I grew up playing table top DnD, it was not cool. In fact it was the exact opposite of cool. Seeing the success of Critical Role and Matt Colville in making real DnD “cool” and finding a mainstream audience is still shocking to me, but in a good way.
Vanilla had waaaay more elements of table top than Retail does, such as leveling weapon skills, skill trainers, slower leveling and pace of game play, and arguably a bit more emphasis on narrative.
I’m curious what the community thinks; will there be a bit of appeal for “old school gaming” that might leak over from the new generation of DnD fans? I realize they’re different games, it just seems that a return to successful basics is an appealing gameplay style and could have some appeal outside the nostalgic oldsters.
Thoughts?
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I’m thinking DnD was cool as ever.
I dunno. When I first played tabletop, it was the late 80s AD&D. My wicked stepmother was on a “demonic things” kick, and her top two targets were Proctor & Gambel and Dungeons & Dragons. That gave playing it a cool rebel feel. We had mall stores selling the books and fantastic models. Then again, I was also raised with an Atari 2600 and played board games like Crude with my step-father and siblings, and arcade machines were all over. I grew up in the valley of Apple and Intel and HP, so cool was already going the geeky intellect route.
Now, looking at that compared to WOW Classic - I’m not sure there’s a direct line of appeal. Clearly the orcs and humans, as well as trolls, elves, gnomes and dwarves, come from the same basic fantasy sources - but they show up in many games, as well as books.
I remember when DDO came out and I kind of hoped it would bridge that gap and feel more like the tabletop gaming. Bioware’s Neverwinter Nights did it better, but tabletop is so much more about your group in a way no MMO could really replicate. The DM is a human, sitting right there, rolling, narrating, directly part of the adventure.
Then again … I’m not in the new generation of DnD fans. As such, I will profess complete and utter ignorance of what might appeal to them. (I’m not even particularly successful predicting what my own generation will find appealing.)
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For a clarification, Critical Role and such shows play D&D 5th Edition, which is the newest edition of D&D. It’s not directly old-school, though it is certainly moreso than 4E (the previous edition).
A truly old-school D&D experience in the modern days is achieved through OSR gaming and retroclones, my personal favorite of which is ACKS (Adventurer Conqueror King System). OSR gaming has been getting a bit of a boost from D&D’s increased popularity in general (D&D is the rising tide that lifts all ships, the ships being tabletop RPGs), but not to the same degree that D&D itself has been coming back into the public eye and zeitgiest.
So long-winded digressions about arcane details of the TTRPG industry aside, I don’t think there will be a huge crossover. I generally think that Classic is closer to OSR D&D in feel than it is to 5E, so it will get some benefit the same way that the OSR games do, but I don’t think we’ll see a huge percentage of, say, Critical Role fans coming over to stay.
I feel like d&d reached its pinnacle at 3e.
3e, with the d20 system was a much needed update (the proficiency system in 2e was crazy bad). The d20 system carried over to many other rpgs, it let people learn one system and play many different games.
3.5, 4, and 5, just feel like attempts to fix what wasn’t broken to sell people the same books, at grossly inflated prices, over, and over again.
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I think the more in depth a game goes with skills/combat the better. i played UO before wow and the fact there was nearly an infinite number of ways to build a “warrior” and have them almost all be effective was amazing. Then you could dwcide to splash bits of other skills into your warrior to improve your experience. Almost no one followed cookie cutter builds because it was more about how you as a player wanted to play your character.
In modern wow (even to an extent in classi ) there was minimal character variations that could make you feel seperated from others of the same class.
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Always wanted a MMO with unmodified 1st Ed. Ad&d rule set pre-Unearth Arcana. It would be a mess and unbalanced with several dry stretches, but I always wanted to delve in such.
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I haven’t gamed since I (along with everyone else) grew up and moved out of our Podunk town. One of the big reasons I got into MMORPGs is they kind of replicated that experience.
I came from original D&D and 2E, as well as old school Final Fantasy on NES, to WoW. I agree that Classic/Vanilla more closely resembles tabletop RPG than the current iteration.
Not sure about whether a resurgence in interest in D&D will bring in players for Classic or not. Kids now days seem to prefer PvP shooters like Call of Duty or Fartnite over-all. That and the negative press Blizz seems to be garnering lately isn’t helpful…
I did a LOT of DnD when i was young - once a week with my brother, his friends, and our neighbour who was a fantastic GameMaster.
I have always been more embarrassed of admitting I play WoW - than when I played DnD.
I have noticed my brothers’ current friends at university getting involved.
I talk to them and they’ll mention how they’ve never done DnD before - and are only here to check it out.
Then they leave with their New Character sheets ecstatic after their first experience.
These people are clearly not nerdy and have never shown interest in gaming - many of them don’t even read fiction.
I think Classic WoW will bring in millions of players - I actually think that Former Vanilla Players will be out-gunned 8:1.
As most people, in my opinion, will come to see what it was like. After all, for the past decade and a half they’ve been listening to stories of Vanilla, and how great it was.
I don’t think the DnD crowd will be too involved - maybe a few who ventured into gaming on a PC.
DnD is great because it is a social event - you go to hang out with friends - DnD is 50% hanging out with friends and 50% playing the game.
WoW just doesn’t offer it in that way.
I’d pick a 4-8 hour session of DnD over any amount of time playing WoW.
Few reasons why;
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You can’t binge DnD since you are so reliant on other people to be there to continue the story.
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DnD is fun only when you have an established group of players - switching teams (Pugging) would ruin the experience.
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Characters in DnD have much more depth - and long campaigns like Critical role campaigns build on character stories.
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You can be whomever you want, and choose any path you want.
I was a Half-orc Monk - I had been playing it for about 9 months - and absolutely loved him - There came a point in which another party member went through a portal, and had yet to come back.
I knew it was dangerous on the other side - and all my human instinct was “Don’t go through that Portal” - but my Characters personality had grown so much that I KNEW he would go through if he was real.
He jumped in and was immediately killed by an adult Brass Dragon.
The other player died too, and it was my brother - whose character was a goblin with a shiny fetish.
You’ll never get that in WoW - so I imagine many people who do come from DnD will pick up WoW Classic and feel it doesn’t have much depth.
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It’s funny. Back when wow started, people would play wow over dnd (3/3.5 then) because wow scratched that itch better. Now with wow in the state it’s in, 5e dnd does it better.
Wotc designed 4e specifically to be mmo like. People hated it so much, they lost half their players and another company filled the vacuum with Pathfinder, basically 3.75.
Now 5e has been topping charts since it was published.
To the thread title, no, it will not help classic. One, because there is not a rising interest in “old school” dnd–this edition is very much it’s own school. And two, whatever itch classic scratched better than 3e, 5e will do it better than classic.
TLDR: apples and oranges.
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My brother, the devs should focus more on hiring DnD players like you to work on WoW, then looking down on their player base.
You ask to hear my thought and I will gratefully oblige. Do with them what you will.
It was the Idelism of DnD that made WoW great, the desire to make a game that fulfills the desire for quality fantasy above all else. And it is the devs forgetting this that has brought about the game we have today.
This is on of the big reasons retail is trash, the game has forgotten its DnD roots. The moment the deves prioritized QUALITY OF LIFE and fair over the DnD elements that make RPG’s games great. Certain things like trasmong and the portals that are in every city weren’t in the game to begin with for a good reason.
Transmog-If the game was supposed to have trasmong the devs would have saved themselves time by keeping appearance separate from gear. By locking certain looks to certain pieces of gear they added to loot identity.
The devs wanted you to originally explored the game and travel around. A game feels more immersive when you know that the next town will be far away and that there is no shortcut to traveling there. You would know each time you left a city to travel farther into the world you would not be back for a while. Even a mage would start without any portal spells and have to do a lot of traveling before they could use them. You don’t receive a mount until level 40 and you still might not have the money to buy one. You had to live and explore the world as it was, because you were actually in a world.
I could keep going but I would be typing for hours.
Classic was not about having the game cater to your needs but changing your need to cater to the game. It was at its core about making the rules pull you into a world no different than DnD, rather than making rules to make things “fair” and keep “players” in line. The world is not “fair” and that is how things should be.
It is said that adventures are free, so I will chose that over being a “hero” any day. Till we meet in classic my friend.
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BELOW IS AN OPINION PIECE, I DO NOT CLAIM TO BE ALL-KNOWING
I think the focus and appeal of the separately compared games here is not as important as the social aspect of them.
Every person I know who plays D&D plays it because they love hanging out with their friends doing a unified activity. It’s why that same group of friends also likes to go and do other things together.
If you can tie Classic WoW to the concept of “having fun with friends” then I think you can very well make the argument that this game will appeal to D&D players.
But can you make that connection? Absolutely! That’s one of the major differences between Classic and retail.
Another obstacle is making everyone aware that Classic WoW is even a thing, or even what Classic WoW is. If you go up to any 30~ year old who doesn’t play WoW but is relatively familiar with gaming culture and ask them “Hey, do you know what World of Warcraft is?” they’ll likely answer “isn’t that the game that consumes people’s lives and all they ever want to do is play it?” and then they’ll follow that up with the same thing every non-WoW player says which is “Leeeeroyyyyy”
Classic WoW’s success, like a lot of projects, will rely heavily on people simply knowing that it exists, and what it even is.
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Is DnD mainstream now? For some reason i don’t see my kid and his soccer team mates sitting down and playing DnD. However, I could see them playing fortnite or Madden.
I played a bit of it when I was a kid, but i couldn’t get into it. Instead of read the DM manual and the Book of Monsters because I just liked that stuff. The spells etc.
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I don’t think it’s ever been mainstream.
Some great posts on this thread, thanks for all the input. Hope to see you all in Classic!
Yeah, dnd is mainstream now. People watch other people play DND online. Critical Role, for example.
To the topic, I think the leveling process, which in classic was more group oriented than it is on live, would appeal to dnd players. But once they hit raids, and the unilateral decisions about viability raid leaders are wont to make, I think they would bail.
could you see them playing wow either? i dont think it matters much if we are talking about bfa or classic, kids these days are not into warcraft like people raised in the 80s and 90s were
you already mentioned what that generation likes, its sports and fortnite , not old school rpgs. imo this is why wow is going down hill, not activision
I suspected what is considered the old-school segment of the gaming Market will continue to Peak regularly as it always has occasionally gaining some mainstream recognition before sinking back down below Call of Duty etcetera.although different from before is that these unsung old school games are far more available.
I remember the first time I entered Black Rock in Vanilla, it was stunning (still is). It was like literally being in Moria; vast frightening, EPIC, gorgeous, inspiring. Ever since then BRD has been in my mind as I design dungeons for my players. That part of WoW, being able to see it, walk through it (get lost in it) literally changed the way I played tabletop DnD.
That’s why I think that a lot of tabletop players would really enjoy Classic; the art and being able to walk through those environments is something you cannot do on the tabletop.
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