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GMs vs. WoW

Posted by KJW on September 23, 2009 at 1:48 PM

Michelle sent me an interesting little news clip about World of Warcraft and its scope, both as a company and as a mechanism for roleplaying.  It?s fascinating and shows the sheer immensity offered by MMORPGs and it raises the question: how can tabletop GMs compete with this?  Sure companies like WotC and Paizo can fight over the crumbs that constitute the tabletop RPG market, but World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs are the principle competitors for every GM out there who wants to run a campaign.  How can we hope to compete with 40,000 NPCs and over 7500 quests? 


Obviously we can?t beat MMORPGs in quantity; you don?t have 4000 people to help you design your adventures and campaigns.  We might or might not be able to beat them in quality, honestly, this isn?t a given and in a lot of cases our adventures and encounters aren?t as good as MMORPGs. Most of us can provide a visual aid in the form of cheap miniatures or a hand drawn map, but that is really rather pathetic compared to the competition.  This is a lopsided fight so we have to be innovative and here are five tips for us tabletop GMs to even the odds with MMORPGs:

 

#5. Provide food.  Video games might have virtual meals that restore hit points, but you can provide genuine sustenance to your players to keep them alive in the real world.  

#4. Get off the tracks.  Video games are tracked, even the most expansive ones, but a tabletop campaign is only limited by the imagination of the GM.  

#3. Read the audience.  Video games can be well scripted, brilliantly so, but the tabletop GM can counter this by reading his group and adjusting the game on the fly.  

#2. Fudge.  Video games are all about the numbers, but with tabletop the GM can ignore the damn numbers to change an outcome to improve the game.  

#1. Keep it unique.  Unlike MMORPGs your campaign is unique, well unless you run published adventures, but the uniqueness is what really separates tabletop from MMORPGs.  

 

This is the challenge of our generation of tabletop GMs ? how do we compete against MMORPGs?  Sure I?m being a little humorous about it, but this is a real issue.  I?ve lost players to MMORPGs and so has every GM.  So to fight this rising tide of digital competition to our campaigns and groups ? what other suggestions do you have?

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4 Comments

Reply Crazy Monkey
02:20 PM on September 23, 2009
I think someone needs to deliver on the promise of D&DI that it hasn't delivered on yet. Namely, the Game Table feature which would allow a GM and players to essentially play a tabletop game online. I know there are some tools out there that do this already, but they lack the graphics quality that sets MMORPGs apart.
Reply KJW
02:43 PM on September 23, 2009
So you want to compete with MMORPGs by making your game more like MMORPGs? Bad strategy. The Game Table had niche appeal for people who run chat campaigns those who don't wouldn't use it and it is utterly worthless for tabletop sessions unless everyone is bringing a laptop and then what's the point? Come on - instead of trying to abandon tabletop (and imagination) let's have some ideas how to highlight the differences and advantages of tabletop over digital RPGs?
Reply Crazy Monkey
06:14 PM on September 23, 2009
Think of it this way. In a recent discussion on your forums, we were both illuminating the advantages of PbP vs traditional tabletop. Now, apply those advantages with graphics, rule management software, etc. Rather than denying the inevitable, adapt to it.
Reply Dakini
10:59 AM on September 24, 2009
Personalization! This is really a combination of #3 and #1, but it's key. A live GM can personalize his/her tabletop campaign specifically for the player in ways that MMORPGs cannot. Give your players a campaign tailor-made to be the one that they most want to play and there will be no competition. This may mean more romance, more mystery, more dominion management, more NPC interactions - or more of whatever it is that your player most enjoys about roleplaying. If you can find that, you can hook them. Of course, this is easier the smaller your group is. If you've got to run a group of 5 or 6, it's going to be really hard to personalize the campaign for each of them.