/vr/ - Retro Games

>>3101765
This makes me think you've never DMed. See how that's an aggressive thing to say that immediately pisses you off and starts you formulating an angry response when in reality you may very well have DMed plenty, just with a much stronger focus on storytelling and NPC interaction than on combat and mechanics.

Although a DM can think on his feet and improvise, particularly where it comes to NPC interaction there's only so much scope and mechanics that a human being can juggle in his head. A terrific example of this is pic related, a table intended to be consulted for every melee attack in armed and armored combat. For combat to proceed smoothly this would need to be memorized by the DM in addition to juggling THAC0s, ACs, Initiative orders, attack speed, casting times and all the other live variables of combat. For this reason, tables like this were largely eliminated from tabletop RPGs in the mid-80s while on the other hand computer RPGs were taking advantage of superhuman calculation speeds and layering to introduce mechanics far far beyond what's possible sitting at a table with pen, paper and dice.

So yeah, tabletop role playing is a collaborative storytelling experience that can't be replicated even by NWN but as a GAMING experience, computer RPGs surpassed tabletops decades ago. But they also don't have the human checks and balances to prevent game-breaking, which is what most vidya RPGs ultimately become about and why modern "patching" can be seen as a good thing from certain perspectives