Dungeons & Dragons Online Forum News (Feb. 07, 05)

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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.

Nik Davidson, Administrator

The Clerical Crutch

Short answer is this - obstacles in our game have one or more optimal solutions, and one or more less optimal solutions. A trap, for example, is optimally detected and disarmed by a rogue, who uses no resources to do so. It is less optimally detected and avoided/disamred by expending magical resources, such as a detect traps spell, or chaincasting dispel magic. It is even less optimally detected by the fighter, getting speared through the chest. But, swap in a cleric for that missing rogue, and you're just dealing with the obstacle in a different manner.

Will healing be a requirement for dungeons? People will take damage. Optimally, a cleric will expend resources efficiently to cure the damage. Less optimally, a non-primary divine caster class (bard, ranger, paladin) will expend resources less efficiently to cure the damage. (No spontaneous casting, fewer spells per day, etc.) Even less optimally, the party will resort to more expensive consumable magical items, or, um, die. Multiple solutions, different levels of efficiency.

The D&D party mechanic is all about parties of adventurers using their complementary abilities to overcome challenges. As a DM, my personal metric is that in a given game session, every party member should feel like their unique abilities were useful to the party. Doesn't always happen, but it's a good goal. I don't feel bad at all that a party of all wizards will almost always get stompled in certain dungeons, or a party of all warriors, or a party of all whatever. D&D campaigns of a single class happen, but they're the exception, not the rule.

Bear's Endurance, the killer spell

People have properly identified the issue as one of communicating necessary information to the player. The question becomes this: If a dynamic is such that it takes an undue amount of explanation and UI effort to explain the consequences of the action, is it better to simplify or otherwise adjust the dynamic?

In this case, the temporary hitpoint mechanic is one that, if not properly understood, can lead to some highly unexpected and unfortunate situations. On the other hand, we're going to have barbarians raging all the time, so we had better make sure we are able to communicate the gameplay effects, short and longterm, of using such abilities. This case is different - rage is something you do to yourself, and thus we can communicate some information about the effect before or as you use it. (If your rage ends, and you're almost dead, forget about the "almost!") But you generally can't interrupt play to explain in detail every beneficial spell that's put on a player, especially when the caveat attached to it will very rarely come into play, and would probably just confuse people more.

Someone has in their sig a long plea to the team here to read all the appropriate D&D sourcebooks. Can I just say "duh?" Of course we know the system, if we didn't, we could "solve" problems like this a lot easier.