Dungeons & Dragons Online Forum News (Dec. 14, 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

About instenced dungeons....

I can answer some of these!

All of our dungeons/instanced areas are being hand-built by our level designers. Although the techniques available for creating randomly-generated dungeons are getting better and better, they still can't really match up to an intelligently-designed dungeon built from the ground up by a living, breathing person.

Some of the content within dungeons can still be randomized -- things like treasure placement, traps, and encounters can all be either static or chosen from a list of possibilities. The degree of randomization will vary depending on the specific dungeon and quest that you're on.

There will also be multiple quests associated with each dungeon, and the dungeons will undergo some changes depending on the quest you're doing. For example, the first time you raid the kobold fortress, you might catch the kobolds by surprise. The next time you go there (say, to capture their leader), they might very well be ready for you, and you'll have to overcome numerous traps and well-organized defenders in order to accomplish your goal.

When you go into a dungeon, you will always be on some kind of quest, so there will be some kind of plot-driven context for your dungeon crawls.

Ships?

The main city in DDO is Stormreach, a harbor city on the edge of the unexplored continent of Xen'drik. In order to satisfy your seafaring needs, we are indeed going to have some adventures which take place on (and in) ships, although I'm not sure if any of these adventures will actually let you control the ships themselves.

There is definitely 3-dimensional swimming in the game, but there probably won't be underwater combat or dungeons that are set entirely underwater.Keebis's idea of certain dungeons having sections of underwater tunnels (possibly filled with traps and puzzles) to navigate is a good example of the types of things we're doing with water.

Hit point, and MMORPGs

We're definitely not going to have randomized hit points for characters in DDO. As fun (and occasionally agonizing) as it can be to roll your hit points in the PnP game, we don't want to see characters in DDO permanently gimped by the random number generator -- imagine getting your fighter to level 18, doing okay on hit points, and then rolling a 1 for hp at both 19th and 20th levels. Not good times.

So we'll be assigning a fixed number of hit points per level, based on class hit die. No word yet on whether we'll be going with max hp per level, whether we'll do 1/2 hd +1 per level (7 for barbarians, 6 for fighters, 5 for clerics and rangers, etc.), or whether we'll be cooking up some other madcap scheme.

Hit point, and MMORPGs

Yes, you will get your Con bonus as well.

Nik Davidson, Administrator

What makes you connect to your char?

This is an excellent topic, and I thought I'd jump in and complicate it.

The example of Max Payne is a great one. Good stories involve interesting characters that suffer in interesting ways. Great characters are frequently tragic ones. Characters with flaws. And in an MMP, that doesn't always come across well. People don't want to have deeply flawed characters, even though the best heroes are characters that have to overcome their flaws. People don't want to have real tragedy in their characters' lives, even though characters in stories are best defined by how they react to tragedy. (What's the last party-based RPG you played where one of your main characters didn't die, betray the party, or at the least become unavailable for an act of the story?)

Still, the best times I've ever had in MMPs were the times I almost made it. I remember a quest in AC1 that my group didn't quite finish. We came so close, and came up just short at the end. I spent the next two days obsessed with what we could do to do better next time, and when we eventually won, it was so much more gratifying than if we had just rolled through the dungeon carefree.

With characters specifically, I tend to enjoy characters that have a role with personality. I don't want a rogue-type character whose role is simply "Melee DPS". There's no personality there. But when my rogue can do things that no other class can do, and better still, when my rogue is meaningfully different than a lot of the other rogues out there based on choices I made, then I connect. Then the role has personality, and then I'm hooked. There's a lot of potential for that in D&D Online, and it's something I really look forward to as a result.

Facilitating Roleplay (long)

This is always an interesting discussion. The big thing in my mind on this topic is this - we can't read peoples' minds.

To reward RP, we are rewarding a motivation, not a behavior. A chaotic neutral barbarian from the highlands, with a rich and intricate backstory, and a guy who just likes to kill stuff at random will behave very, very similarly. What we can measure is not motivation, but activity. And even when we build quests around alignments, people will be able to "solve" the alignment issue. It's a game system. Peoples' behavior may be that which gets the biggest reward, and if that means interacting with things in a certain way, they'll do it. Whether they do it because they're roleplaying a character, or because they just want the shiny object at the end, we can't tell.

Ultimately, we can do a lot of encourage roleplaying. We can provide a rich backdrop, a vibrant setting, social options, and stories that people can feel a part of. But to answer the question of who rewards roleplaying: You do. Because it makes the game more fun for you, and isn't that why we play?

David Eckelberry, DDO Dev Team

Best Duo

Basically true. The typical response would be to mix your melee character with a healing character: cleric or bard. But as a paladin you already have some healing, and you're already a model defensive character. So you may want some offense in the form of an arcane spellcaster. Of course it might also depend on race, since a warforged paladin might be better off with a sorcerer or wizard than a human paladin would.

 

Hurrah for fixed HP. I don't like the random HP aspect of pen and paper games. I do remember rolling one on level up.

As for roleplaying, one of the best moves to make would be to make a complex, detailed and all-covering system of alignment control and alignment change.

Killed an innocent, not mind-controlled, no special variable? Sorry, you aren't Good any more. No more Paladin levels if you had any. And you're most likely fallen now, if you're a priest or a Ranger, as well. That's also hardly Lawful, unless Lawful Evil in some circumstances, maybe, so say good bye to new Monk levels until you're Lawful again. Setting a variable each time a Lawful character makes a promise (possibly Lawful Evil excepted in some circumstances) is also a good idea. You know, I'm sick of it being possible to kill innocents and loot houses and keep your Good and Lawful alignments.

Checking if Barbarians or Bards aren't getting too Lawful could be a bit tricky, though.

I would like to see special triggers dealing with deity dogma for divine casters. There are things deities don't like and those things should make you fall.