening to you, not your character.

A RPG on the other hand allows all those unlimited possibilities that WoW couldn't. About to be eaten by a dragon? Talk him out of it (maybe one of your companions is a maiden). Combat need not be the most common resolution. Or a pint of ale and a handy axe might end most things. Want to kill a dragon and let it be known around the (real and imaginary) world? Participate in a Living Campaign. It is harder to list all the things that may or may not be possible in an RPG simple because the possible variety is so great. Fallout can be "won" by a planted bomb, quick wit, or a big gun. In Planescape: Torment belief is literally reality. On the other hand many people never actually "finish" the games in The Elder Scrolls series. The rules are not limitation but scaffolding and structure for creativity to build on. The only real limits are what you and your friends find fun, the integrity of the campaign world, and your imagination.

Right now a 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons has been announced. Blizzard is also developing a new expansion pack to WoW. If they want to make the best game possible Wizards of the Coast shouldn't be looking at Blizzard's revenue and asking "how can we be more like those MMORPGs". Likewise, Blizzard should not be trying to graft a true persistent world like Living Greyhawk onto the abstract game-world of Azeroth that millions visit every day. Instead the question is simple: how can we take these games that we love and play to their strengths, making them better, more fun, and more popular in the process?

[1] - Breakdown of RPG Players

Let me propose an alternative definition: RPGs are defined by gameplay centered around stat-based character progression. These stats are used in conjunction with random factors to determine the outcome of combat. Characters occupy a persistent world with a consistent mythology.

Look, now WoW is an RPG! It's just a question of semantics.

Good post!

As you can see from the server name, I came to WoW from an RPG background and hoping for an RP experience. I didn't understand MMO mechanics and raiding wasn't even something I considered a goal -- I didn't see the point. Looking back, I had a mistaken image of the game as a sort of 'sandbox with mechanics' where you picked a character and were then free to be part of a loose campaign set in the game world. I didn't consider or understand character optimization.

So off I went, bumbling through Westfall and Darkshire with my paladin (of course I was a paladin!) in ridiculously suboptimal gear and a spec I don't even remember. I did a few instances, whacking away with my sword, generally being a fifth wheel and completely unaware of it.

Then I had a game-changing experience. My friends and I wanted to go to SM, but we couldn't find a priest. I said that I'd try to heal. My friends were dubious, but I put on some cloth Owl robe I'd found at random earlier in the day, and it worked out great. I saved the party from mistakes, kept everyone alive, struggled with my terrible mana pool and our complete lack of aggro management, and persevered. Healing that instance was ten times more fun than any of the RP I'd tried to do. I liked being part of a team and playing a position I was good at.

That's when it started: a long process of realizing that WoW was a team game about statistics and performance both in the short run and the long run, about politics and social organization. I rerolled Horde druid and continued to RP, but I found that the RP environment in WoW was terribly stilted for all the reasons mentioned in the OP.

Surprisingly, the only really interesting basis for RP I found lay in the hardcore, 'non-RP' parts of the game: the human efforts of raid guilds to overcome the challenges presented by the raid instances, and the conflicts that grew within and between these raid guilds as they were tested by these challenges. I found that the most interesting RPers were without exception the raiding and PvPing RPers, who turned non-RP gameplay into RP opportunities. Any random player could claim to be a hero of the Horde or Alliance based on thin justification. Those who had overcome the practical challenges of WoW were able to present better stories about what their characters had gone through to become heroes. The RP was not enjoyable without a solid foundation of good gameplay. Otherwise, it was all bullshit.

This led me to the same line of thinking that the OP elaborates in his essay: MMORPGs should not be labeled RPGs at all. They're team sports. You can brand your team any way you like, and on RP servers good raid guild RP goes a long way towards improving guild reputation, but no one will respect anything from a team that's a perennial doormat.

Now onto the D&D side of the OP:

While I was busy realizing all this I joined a Planescape campaign, and found that my experience with RP and WoW had changed my attitude towards RP in general. I rapidly became frustrated with the subset of players in the campaign for whom backstory and characterization took precedence over mechanical effectiveness. RP had become rather empty for me without a practical yardstick of encounter performance to gauge it against. I had come to feel that the mechanics and the challenge drove the story, and that trivializing gameplay trivialized the unique character of the RPG.

When I realized this I became much more interested in the question of balancing D&D and providing challenging encounters than I had previously. The problem of providing challenging balance is a major one in pen and paper RPGs, especially in non-combat encounters. After trying to design challenging encounters for an Arcana Evolved game I'm currently running, I have a lot of respect for the WoW R&D team. It's a lot of work.

So as far as the 4th Edition of D&D, I think that cumbersome mechanics and encounter design are the main flaws in D&D 3.5. It's too damned hard to move around, kill things, and become awesome, and as the DM it's too damned hard to fill your game with nontrivial content. The root of the problem is the pen and paper nature of the game and the fact that you have to cook everything up from sourcebooks and the Encounter Level tables in the DMG. It's really time-consuming to get everything right, because you spend more time rooting around the DMG and doing math than coming up with the actual encounter.

There's another problem with sourcebooks: the popular ones are widely pirated these days, and I can't see the problem going away any time soon.

This is why I believe that WotC should take a cue from WoW and the online gaming community in general, and do a conceptual reboot of how D&D is presented as a game. Take it online, and offer subscription-based sandboxes for DMs and players, with tactical encounter design kits, inventory management, economy functions, overworld maps, and all the rest. Build an Encounter Level-O-Meter right into the encounter design kit so that the DM can see exactly what kind of challenge they're providing. Allow different rules modules to be plugged into the game. Make the mechanics transparent so that players don't have to roll dice, but allow them to be visible in detail, and allow the DM to turn the mechanics off in cases where the rules have to be broken. Provide plenty of 'standard templates' and randomly generated encounters so that DMs can come up with things quickly and on the fly. Allow spectators, game replays, tournaments involving standard D&D adventure modules, and so on.

This kind of 'sandbox with mechanics' would be a challenge to implement, but I think it would advance the state of D&D gameplay beyond its 1970s pen and paper roots, and greatly decrease the tedium involved in D&D play. Most of all, it would help bring the challenge of D&D games up to a uniform, regular standard and provide a platform for D&D to reach a wider audience by taking it out of the RPG ghetto and turning it into an online team game with optional RPG elements.

They sort of attempted to do this with Neverwinter Nights. I would really love to see an MMO incarnation though. I'm firmly convinced that the only way to make a game that will outdo WoW's success is to greatly expand player freedom. A spellcrafting system would be great, as would more in-depth tradeskills that allow players to truly customize their creations. A realistically-styled world that follows basic rules of population density, economy, and transportation would add immensely to the immersion factor.

More advanced AI would also be huge. Even the basic AI and scripting that they gave NPCs in oblivion would go a long way when applied to an MMO, but they're easily capable of doing a lot more with that given the resources. Imagine being able to populate all of these ghost towns you see with NPCs that actually give a sense of life to the place instead of standing in their corner waiting to be talked to.

Well, I think the Wikipedia article on RPGs covers this better than any of us could.

Essentially, RPG refers both to a type of game, and a type of game system; it is the latter that we are referring to when we talk about "computer RPGs" or "console RPGs"; the RPG itself is a game that far predates the modern RPG game system ( which was invented by D&D and now has thousands of different incarnations).

edit: As an example, "adventure" games like Leisure Suit Larry are actually much closer to a traditional RPG, but we'd never conceive of them as fitting the category... it's just a shift in common usage. Virtually every modern video game is somewhat RPG-esque, as in, has a character you play, a plotline which is planned in advance, etc.

This definition includes many sports games.

But really rehashing decades old arguments over the purity of different things referred to as RPGs was not my intent. Rather to recognize that WoW and other things called RPGs are different (or have diverged) enough that that the things that make them fun are no longer the same. Thus is we want to make them better we must work with those differences (their strengths).

Different people have different mindsets than you do. Some people have always found this fascinating, or like talking about the human psychological dynamics, the game construction mechanics, the capabilities given to UI construction both in terms of coding perspectives and what power Blizzard will grant the client side ("The Enemy") after dealing with Diablo, the techniques one can use to become wealthy for its own sake in the simple free market simulation of the auction house and the economic trends, both player induced and controlled by Blizzard.

That you would not discuss a topic like this unless you were extremely bored does not mean that other peoples' motivation for discussing it is necessarily the product of boredom. People always laugh at the people who all of a sudden can't wear their blue festival dress in Darnassus for roleplaying purposes or something, not understanding what would ever compel that person to that conclusion, but its inevitable that a social game with millions of players will attract many, many people for reasons other than the ones intended or the reasons most popular with the community as a whole.

It's boring, but not this boring.

I'm not sure what purpose this thread serves. Aside from the aspiring to be the next 60 page "I'd like to disagree with what someone said on page 2" (on page 65) thread.

WoW is a fun game. Why is WoW fun? How it is different from other fun games? And: How can it be made to be more fun?

Those are all reasonable questions to ask although they may not be of interest to everyone.

I placed the note at the top to try to avoid something like that. The title is an artifact of my thought process and my inability to think of something better. Is the title what you believe to be the problem or the content of the post?

I was always confused with the label RPG. Does it mean I'm playing my own conceived role or someone else's? More often then not it's someone else's. I am kind of interested in that HAZE mod for NWN2, it's an interesting concept for anyone that like to write a story and run with it.

This. And I only left two weeks ago.

To the point, can't we just agree that people have different definitions of what they call an "RPG"? Arguing about whether the properties of WoW fit certain such definitions in no way constitutes meaningful discussion about WoW.