DnD vs WoW
By maryvarn on June 17th, 2010Posted In: Boardom,NPC Blog,Table Top Games,World of Warcraft
My DnD group just finished our first campaign together. For a couple of us, myself included, it was our first tabletop RPG experience ever. Hopefully our rag tag crew of level 4 heroes will go on new adventures soon, but until then, I had some thoughts regarding the different gaming experiences I get from DnD and WoW.
How DnD is better than WoW:
1) The Snacks. 
I don’t have a snack ritual for WoW. I just, you know, eat stuff like normal to ensure I’m not a hungry gamer. But whether we order out or make food or a combination of the above, snacks are always an integral part of playing DnD. They determine the breaks, give us stuff to talk about and do between turns, and they are YUMMY. DnD is possibly the only game I associate food with.
2) The Unknown.
If I’m going into a raid or a 5-man I’ve never been to before in WoW, I better read up on how each boss fight is gonna go so I’m prepared. But DnD? Nope. None of that. No peaking at the Monster Manual! (Depending on your DM.) We walk into a new room and have no idea what will jump out at us. We figure out tactics on the fly, find and exploit weaknesses, and solve puzzles. And then we don’t repeat it, because there are always new adventures and lands and dungeons to go explore!
3) The Face Time. (Ugh, is that term trademarked by Apple now?)
This one probably goes without saying, but I just can’t leave it out. Getting together, face-to-face, with friends for the common goal of fun and conquest is awesome.
How WoW is better than DnD:
1) Math. Lack of.
Unless you’re so heavily into theorycrafting that you’re actually making spreadsheets instead of just plugging numbers into them, you don’t really need to do math in WoW. Not with the regularity of DnD math. Of course, math in DnD isn’t hard, and it’s probably helping us keep dementia from aging at bay. And there’s a certain charm to adding die rolls together and knowing how all the stats work to make you awesome. But there’s something to be said for not having to do math every time you make an attack.
2) It’s faster.
DnD can be slow. Sometimes too slow, especially in this age of short attention spans. WoW is fast and snappy. You’re in and out of a raid in a matter of hours. It took many 5-8 hour sessions to get through our DnD dungeon. And that leads into the last point…..
3) You don’t have to coordinate schedules to play WoW.
You can log in whenever you want. You don’t have to email back and forth with all 25 people you raid with to see what works best for them. The guild sets a raid time and people show up. Our DnD group didn’t meet in May at all because we couldn’t find a time all of us could get together for a 5-hour stretch.
i think you covered all the points pretty well i DM’ed one DnD mini-campaign with my friends and they all enjoyed it, but its very hard to meet up consistently
OMG! I LOVE D&D! I have been playing for about 4 years and my group has always changed composition but it is always fun.
And I think it is awesome you put snacks because we are ALWAYS eating during our runs. We have a day were all of us are off early or entirely so we get together once a week, same day, except for those exceptions and we have 2 campagins going on.
But I could talk all day about it I get so excited and I have to go to work
I’m glad you had fun!
“The guild sets a raid time and people show up. Our DnD group didn’t meet in May at all because we couldn’t find a time all of us could get together for a 5-hour stretch.”
Most D&D groups I’ve run with actually do it the way your guild does. We pick a stable time (usually Saturday or Sunday evening), and people make exceptions from there (“I can’t make it this week because…”). Saves a lot of emailing around, but requires everyone to have an evening they can schedule around.
Yeah….I wish that could work with our DnD group. Everyone is mad busy all the time. Especially in the summer.
Usually we try to figure out the next meeting time after each session. We all get out our calendars and find the next Saturday or Sunday that works for everyone.
I’d say the advantage of WoW over scheduling is that you can get on at any time, but you might be soloing.
You can run raids and DnD session scheduling the same way — either pick a regular time, or play it off-the-cuff. It’s easier to play off-the-cuff with DnD than WoW raiding because there’s usually fewer people involved, and being face-to-face usually lowers drama-potential.
I also play both WoW and D&D. My D&D experience is a little different from yours. I play with my husband and five other people plus the DM over Skype using Maptools. So there is no food association and no face time.
But I do agree the unknown and rawness of D&D is very appealing. The hit points and damage can be lower than WoW but the intricacies of play and positioning is great.
I’ve even started to think of WoW in D&D terms. My husband thinks I’m crazy.
When our D&D group missed three sessions in a row, I starting jonesing to play. Plus our DM is awesome because if 1 person can’t make it, we “stuff them in our bag of holding” and continue on with the adventure. But if two people can’t make it, we get to do our LFR and we get to do classes we’ve never done before.
So I like both for many reasons. Hard to say which is better I guess. Nice comparison!
It is hard to say which is better, for me, because I play each game for something different.
With wow its about min/maxing and squeezing out that last drop of dps or healing a group and watching your mana bar not move. With D&D it’s more about the story and the roleplaying. Seeing what that character would do in different situations and how the story progresses.
I also DM which is a different experience. You get to create a world and watch what 3-5 people all with different goals and strategies will do in it.
Also what edition of d&d are you playing? I DM 4E but I’ve also Played Pathfinder and get a totally different feel from both.
I disagree with #3 about “WoW is better than D&D,” because setting a raid time does require coordinating schedules. At the least, it requires the guild officers in charge to find a time that works for all of them who will have to show up, and then a few-to-many communication where they tell the rest of the guild what time to raid at. That model also only works for large guilds, and only works well for 25-slot content. For 10-slot instances, or anything that’s at the current top-tier, it helps to have a consistent team who know each other and work well together. That means coordinating the schedules of all 10 raiders.
I understand the perspective that created that idea, though, and it’s no crime. You have played WoW longer, so your raid night is well established, and doesn’t need to be wrangled every time. I have a similar situation, both for WoW and for tabletop gaming: friday is raid night, tuesday is RPG night. Saturdays and some sundays, monthly RPG chronicles have longer sessions at my house, and I’m trying to set up another raid night on thursdays (some others in my group have raids on wednesday nights, though I usually work those).
My gaming group is eclectic, and so we play a lot of other games like D&D as well as D&D itself. Right now I’m GMing Traveller on Tuesday nights, and when that ends in a week or two the next person in our rotation will be funning Feng Shui. I run Legend of the Five Rings monthly, and play in monthly D&D, Shadowrun, Hunter: The Vigil, and Anima: Beyond Fantasy games. Every three months, I fly an old college friend into town to join the group again for an epic World of Darkness game I’ve been running for 5 years. That may be wrapping up by the end of this year, to be replaced with an Exalted game I hope to be similarly epic.
Oh, notably, the weekly sessions on Tuesdays usually last only 3-4 hours, not 5+. Which is about as long as Friday raid night. Saturday/sunday sessions last 5-7 hours, depending on when people can arrive, and the tri-monthly sessions are a two-day affair where I welcome players to sleep over, and we have 6-10 hours of gaming each day with a dinner break in the middle.
I see your point about the raiding schedules. I confess I really don’t have a ton raid experience despite playing for a while and am currently not raiding. (And I’m looking for a casual-friendly guild!)
I guess it’ll just vary depending on your experiences. The guilds I’ve been in have always just set a standard time and it seemed like if someone couldn’t make it then there was always someone else to stand in. But we were doing mostly 10man stuff. Whereas with DnD, we always have such a hard time scheduling. We’ve gone without a player from time to time (love the stuff-them-in-bag-of-holding, Iceflow!
) but it’s always more fun when everyone is there.
I did a pretty long stretch with 25-mans, so I can definitely concur it takes a much more coordinated effort, at least for most guilds. 10-mans are significantly easier, and like you said, if one or two can’t make it, there’s always more who are ready, willing, and – more importantly – at the required gear levels for the 10-man. In the few occasions my guild did Heroic 25-mans before I quit, if we didn’t have at least 23-24 of our dedicated, high-geared, non-alt players ready at raid time, we actually had to hold off on going, usually for a good hour or two. During Ulduar, we had FL through Kologarn for the slackers to show up, but after that it was always a game of “hurry up and wait”
I still think that D&D scheduling is harder because of the irreplaveability of individual players. If Bob can’t make it that night, you can’t go to trade chat and “LFM 1 TANK”. You just play without him. And if you’re missing two people, well then out just cancel. And the absence of a single individual, the GM, can sink the entire group.
Thankfully, my group has two GMs (and I may possibly be becoming our 3rd. We play two different systems (Rifts and Palladium Fantasy) and may be adding one of the World of Darkness settings to our list soon. But, you’re quite right. If one GM is out and the other wasn’t prepared for it, then that kills the whole session.
I think you may have missed an important aspect that D&D offers where WoW falls short – role-playing. D&D offers a very free-form environment for both the DM and player to really delve into characters as much more than just mobile sources of damage and/or healing. With the right DM and the right group, it can become a much more immersive experience.
I know WoW has designated role-play servers and role-play guilds, but it’s hard to maintain a good role-playing environment when a Tauren with the name Destructocow walks by in Orgrimmar. Unless role-playing is somehow enforced (and really, how would that work?), you have an environment where pockets of RP exist inside expanses of Destructocow and the Medium Rare Enforcers guild.
That said, I really enjoy WoW. I do a WoW podcast and have been playing for years. I also accept that role-playing isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, which is cool, but for those of us who enjoy a really immersive role-playing experience, D&D trumps WoW.
“how would that work?”
The text-based MU*s figured this out 12+ years ago. Basically, your level is tied to your performance. You gain XP by the scenes you do through a player controlled voting system. There are other bonuses for special scenes, combats, and plots. Levelling was non-competitive, but also not visible. You had no way of knowing relative levels between two players, but it rarely mattered (oh, the tale of the arrogant young knight who deigned to have his way with the blacksmith’s daughter! How was he to know that the blacksmith was a former grand master of the blade …)
The result of the system was that older characters tended to be all high level. Lower-level characters were usually either new players, old alts, or longtime players who didn’t participate in anything. The proverbial ‘Destructocow’ player, if he existed, was invariably the lowest-level character and a well-deserved pariah: in a system that requires suspension of disbelief more then patience, that kind of player usually either gave up fast, or started griefing and bought it faster. The highest-level characters were rarely those that lived by the sword: they were politicians, entertainers, and other social butterflies.
The system had its perks, but also its flaws. It depended heavily on referees/game masters to set scenes, establish continuity, and maintain the overall story. A good team meant a community of hundreds (and pre-2000, that was something). A bad team wasn’t worth knowing. If you think guild drama is bad now, I have stories that defy belief.
While I don’t play alot of MMO’s My mates and I usually try to get together for a LAN every now and then. We hope to start playing the World Of Darkness pen and paper RPG someday.
What DnD edition are you playing?
@Kurtpotts and @YeahStriker: I’ve only played 4.0. No one had played it before and wanted to try it out. I can’t compare to other editions since this is the only campaign I’ve played.
The earlier additions are different in a lot of ways. The big one you notice as a player is complexity of combat. You go from having things that can be summed up on a 3×5 card to constantly looking through your PHB. 4.0 is the gentlest on new players.
Don’t forget dice rolling as a plus for D & D. The physical act of rolling the dice that determines your character’s fate is part of what makes D & D special.
The anticipation and the suspense that builds when you need to roll a high number for a saving throw or needing to hit a monster so you can land the killing blow before it kills you is not easily duplicated in WoW.
One of the difference is that repercussions for death is much lighter for WoW than D & D. In WoW, if you die or the raid wipes, you just rez and it costs a few gold to repair, in D & D, the cost of a rez if you can get one is much higher and could cost you stat points.
Also D & D gives you a lot more spells, but forces you to choose what spells you can carry for the day. There’s a lot more strategy involved there and choosing the spells is a lot more open ended than in WoW.
There’s also the skill versus randomness illusion factor.
In D & D, you can set the stage for your actions, but ultimately it comes down to a random number. The randomness is a palpable thing you can feel in your hand.
In WoW, the randomness is concealed to provide the illusion of skill. A bit of lag, a disconnect, crits at the wrong time, and you and your group loses a challenge. But this loss is almost always blamed on lack of preparation/talent, rather then something random that didn’t fall your way this time.
The key to playing D&D as an adult is to act like an adult. Instead of it being “Something we do when we have some free time”, you make it a scheduled, adult, activity, no different than bowling night or movie night or any other thing adults all manage to get together to do. You discuss what night works best with your friends and they adjust their schedules to fit, emergencies excluded.
(I’d also recommend going for 3-4 hour game on a weeknight instead of a 5-7 hour game on a weekend. Because it’s generally easier to schedule for, you do more gaming overall.)
Thanks for the suggestions. We have sort of worked out that sundays are best for us. But usually the problem is that people are going out of town a lot on weekends, so we just find a sunday that we’re all in town for.
We’ve tried weeknights, but it doesn’t really work for us. One of the players has to get up at 5am for his job, thus going to bed at 9pm or 10pm. And two others (and sometimes myself) often have to work late, until 9pm or later. Even if no one works late, no one is home until 7pm at the earliest, and then we’d only get two hours in before our up-at-5am buddy falls asleep.
If its a small group and scheduling is a factor, services like Meetup.com can make life so much easier in terms of scheduling.
Weekend games are almost always better then weeknight games. Weeknights works for college kids and people with similar schedules, but if there is even a little bit of drift, they fall apart fast.
If you are part of a game that runs on an irregular basis, then you should have someone acting as a secretary/historian/blogger who can maintain a history of what has happened to the group each session. A campaign blog is a powerful tool, especially if the last time the group met was last month and memory gets cloudy.
I loved D&D (played v.3.5), and miss playing it. But there are a few things I don’t miss, and these are areas where I feel WoW has the advantage:
• Rules/mechanics requiring human interpretation – when I first started playing, the others in my group had many years of experience on me. So I made a point of … /thoroughly reading and learning the rules/. I was the only one in the group that could be considered “Internet-savvy”, and I made a point of frequenting the official D&D forums and asking questions when I wasn’t clear on something. I ended up understanding the 3.5 rules better than most of my group, and became endlessly frustrated by misinterpretations that were breaking our game. It was terribly frustrating watching the player of a dual-wielding ranger going through a crowd of enemies like a lawnmower, taking out a half-dozen enemies in one turn because the DM completely misunderstood how dual-wielding worked, and then on my turn my warrior, of the same level as the ranger, got to walk up to a single enemy and go “whack”. This was at around level 6. The way the DM had interpreted the dual-wielding rules, this ranger would have been making something like 16 basic attacks per round by level 16, and that’s before factoring in the Cleave and Greater Cleave feats. This can’t happen in WoW.
• DM had been playing the game since 1st Edition in the 70s … and was constantly mixing up 1st and 2nd Edition rules into our 3.5E game. In particular, rules regarding spellcasters taking damage during combat and how that affects their spellcasting. His 1st Edition interpretation was rendering spellcasters completely useless. I soon discovered why none of the more experienced players wanted to play wizards/sorcerers.
• DM letting the group get too large (7-8 players!), and not adjusting the encounters accordingly. Encounters designed for 4 players (DM used published adventures – he didn’t make his own) were presented as-is to the larger group, with the corresponding lower XP and treasure because the same amount of reward was being split between twice as many people. As a result, we blew through encounters at early levels, but by 7th or 8th level we were falling behind the enemies we were facing, both in level and in gear. And that led to frequent death, and each time you’re resurrected you lose a level … you can see how that goes. Pretty soon you’ve got a group of 6th-level characters facing 11th-level enemies.
• Finally, in WoW, the enemies aren’t intimately familiar with every tool your character has at his/her disposal, and so they don’t show up prepared to counter absolutely everything you can throw at them. Your fire mage can adventure without worrying that every single monster she faces is going to “just happen” to be protected by a Resist Fire spell.
It got to the point where I just wasn’t having any fun, and so I dropped out rather than turn into the complaining rules lawyer of the group.
Erg. In my first point, I meant “fighter”, not “warrior”.
/facepalm
I’ve been DMing a game for about 6 months now, and there’s one thing I absolutely love in D&D over WoW: Consequences. WoW (being an MMO) has a problem in that whatever you do, it simply resets after you’re done. Expose Lady Prestor as the vile Onyxia? Well, she’s back to just being trustworthy ol’ Lady Prestor in not a half hours time. In D&D (depending on your DM I suppose) something could have earth shattering consequences!! (literally in some cases) And they STAY that way (once again at DM’s discretion).
However, I must ask, since your heroes are now level 4 and you have the pic of the battlemat, did you just happen to finish Keep on the Shadowfell?
(And why is Kalarel sacrificing chip dip?)