Dungeons & Dragons Online Forum News (Feb. 25, 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

ddo is our baby

Babies are a lot of work, dude.

Constantly feeding, being awake at all hours of the night, and never really being sure that you're doing the right thing, no matter how strongly you feel...

Yeah, it's a lot like that, actually.

DDO can be your niece or nephew that you visit a lot and help out with, but ultimately stays at our house, since we're the ones who have to wake up when it cries. Sound like a deal? Heh.

Character growth, Player perception, and 'uber'-ness

You can trade items.

Grouping, Travel time, and Joining.

Again, we're creating a pretty wide range of dungeon experiences. Our standard metric is that an adventure "chunk" will take about an hour. There will be dungeon experiences that are both longer, and shorter.

DDO hard pressed to beat WoW

To address the question posed in the topic, it's not a matter of "beating" WoW.

If we were making the exact same game, only dressed up in D&D clothes, it might be about "beating" WoW, but we're not. I have no doubts that the two games can succeed simultaneously; they're going to appeal to different groups.

Recharge Magic?

Interestingly, that was a system designed with a computer adaptation in mind. We have discussed a spellpoint-style magic system for DDO, based off that alternate ruleset. I think we're even to the point of putting together a prototype for playtesting; we'll keep you posted on how that investigation goes.

Recharge Magic?

Good catch - you're right, this is an issue we've gone back to revisit after some playtesting and feedback from (believe it or not) WotC, who suggested we take a second look at a more flexible casting system that still keeps to the important Big Rules of magic in D&D.

DDO hard pressed to beat WoW

Ugh. For the love of...

I mean... I just wanted to... Sigh...

Your Grumpy level has increased. (+5)

Recharge Magic?

Yes.

We're talking about a spellpoint system, not a recharge-over-time dynamic. Just sitting on your butt in a dungeon will not help you.

Eberron Novel by Keith Baker

The book was a big help to me - there were some themes that, although explained in the ECS, really didn't click with me as a DM until I got a sense of the character interactions in the book. Chiefly the post-war political scene; I was definitely off-base on that prior to the novel. The recurring minor villain (the dwarf on the lift) was pure pulp goodness.

DDO: Take what WoW does and improve on it.

"N+1" development is doomed to failure.

The idea that you can look at a successful game and just "do what they do, except more and better" simply doesn't work. WoW's a great game, many of us do play it, and we're happy for their success. (Every successful MMP broadens the total audience of MMPs to come.) But if there's one thing that D&D is NOT, it's a knockoff.

Welcome to the community, read some of the discussions, dev diaries and articles, see what we're all about. We think you'll like what you see.

DDO: Take what WoW does and improve on it.

While it's true that there are a lot of examples of games that built on previous games' successes, all the successful examples you mentioned were not merely derivative, but took things in a recognizably unique direction, which is as much a matter of what is not done, as what is done. BF1942 had a lot in common with Counterstrike, but wasn't an "N+1" game, for example. The economic factor and the customizability of loadouts in Counterstrike isn't there in 42, but it doesn't detract from the experience, it changes it. Recognizable, but distinctly innovative.

I'm not saying we're need to go in a completely orthagonal direction - that's what a genre means, it means there are some core, recognizable aspects, such that a fan of a style of game isn't starting from scratch. But truly trying to create "Game X with more stuff" has a high chance of failing. It's why sequels often do worse than the originals. The ones that do better tend to be those that are uniquely their own game, in addition to capturing the essence of the game that came before. And woe unto the game that shoots for "N+1" and ends up with "N, sorta" due to the realities of production. Pretty much a kiss of death for the game, while the game that chose to go in a more innovative direction can still succeed despite a cut feature or two.

MMPs as a genre, in my personal opinion, are not as broad in their goals as the FPS or RTS genres. Players have much, much more narrow expectations of what the next game should be. It's a sort of conservatism that happens in cycles with any media. One year, you'll see some indie films hit it big, then for the next few years you'll see all sorts of crazy movies, many of which fail horribly. Then the pendulum swings, people get worried over high-profile crash-and-burns, and it's nothing but action flicks and romantic comedies for a year or two. Same thing here. This too shall pass.

Xundau, Community Relations

What Feets and Skills do you see in the video?

Hide in shadows/move silently are in the first scene. So is sneak attack.

Whirlwind attack is definitely in there -- in fact, I think it's used more than once.

The rolls are actually the tumble skill (and yes, I know that it's weird for a fighter in plate armor to have a very high tumble skill -- we've made adjustments since the video was made).

Our current spec for the dodge feat has it giving a +1 passive dodge bonus to AC. This is better than the book version, which only gives the bonus vs. a single designated opponent, but we have enough going on in our combat system right now without also asking players to choose an opponent for dodging.

The charge forward is indeed the move that I recently said we're using for cleave. However, I'm not so sure that this is going to be our final cleave feat -- as I understand it, the dev team wants to try going back to the idea of a large, sweeping, stationary strike capable of hitting multiple enemies. Regardless, the charge move should still be in the game in some capacity.

Solution to RPGing and NonRPGing

Interesting, but I don't think it would be very fair to the players playing the characters, especially those with borderline-acceptable names.

We'll probably just take the more traditional approach of asking people to change names that violate our naming policy (or in extreme cases, changing the names of their characters for them).

Oh goody, still no new NEWS?

To be honest with you, we had hoped for a much noisier February. Unfortunately, that hasn't really been the case, for a number of different reasons. And I'll admit that the problems were compounded by a pretty quiet week on the forums -- between Nik being out of town, and me being sick, and the holiday weekend, we just haven't had a lot of time to say much in the past week.

But every cloud has a silver lining, right? In this case, March is right around the corner. The content that's in the pipeline is still in the pipeline, and Nik and I are stuffing it more and more full every week. So everything we've been working on is going to get to you at some point -- we're just a little backed up right now.

(Hmm, I wonder if I should edit that last paragraph ... nah.)

need to familiarize myself with 3.5

(Moving to the Newbie forum ...)

The Temple of Elemental Evil does a very good job of implemeting the 3.5 D&D PnP ruleset. Neverwinter Nights does a pretty good job of implementing D&D 3.0 -- the differences between 3.0 and 3.5 are not very major.

Keep in mind that although knowledge of the 3.5 ruleset will be helpful for our game, it won't be essential by any means. And while we're doing our best to stick to the 3.5 rules, there will be many places where we need to diverge from them (sometimes significantly), due to the fact that we're a real-time MMP, and not a turn-based PnP game (or a computer simluation of one).

Music and ambient sound

Yes.

Actual recordings.

If our sound guys do their job right, you'll want to keep the sound on

Seriously though, we're aware of the fact that most people play MMPs longer than they play a typical single-player game, so there's more potential for the music to get annoying. We're keeping that in mind as we score the game. I'm not sure if we're going to be able to do a customizable soundtrack the way that s3rial's asking though -- our music system's a little more complicated than "dungeon track 1," "dungeon track 2," "combat track 1," etc.

I'm not 100% sure in this case, but it should be some of both. Keep in mind that Jason Booth (who posts here frequently) is very into sound and music, and if he has his way they'll both play a significant role in our game.

Game Time Vs. Real Time

Players will have certain opportunities to rest during their adventures -- you will not be able to rest whenever or as many times as you'd like, however. Because these adventures take place in private, instanced dungeons, and because we don't have aging or crafting in our game, the perceived time difference in bazag's original scenario is irrelevant from a game mechanics standpoint.

In terms of roleplaying, there will be somewhat of a discrepancy. For instance, I could be sitting in a tavern for a couple of real-life hours; during the same two hours, you and your party might travel to some newly unearthed ruins two-days' ride from Stormreach, retrieve a lost artifact, and return to the city. By necessity, some suspension of disbelief needs to be involved.

D&D Modules in the game??

You won't find any complete classic modules in Dungeons & Dragons Online -- IMO, it would just be kind of weird for us to be dropping them in there unchanged. However, you can rest assured that there will be lots of elements and situations inspired by or even taken directly from classic modules in our game.

Not only are our level and content designers long-time D&D fans (our lead level designer regularly talks about taking his party through such-and-such classic module back in the day), but we actually have a very extensive library of older and newer modules that the dev team references regularly.

Of course, these aren't our our only sources of inspiration -- our designers are also influenced by everything from 3rd-person action games to other MMORPGs to single-player CRPGs to survival horror games.

Will "feats" be in the game?

Feats will absolutely be in the game, and they will be important.

In general, character advancement in DDO will be very much like it is in D&D 3.5 -- characters will gain one or more of hit points, skills, feats, attack bonus increases, saving throw increases, ability score increases, spells, and special abilities when they gain a new level.

Turbine's Beta Rewards Program

Hi Folks,

We announced the Turbine beta rewards program today, which gives long-time subscribers to AC1 and AC2 an opportunity to participate in upcoming beta tests, including the DDO beta.

To answer your questions ahead of time, no, this doesn't mean that all of our beta testers will be AC1 and AC2 players, nor does it mean that we'll take all available beta rewards participants before we take anyone else. If you are a long-time AC1 or AC2 subscriber, this also doesn't necessarily guarantee that you'll get into beta.

This is simply a way of saying "thank you" to our most loyal customers by giving them an increased chance to test our upcoming games. By the same token, we recognize the contributions that you all have made as the pioneering members of the DDO community, and I'm sure we'll be able to find a similar way of expressing our gratitude

You can read the full text of the announcement here:
[link]

DEV PLZ! My toon!!

The earliest reference I've been able to find for a character being referred to as a "toon" is a post on rec.games.computer.ultima.online on December 4, 1998.

I've tried finding an older reference on the rec.games.mud newsgroups, but I couldn't get anything definitive. The word "toon" does show up a lot, because there were a lot of cartoon-based MUDs in the early '90s, so it's a little difficult to search. I did find a post on rec.games.mud from Mar 30, 1992, which includes the sentence "On muds, sticks and stones only hurt your character, who is generally a toon, one way or another," but I'm not sure if that counts.

And yeah, the TOON RPG was a lot of fun -- my characters always had a 6 Chutzpah.

DownTheRoad:'Unlockable' Races/Classes/etc. (none in specific..generalities please)

We definitely like the idea of unlockables. We're still tossing around ideas at this point, so we'd be pretty interested in hearing your thoughts (the feedback on the PrCs is a good example).

PlaneScape Torment

Personally, I think that while the Baldur's Gate games were the most popular Infinity Engine games, Planescape was really the best. I also think a lot of the dev team would agree with me.

Members Only forum, dev diaries, spell changes, oh my!

Hi Folks,

We just added a Members Only forum, which we'll use to preview new content for forum members before it goes live on the main site. Full explanation is here:
[link]

The first post on the forum is an upcoming Dev Diary by our own David Eckelberry. The Dev Diary details a fairly major change we recently made to our spellcasting system, so you'll probably want to read it (and possibly reply to it -- I'm sure there will be a lot comments on this).

You can read the Dev Diary here:
http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2057.

If you're not a forum member yet, you'll need to register first -- Members Only, remember?

Enjoy the read -- we look forward to hearing your feedback!

Zodiac, Web Monkey

News Flash -- Turbine changes name, launches new website

The Flash piece (which contains the sound) should only load on the home page. Are you getting the sound on subsequent clicks within the site also? If so, which browser are you using?

News Flash -- Turbine changes name, launches new website

Oh I am with the web team and I usually just lurk. I am just poking around the website feedback threads and want to make sure everything works.

*hopes he doesn't get in trouble for getting out of his cage... uhh meant posting*

News Flash -- Turbine changes name, launches new website

Thanks for the info!

We are still determining the standard set of browsing platforms we are supporting for all our web properties. Unfortunately Opera was not in the launch support list for this release (and I know it doesn't work well on Mac browsers either which our graphics designers aren't happy about )

Rest assured we are trying our best to support as many browsers as possible

As far as the sound, it's a shock factor trade off. I am definitely listening to feedback and will work with our web designers on possible improvements/tweaks. Thanks again!