Dungeons and Dragons, Fourth Edition

What does it tell us when the roleplaying industry leader is a follower? Granted, the new edition hasn't actually been released yet, but what I've read indicates that the upcoming new edition of D&D is overtly modeled after the success of the MMORPG World of Warcraft. My question here is why someone who enjoys World of Warcraft would play D&D modeled after World of Warcraft when they could just as easily actually be playing World of Warcraft? This subject first came up a long time ago, in a way, when roleplayers started realizing that they were losing a lot of players to MMORPGs because MMORPGs provided the same type of fun they were getting from their paper and pencil RPGs and provided it faster and in a more visual, less mentally taxing way.

The main thing that paper and pencil RPGs offer that MMORPGs can't is flexibility. A computer moderated game can't allow you to try an "out of the box" solution to a problem. So why not focus on what paper and pencil games do that MMORPGs can't, rather than being a lame MMORPG? I suspect that there are a couple of reasons for this. For one, the business guys at Hasbro see WoW making truckloads of money, and see that D&D is almost the same thing, but not nearly as profitable, and the word came down that the sensible thing to do was to make D&D more like WoW, in a business sense as well as a flavor sense. Secondly, if D&D players are giving up D&D for WoW, there's clearly something they like there that's worth emulating.

Honestly, I don't know what I'd do if I were in charge of the D&D brand and was bleeding players to more technologically oriented games. I might well make the same decision they did, but I don't think it's a viable strategy for the long term. D&D isn't going away tomorrow, but it might not be around (at least not in the form we know it now) in ten years.

This direction for D&D doesn't bother me terribly much because it doesn't touch what I personally love about roleplaying games. I lost interest in dungeon crawls and cool powers a long time ago in favor of deeper characters and more intricate plots. If hack-&-slash players are better served elsewhere, that's a Good Thing. They're happier, and so am I because neither of us is bringing down the fun of the other by trying to share a table with people who have entirely different ideas about what is fun. I don't think technology will be ready to replace the human elements I enjoy for quite some time to come. My only concern is where new roleplayers will come from, since many players of non-D&D RPGs traditionally come from the ranks of D&D players who became frustrated because they were looking for more story than wargame and realized they were unlikely to find that in most D&D campaigns. I could see paper and pencil RPGs dwindling down to numbers similar to the remaining traditional wargamers, which could be a problem, since RPGs are a social activity. It's possible that that problem could be solved in time by improving the experience of playing over the internet. Wizards of the Coast may actually be helping to solve just that problem in the long term, as I understand they're working on ways to improve the ability of players to interact via the internet to play D&D. Time will tell.