Dungeons & Dragons Online Forum News (Dec. 09, 04)

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Here are today's Dungeons & Dragons Online forum highlights, collected from Dungeons & Dragons Online forums. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Xundau, Community Relations

Someone has to ask. Two Weapon Fighting...

This is an easy one -- just check the screenshots

We've actually had this in for a while now. The rules are pretty much by the book, AFAIK.

Planar travel

I don't have the book right in front of me, but IIRC, different planes have wildly different orbit times. Some are the hundreds of years you mention, while some are only a few years. In fact, I think that the plane of madness/chaos doesn't have any kind of regular orbit at all, which I suppose is fitting.

That being said, I hoestly don't know if we're planning any special events where such-and-such plane becomes coterminus. It is an interesting idea though ...

Multi-Classing

As far as multiclassing goes, we'll be following the PnP rules. Our current design does not allow characters to drop levels from a class they've already taken.

For number of characters per server/account, we don't have exact numbers yet (and won't for a while), but our plan is to allow multiple characters per server and per account.

Twinking?

I think this came up a while ago, but here's the deal: we do not see some degree of twinking as a bad thing.

If you want to earn everything in game yourself -- personally, that's how I usually like to play -- that's fine. But we don't want to force this restriction on everyone; if someone wants to give their friend's new character (or their low level level alt) a +1 longsword and a couple hundred gold, we don't see that as a problem.

Where it becomes a problem is when a 20th level character gives a 1st level character a +5 vorpal longsword, +5 full plate, and a +5 ring of protection. So there will be measures in place to ensure that this doesn't happen.

What those steps are, and where we draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable twinking, is something that we'll discuss in the future.

New Site Feature: Dev Roundtable #1

Hi Folks,

We just published a new site feature called the Dev Roundtables, where members of the Dev Team can share their thoughts on some of the burning issues that have come up on the forums.

For the inagural Dev Roundtable, we've taken on the subject of solo vs. group play. Two of our designers, Heather Sinclair and Jesse "devilmouse" Kurlancheek, share their thoughts. You can find the article on our site's homepage, or by just clicking here:
http://www.ddo.com/index.php?page_i...isplay_item]=24 .

Read up, and then come back here and let us know what you think!

Thanks,
Xundau

Half Elves

RP considerations aside, the differences between half-elves and humans come down to an extra feat and an extra skill point per level for humans, and low-light vision, immunity to sleep, a longer lifespan, +1 to listen/search/spot, and +2 to diplomacy and gather information for half-elves. Whether the tradeoff is worth it is up to you. Again, RP considerations aside, I'd probably pick human for most characters over half-elf.

As I understand it, half-elves in Eberron are generally a separate race from humans and elves -- that is, they can still be made the "old fashioned" way (one elf and one human parent), but most half-elves are the children of half-elven parents. The dragonmarked houses of Medani and Lyrandar are half-elven.

hecatonchires, DDO Dev Team

Animation Diversity

well, first off: there will, in fact, be a variety of spell-casting animations. we’ve been working to determine which spells need their own custom casting animations versus those we can use a more generic animation for. a good example would be “shout”, which would look kind of silly coming from the avatar’s hands, yeah? so we made a custom animation for the avatar shouting out the spell (some are a little less painfully literal than this, but you get the idea...)

second: i'm the artist creating most of the spell effects, and i am very much of the “whiz-bang!” school of thought when it comes to visual effects for spells. we're going for quick and flashy-splashy, visceral effects that grab your eye for a moment but don’t detract from gameplay overmuch. i’m not a big fan of seeing characters running around trailing a rainbow of spell effect particles as they charge through a dungeon. especially factoring in the fast-moving combat system of DDO (as a completely immodest aside, i really need to drill this home: our combat rocks. seriously), i try to balance just enough splash of particles and color effects to be cool, but not so much as to distract you from combat.

and lastly: our lightning effect is looking pretty sharp at the time i write this. i still have a bit of polish to put on it, but i’m feeling good about it. i spent some time working on it with one of our graphics engineers, and he and i came up with a neat new visual effect to get the bolts to zap out from the avatar and hit the target in a fairly convincing impression of how lightning actually zaps from point A to point B. i think (hope) you’ll like it; i’m pretty psyched about how it looks right now, myself.

hope this sheds some light on the spell visuals, and thanks for your comments!

Vessekai, DDO Dev Team

Will the world live and breath? (Warning: Long)

I know you're not suggesting this, but just to be clear:
D&DO is not about huge sprawling landscape.

Most adventures will occur in a dungeon-type setting. However, we will have some outdoor zones. These outdoor zones will contain entrances to dungeons, similar to your forest and cave example.

We're creating these outdoor zones for the exact reasons you have suggested:
- providing more of a world feel
- providing a sense of exploration, rather than a direct teleportation into a dungeon crawl.
- expanding our content to include outdoor adventures instead of just inside.

Agreed.

D&DO will have locations and crossroads which lead to (or become part of) a variety of different adventures. These "crossroads" might be set within an urban, wilderness, or dungeon setting. Players will come to know these places very well.

There are no plans to implement changing seasons at this time.

We will be leveraging our instancing tech to make world changes. For example, the forest you described earlier could become overrun with bugbears only when the players are on a certain quest. Once the quest is solved and the bugbears are eradicated, the bugbears would no longer appear in the forest (for any instantiation of the forest for that party).

D&DO will also have regular content updates once the game goes live, in which global world changing events can occur.

No problem. It was a good post.

Thomas Oakstaff, DDO Dev Team

non combat pvp

If you buy a video game expecting it to allow you to do anything you can do in real life, you'll be disappointed. Furthermore, Pen and Paper D&D lets you do everything you can do in real life.... and more! Unfortunately, no D&D videogame has ever allowed you to do everything, and that's unlikely to change in our lifetimes.

My point? D&D Online will stretch the envelope in many ways, and I'm very excited about that, but it can't be an exact translation of PnP, where PnP is defined as "anything you can imagine."

Some games have tried to be everything, often at the expense of gameplay. The development of D&D Online, on the other hand, is focusing on a really fun set of core mechanics. I firmly believe that everything we didn't try to do translates to a better experience in the end.

Furthermore, and this is especially true for Rogues, there's a lot of things in PnP that only work because a) you're face-to-face with friends and b) there's a referee present. If every adventurer had a GM watching him and only ran into real life friends online, none of these problems would exist.

What Rogues can do in D&D Online will stretch the envelope of what they've been able to do in MMO's so far, even without PvP. Rogues are very very cool, despite the fact they can't pickpocket or backstab other players...

Nik Davidson, Administrator

Buffs

3.5ed D&D buffs tend to be short duration, but of sizable effect. This is a pretty big design shift from 3.0 and earlier, where buffs tended to last longer, but with lesser effect.

We're expecting the same to translate well into the game - buffs will help you prepare for tight situations - they won't be expected to be "always on".

Question about knowing (or not knowing) the rule sets

Again, we run into some exciting contradictions. On one hand, people want a faithful translation of the rules wherever possible. On the other hand, a faithful translation of the rules will confuse the heck out of people who are not already familiar with them.

And let's be honest, even people who are familiar with all the rules play with the books right in front of them, and we can't expect people to do that with DDO.

So, short answer - an in-depth knowledge of the pen and paper ruleset will not be required to play. It will certainly give players an early advantage, since they'll be accelerated on the learning curve. But, we're going to be ramping people up through tutorials and early gameplay such as if they had never played before.

[ December 13, 2004, 21:41: Message edited by: chevalier ]