I'd like to address some issues related to what Machocruz and SajuukKhar are talking about:
Old School Dungeons and Dragons, the original concept, is not about monster-slaying. Monsters were merely one type of obstacle - the point of the game was role-playing, teamwork, and using a variety of skills well to progress past a variety of obstacles - puzzles, traps, monsters, special complex situations. That's why the original warrior class was called a Fighter - he was the only character focused around combat. The Magic User was there to figure out the arcane, ancient, and mysterious aspects of the dungeons. The Thief was there to help the party past traps, find secret areas, and gain additional treasure. The Cleric would heal the party during the adventure to allow many fewer trips back to town to rest and deal with unholy monsters.
Along the way the amazing creativity of the original concept was degraded more and more in favor of slaying monsters. Video games likewise degraded the same way, with Neverwinter Nights 2 being a terrible example of "monster blasting".
The *reason* the original spell list for Magic Users was so long, there was so much variety and amazing creativity, was to allow dungeon masters vast creativity in how they constructed the dungeon, which could then be countered by a crafty and well prepared Magic User. Subsequent degradation focused the magic user more and more on combat, with players overly selecting magic missile and fireball spells due to how "useful" they were relative to the other spells.
Compare the original concept of Dungeons and Dragons with, say, Skyrim. Puzzles, traps? A few, with the traps only an annoyance at worst and the puzzles the *player* figures out, not the character. Most of Skyrim gameplay is travel, inventory management, skill management, and of course murdering lots and lots and lots of creatures.
The phrase "dumbing down" doesn't cover it. It's a loss of variety, of creativity, of the basic quality of the game experience. It's a loss of realism in favor of superpowering the protagonist.
In the original Dungeons and Dragons concept, players were fragile. If they did stupid shit in a dungeon, they had a decent chance of dying. Level 1 Magic Users were terribly prone to death. But a constant line of degradation since then has seen characters become nearly death-proof, with stupidity or poor decisions resulting in mere inconveniences.
One of the cool things in dungeons and dragons was that monsters often didn't even have to be killed. Some could be bribed, some would be friendly if one of the characters (usually the magic-user) knew their language, some would be friendly if the players had useful information to share with them. I hardly need to point out that this kind of social interaction and complexity has pretty much disappeared from gaming as a whole. Monsters were *respected* in the original dungeons and dragons - goblins had their own societies for example, they didn't just exist as goblin-shaped bags of loot and XP. They weren't (typically) there to be killed.
Precisely because in later iterations of D&D and of course video gaming monsters DO exist merely to be slaughtered, the player characters need to be more powerful, in order to ENSURE that the slaughter is successful. So literally every character in a modern RPG is combat-based, they are "balanced", by which is meant balanced in their combat power, an utterly ridiculous notion in the original D&D concept, and they are very powerful (in combat, not creative thought) compared to the original D&D notions of player power.
We make fun of gibbering ignorant Call of Duty cretins, but the chickens have merely come home to roost - video games are producing the very players who are worthy of playing what games have become.
The better the game the better the effect it has on the human being playing it. Make shitty games and the humans playing them become shit themselves.
