Wow! Things have changed! [Pun intentional!]
Not so many years ago, but before the war, my son was playing a brand new game called "Ultima on-line."
The idea was pretty clever. There was an instanced world, and folks would interact with the pre-scripted NPCs. The amount of GM intervention was theoretically minimal. Gamers being gamers, the designers expected that the eager , new on-line community would organize itself according to how a group of table-top gamers would organize themselves.
Alas, some of those assumptions were wrong ... but, hey, it was the biggest splash to come along when it came out. While I know that others would argue, Ultima was the grandfather of the current generation of massive multi-player on-line games.
What exactly was wrong? A few things, but they significantly affected game play and enjoyment.
For one, there was no quick and obvious progression. I found my son killing bunnies and squirrels after playing for over a month so that his character could get enough experience to survive outside of the city. That just was not a lot of fun.
The players sought loop-holes rather than adventuring and cooperation to get treasure and power-up. At the start-up town, every space along the wharf was filled with a player avatar butt fishing. Why? Well, it was a way of making some money, and there was a non-zero chance that you would randomly acquire something cool, really cool.
Many players took the role of highwayman. They would lay in wait and ambush the new players and steal their stuff. Also not fun.
Lots ... WoW corrects a lot of the issues from that original Ultima game.
There is a clear progression, and the scoring system in the game pushes you to leave areas where you are over-powered. If you are more than six levels higher than your opponent, you get now experience for killing him. There are thousands of quests that are built in the game.
The game discourages the highwayman attitude. If you choose an environment where you want to be safe, another player cannot attack you.
There are a lot of nice touches. If your character does die, you just appear back at the nearest graveyard as a spirit, and then you can travel to where your body is and resurrect. You lose time, but that is about it. There are automated systems to seek out fellow adventurers to do some of the more difficult quests.
For what WoW set out to do, I have to say it succeeds magnificiently.
I'm not a doom and gloom kind of guy. I have to say that while more and more of the RPG hobby is moving on-line, there will always be some residual table top gaming. I think it is going to be in serious decline though.
Why do you say that?, A few reasons ... Dragon and Dungeon just announced that they have come to the end of the line. There will be no more issues of these magazines after September 2007. More and more material is being printed in on-line formats for download. There is not a lot of cross-over from on-line gaming to face-to-face gaming. Many of us had hoped that the Pokemon and Magic players would cross-over to table top role-playing, but that just never happened.
No surprise here, but it is not happening with the on-line crowd either.
Why not?
Essentially, it takes a lot of work to do a decent job GMing, and folks are not inclined to do work if it can be avoided. Also, WoW and other on-line venues are available 24-7. Whenever you are ready to play, WoW is ready. Trying to match schedules with friends (especially once you all have your own jobs) to set-up a table top game is tough.