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?)

/facepalm

• 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.

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’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.)

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 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.