Dungeons & Dragons Online Forum News (Jan. 08, 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

Auto-Translation

FFXI had a translation feature for commonly used phrases. It worked well for communication about game terms.

On-the-fly translation really hasn't come far enough. Mess around with Babelfish, for example - wordswaps don't account for context. Especially the way MMP players type... there are days I'd love to have a translator for other english-speakers.

We need a "What is DDO" article

We're planning for a big release of info coinciding with our beta announcement. How soon? Sooner than it was yesterday...

Healing requiring touch?

We playtested touch-range healing, and it was just awful. Delaying your action until a later initiative so that the cleric has time to heal works great in PnP, but is a huge pain in a realtime system. Right now, healing is short range, but ranged.

Why not Take DDO to the next level?

We spent a great deal of time discussing ways to do this, truth be told, early in the design stages of the game. We talked about solutions that ranged from "quest wizards" to tool-based dungeon building, and eventually we hit the same blocking points.

First, we'd still need to do just as much content ourselves anyway. Even if the tools are out there, the game needs to be "complete" out of the box.

Second, there are some messy legal issues. If we're charging a subscription for the game, and other people are creating assets and content, and we're not compensating them... trouble. We're not going to let people just have our proprietary server software, so player-run servers aren't in the cards. We talked to our lawyers about it, and it's not an easily resolved dilemma.

Third, there is a MAJOR cost in vetting player-submitted content. Doing an editing/bugfixing/quality checking/engine performance test on a piece of content takes a lot of work, to the point where it's not a savings of time versus just doing it ourselves. And of course, the signal-to-noise ratio of submissions in the first place. For every featured player-made NWN scenario, there are hundreds that didn't make the cut. I can't stress enough how big an issue this is. The more freedom you give the player to create, the more it will take to integrate it. If you reduce the integration to a reasonable level, you remove enough freedom to negate the attractiveness of the feature.

Lastly, our tools are in a constant state of development. We use all in-house technology, and it's not something that we could release to the public. NWN uses a simple java-like scripting language, because it was designed for public use. Our scripting system is much more robust, and isn't intended for public use; it's designed to be used by our engineers and designers.

I hope this explains our position on the matter - we still think it's a good idea, and I sincerely hope we can come up with a solution for the future. But it's not in the cards for DDO at launch, and it's not for lack of consideration.

Thanks,

DNDO OS Platforms

Just PC Windows for the initial release.

Item, Weapon, and Armor Drops

So, just curious, but do you guys really want this? Sorting through a list of mostly-garbage items every time you kill an orc? Rebalancing your inventory every few minutes because you've exceeded your encumbrance levels due to sixteen rusty battleaxes and suits of smelly chainmail? (You will not be leading a donkey and cart through the dungeon in this game, sorry.) Missing the one good item from the room because you forgot to search the orc who ran off into the hallway before dying?

I've played pen and paper campaigns that did it both ways. In one, I remember we'd load up our carts and bags with all sorts of crap, keeping meticulous lists of what suit of ringmail came from what monster, then cast detect magic on a small mountain of junk once we got overburdened. In another, the DM made it pretty clear right away what was trash and what was useful - the "treasure phase" was short and sweet. The first was certainly more realistic, except that it actually just realistically depicted us "gaming the system" in a different way. In the second, we spent more time playing, and less time bookkeeping.

So, imagine you're sitting down at your computer, playing the game. You and your party have wiped out a room full of vampire spawn and their henchmen, but you've still got plenty of dungeon ahead of you. Describe what you what the "treasure phase" of that encounter to play like. Keep in mind that we will be using encumbrance rules.

XP gain considerations for various play styles

Let's not get too far ahead ourselves and discuss nerfs that we will make a year after launch.

We haven't really done too much tweaking on our advancement rate yet; we're still developing our content. We're definitely going to be adjusting that pace as we get into beta, and adjustments based on play time is a possibility. Again, that's not the kind of call we make without playtesting, so it's too early to say "We will do [This] or [That]."

Xundau, Community Relations

Multi-classed characters

Off the top of my head:

• The old SSI Gold Box Games (the original Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, etc.) are 1st edition.
• Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale are 2nd edition.
• Baldur's Gate 2 was mainly 2nd edition, with some optional rules (kits), and some classes from 3rd edition (barbarians, monks, and sorcerers).
• Icewind Dale 2 is 3rd edition.
• Neverwinter Nights is 3rd edition.
• Temple of Elemental Evil is 3.5.

Multiclassing and dual-classing rules didn't really change too much from 1st to 2nd edition, or from 3.0 to 3.5 -- the big change came between 2nd and 3rd edition. In the new system, you generally have complete freedom over when and how you choose multiclass levels. So for instance, you can alternate every other level, or you can take 10 levels in fighter, then take the rest of your levels in cleric. Or you can do something wacky like take 9 levels of fighter, 10 levels of cleric, and then 1 level of barbarian.

The only potential drawback is a 10% xp penalty imposed whenever you have two classes that are two or more levels apart. However, each race has a favored class that ignores this penalty, and humans and half-elves have the benefit of their highest class automatically being their favored class. It's a somewhat complicated rule, but the bottom line is that you probably won't have to deal with this penalty if you plan your character correctly.

As far as relative power goes, some classes mix better than others. When classes mix well, multiclass characters are just as (if not more) powerful than their single-class counterpart. For instance, I'd say that a 10 Fighter/10 Cleric is a very viable character, as is a 10 Ranger/10 Rogue. On the other hand, some combos are just a bad idea -- a 10 Sorcerer/10 Wizard will almost definitely be gimped.

Admittedly, it's a big change from 1st and 2nd edition, but once you get the hang of it, it's much more flexible and logical than the old rules. (Did anyone ever understand why humans could dual-class but not multiclass, and non-humans could multiclass but not dual-class?)

Healing requiring touch?

This particular choice has absolutely nothing to do with our ability to code the rule, and everything to do with gameplay -- as Nik stated above, we did in fact code and test touch-based healing, and the end result was that it was virtually impossible for clerics to get a heal spell off during combat. Not fun for the clerics.

I've said this before, but it bears repeating: when preserving the 3.5 rules conflicts with good gameplay, we're almost always going to go with gameplay. We are trying to stick to the 3.5 rules whenever it makes sense, but PnP D&D and an MMORPG are two very different mediums: one is a turn-based game played with paper, dice, a handful of other players, and a live DM; and the other is a real-time game played with your computer, hundreds of other players, and pre-programmed content. If a certain rule, feature, or ability from the PnP game doesn't work in DDO, we do not hesitate to change it, or remove it from the game entirely.

The bottom line: if you want to see a nearly letter-perfect online translation of 3.5 D&D, with a couple of tweaks here and there, this isn't the game for you. But if you want a fun, compelling, real-time MMORPG that implements the bulk of the 3.5 D&D ruleset and does quite a few things that no MMORPG has ever done before, you'll be one happy camper.

New Adventures

Sorry that Nik and I kind of hijacked the thread.

Getting back to the original topic, I think you make a very good point. I'll talk about this with Nik tomorrow and see what we can do.

"The DDO Manifesto" has a nice ring to it, no?