ScottS wrote:Individual D&D trash fights take as long to resolve as entire WoW instances. If I'm a hypothetical gamer coming over from WoW to 4e, what am I supposed to be getting in return for giving up on anything resembling a real-time, exciting combat?
You've made a massive assumption that WoW's combat is exciting, or even real time.
You can macro the shit out of your actions because they're pseudo-real time, or rather it's essentially round based with a time limit on each round.
How exciting WoW's combat is I'll leave open to debate. I maintain that if WoW's combat was exciting each and every time, they wouldn't refer to it as "grinding".
But all that aside, my "4th is like WoW" argument doesn't even come from individual systems that were ripped bleeding and twitching from WoW and stitched Frankenstein-like into 4th. No, what I mean is that the designers of the game intentionally tried to recreate the whole experience of playing an MMO, and specifically WoW, on the tabletop.
This is a plain shit idea. You're sacrificing the computer, the speed of rules arbitration, the graphical flair, the "massively multiplayer" part of the game, and a tailored, scripted experience. So you literally get the grind, the uninspiring cool-down timer combat, the level treadmill, and many, many of the negatives of the genre, without any of the benefits.
That's my complaint about 4th ed ripping off WoW. It managed to recreate the experience of playing the game. And then take away all the benefits of the genre, so you're left with shit. Instead of designing a game that plays to the strengths of tabletop, they designed a game that would benefit from the inclusion of a computer doing all the accounting for you. Why? Because the designers thought that WoW was cool and therefore, any element of WoW must be cool in whatever iteration it's components were forced into.
This is a shit decision.