You’re quite right, there isn’t anything wrong with getting inspiration from video gaming for core rules. Hell, most of the time it’s the same thing, it’s just that our primitive polyhedral random number generators go slower.

My point was not that WoW or videogames are bad somehow. (Come on man, who do you think you’re talking to here??!!!) It’s just that WoW doesn’t allow me to do the things I like to do in D&D (out-of-the-box roleplaying). Perhaps WoW is a bad example since there’s RP servers, but you won’t see those guys able to have sex on the Tarrasque. Or making stilts for your gnome that fire husky pencils from the kneecaps. Ever. If you do anything different in a videogame, you have to figure out how to trick the engine into doing it. Which I’ve done, and it’s fun but man it takes a lot of work.

That’s what I meant by “might as well play World of Warcraft”. If I just want to go around and kill monsters all day wearing fancy armor, a videogame will do nicely. If I want to RP, I gotta sit at the table with you guys.

WoW’s rules are very streamlined and accessible, but my fear is that if they streamline D&D TOO much trying to be like it then we stop being able to do the things that makes D&D flexible (and fun for me!).

Having some weird arbitrary rules doesn’t mean that we’ll never be able to RP ever again, of course, but I can’t say it’s a direction I like the game going in.

Honestly, World of Warcraft is the single best selling MMORPG ever (crazy Korean MMORPGs not included). Selling to people that normally wouldn’t play these kind of games, or even games in general.

So the question is, why? Well, the answer is because it’s accessible. World of Warcraft streamlines things and makes it easy for even a novice to pickup and start playing. Sure things get more advanced later on, and it becomes a second job to do ANYTHING, but the handled it just right at the beginning.

So if Wizards can implement a system that is accessible to all, then awesome. The bottom line is, that there is nothing wrong with looking to Video Gaming systems for inspiration on core rule sets. We are playing Pen & Paper, and Pen & Paper will always have the advantage of being completely open for the players to do what they want (storyline wise) so it avoids the “second job” – “grinding” aspects of MMORPGs.