The Dungeons & Dragons: World of Warcraft Gameplay Expansion allows Dungeon Masters to run games in the world of Azeroth where players battle bosses in dungeons inspired by the MMORPG. But lead designer James Wyatt never wanted those adventures to feel too much like the video game.
“There have been times in D&D’s history when it has leaned a little bit closer to the MMO experience, with short rests being shorter and spells being a little bit more like buttons,” Wyatt told Polygon in a virtual interview. “That’s not the direction we wanted to go. What this book is about is the world, and how to make that world the setting of your D&D game.”
D&D 4th Edition was released in 2008, four years after the launch of WoW, and it entirely reworked the 3.5 Edition ruleset by turning both weapon attacks and spells into a set of powers that could be used at will, once per encounter, or daily. The shift, combined with language that divided classes into roles like Defender, Striker, and Leader, led many players to criticize the new rules as being too much like WoW.
“I think there’s an anxiety among the fandom about losing what they love to the new wave of entertainment,” Wyatt said. “I think 4th Edition followed WoW’s lead in a direction that wasn’t great for the tabletop game.”
D&D: WoW provides rules for translating all of WoW’s classes and builds into D&D, but Wyatt focused more on getting the feel right than upping the complexity to be more in line with a WoW character’s ability rotations and cooldowns. His team considered creating mechanics for managing enemy aggro, but decided to just stick with the already present rules for a Battle Master Fighter’s Goading Attack and the Protection Fighting Style feat. Sometimes more transformative work was needed, like replacing many Paladin class features to turn them into Death Knights.
“It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution,” Wyatt said. “It’s a lot like the alternate class features in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, except that they are packaged together. Paladins got all this light and healing stuff, and that doesn’t really fit the Death Knight flavor, so let’s change that to death and necrotic damage and darkness stuff.”
Wyatt’s biggest challenge was evoking the feel of a WoW Shaman in D&D. He eventually settled on a redesign of Barbarian that swaps out Primal Knowledge for the ability to create totems that can help allies and hinder enemies. Wyatt is currently playing the class himself and took the feat Magic Initiate (Druid) to further mimic the WoW class that blends melee fighting and primal magic.
“When I enter my rage, I describe the orbs of elemental energy circling around my body and I’m hurling ice and fire and lightning at foes, and it feels very shamany,” he said. “I even took Ritual Caster, so I’m going to get in tune with the elements and do shamany stuff when I’m out of combat. There’s a lot of possibilities for how you conceptualize the character within that framework.”
World of Warcraft spells can find their way to other D&D settings
While D&D’s World of Warcraft spells are designed to evoke abilities from the video game, Wyatt expects many of them will make their way into D&D games that don’t take place in Azeroth. DMs will still want to use their discretion with some of the more unusual options like Arcane Pulse, a cantrip designed for Nightborne Elves that slows enemies in a burst instead of scaling in damage like most cantrips.
“The spells are balanced against other spells in the Player’s Handbook, so they should work just fine if you pick them up in other places,” Wyatt said. “There are a couple that might feel a little weird in other characters’ hands, but they will still be balanced and work.”
While he was working on the new sourcebook, Wyatt wrote himself a list of design guidelines that wound up in the book’s section on Adventures in Azeroth. They serve to remind DMs that they shouldn’t try to make their games feel like an MMO. Dungeons might take multiple sessions to clear rather than being fought through in a few hours. Characters are going to want to find creative ways to interact with the world and NPCs rather than just following preset paths and killing everything they encounter.
“In D&D, most of the time, monsters stay dead when you kill them, and you can’t expect characters to run Icecrown Citadel over and over again to get the loot that they want, with everything just resetting to the way it was before,” Wyatt said. “Their actions need to make a difference, and the spotlight really needs to be on them. It’s not massively multiplayer. It’s minimally multiplayer.”