Is D&D 4th REALLY the MMORPG based game?

[roseembolism]

 A slow enough day that I'm even talking D&D.  Next week I'll get back to my own game projects.

Anyway, one of the common things I've been is that D&D 4th edition reminds people of an MMORPG.  Evidently the assigned roles, the at-will, encounter and daily powers, and the emphasis on combat powers, strikes people as MMORPG-ish.  A lot of that is arguable- I don't find the power splits very MMORPG-like at all, though the way armor is described seems very much like something out of World of Warcraft.  Likewise, the roles seem to pretty much harken back to classic D&D tactics.  But, I'm not here to argue that.

All that aside, do you know what really screams "MMORPG" to me? It's not any particular version of a game themself; it's actually the optimization debates where numbers are crunched to show that character A is less effcient at dealing damage per round than Character B. So in this regard, it's actually D&D 3.X that reminded me of an MMORPG, whenever people got into massive threads proving mathematically that two-weapon finesse fighters did something like 2.35 points less damage a turn than a two-handed fighter. If they simply used terms like Damage Per Round (DPR) to mimic the MMORPG term DPS, the comparasion with similar debates on the MMORPG boards would be complete.

So right now, 3.X feels the most MMORPG-ish to me, simply because there were so many people obsessed with optimization, juggling numbers, and claiming that any character that wasn't optimized was a drag on the team. I don't really remember quite that attitude with AD&D; sure there were twinks munchkins, and people argued that certain class features from some of the dodgier supplements were over-or-underpowered.   But it all didn'tget so much into the algebra, and claims that any character that wasn't optimized according to rigid math was worthless.

So far D&D-4th doesn't feel so MMORPG-ish to me, simply because I haven't seen the extensive number crunching 3.X spawned. Sure there's already people trying to optimize characters, but the combination of At-will, Encounter and Daily effects may make trying to do number crunching problematic, especially when considering that the effectiveness of those powers will depend heavily on circumstances and fellow players. 

So, whether the algebra fans show up later will affect how I feel about the MMORPG feel.

Comments

[devonapple.livejournal.com]

I believe there are feats/abilities which let you draw attention away from soft targets.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

The fighter has a basic ability to mark targets; after that, if they attack someone else instead of him, he gets either a free attack or a bonus to hit. I actually consider this an extension of a big part of the fighter's role in classic D&D, and it helps make the fighter more useful in combat, asde from his ability to do massive amounts of damage.

Also, as someone who plays a lot of mages, I am naturally in favor of this idea. ;')