Dungeons & Dragons Online Forum News (Jan. 14, 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.

Xundau, Community Relations

Skill based Vs. Leveling

There are a lot of arguments that can be made for and against both level-based and skill-based systems. However, the point is moot -- DDO is based on the 3.5 D&D rules, and those rules use a level-based advancement system.

As Vecter and ShadesofGreen point out, however, the D&D advancement system allows a tremendous amount of flexibility. As your characters gain levels, you will be able to customize them with feat and skill selection, so two 10th-level fighters, for instance, can be very different characters.

Furthermore, multiclassing options expand the range of character possibilities exponentially. For a good discussion on multiclass characters, try reading the following thread:
http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1288

Hear This Out

This topic has already been exhaustively discussed on these forums. I'm happy to report that the dev team has read the feedback, done a bunch of research, argued a bunch, read more feedback, argued some more, and finally reached a decision.

Sort of.

As of right now, the chargen point buy is set at 28 points, using the standard D&D point buy rules. We chose this amount for a number of reasons, and this is the figure that we're going to use heading into beta. We might play around with the number a little bit as beta progresses, but it's extremely unlikely that we'll change it before then.

Thanks for all of your feedback on this issue, in both this and past threads.


Warforged avatars

Just talked to our design team ...

As it stands now, we'll be following the book rules for Warforged healing, which means 1/2 heals for Cure spells and full heals for Repair spells -- note that Sorcerers and Wizards have access to some repair spells.

We'll see how this pans out in beta, and make any adjustments as necessary.

Spell/effect animation

Good ideas rawbanana. Our effects guy talked about this early last month; you can find his post here:
http://www.ddo.com/forums/showthrea...16398#post16398

As for the video, keep in mind that it was filmed and released last summer. Our spell effects have come a long way since then.

Feats you like to see

Most, if not all, of our feats will be drawn from the core 3.5e rulebooks and the Eberron Campaign Setting. Thus, feats like Energy Substitution and Spellcasting Prodigy are unlikely to make it in.

As for swimming, it is in the game, but it's in the form of a skill, not a feat.

Thay!!!

I'm actually not sure if it would be possible to Spelljam to Eberron from Toril or Krynn or Oerth -- seeing as the planar cosmology of Eberron is very different from standard D&D, it seems reasonable to assume that Eberron stands apart from the others. Of course, that's just IMO.

In any event, there won't be any Thayan prestige classes (or anything else) in DDO.

flying race

Sorry magnar, we have no current plans to implement half-dragons, half-celestials, or any other flying races.

To answer your second question, we have talked about adding additional races that will be playable only after some kind of milestone has been achieved in-game, but no final decision has been made.

Nik Davidson, Administrator

Server Full!?!

I'll try to clarify - 1000 is a target concurrent number of players. We will attempt to "soft balance" by adding more worlds if that number is consistently exceeded. We have ideas for "hard balancing", but we're not going to set those in stone just yet.

If our biggest problem at launch is that too many people are playing, we'll stop partying long enough to install new hardware.

Server Full!?!

Heh, I'll try - I think we're overthinking this.

This is really no different than any other game, except that we're setting a different target number. If all the people playing Game X decided at once to go play on Server Y, it would blow up. Same with ours. So, when average populations start getting too high, we open up new worlds. The 1001th person to try to log in won't get a "server full" message, it's just a target, a guideline. We feel like the best gameplay experience will be for average peaks in the 1000 range, so when numbers get near or above that, we'll react. But not by closing a big iron door. And again, we haven't been able to properly playtest this - that's one of our beta goals. So it might change. We'll see.

Would a haiku help?

We are as the reeds
Bending to the whipping wind
At night, unbroken

When does beta testing start?

That's not actually why we do betas, you know.

We will be announcing more beta information in the coming weeks.

Roleplay Servers

Food for thought: According to another game that features official RP servers, those servers get TEN TIMES the number of customer service calls as a regular server. (These are not easy-to-resolve "I'm stuck" calls, either.)

Discuss.

Is this or is this not D&D?

The "house rules" description is much more succinct and helpful than most of the things I've tried to say on the subject.

We've got three goals, which sometimes compete - a great MMP experience, a great D&D experience, and an incredibly fun game.

Balancing those three is a daily challenge, but one I think we're doing pretty darn well with, if I do say so myself. It helps to have the people at Wizards of the Coast there to back us up and help us solve some of the trickier interpretation issues. Having the makers of D&D give your adaptation the seal of approval should count for something. So, short answer to the initial question:

Is.

D&D Atmosphere

Correct me if I'm wrong, (and I know someone will) but has ANY PC D&D game given paladins mounts? Ever?

I'm not trying to trivialize this, but let's put this in a bit of context.

D&D Atmosphere

Hillsfar! I was thinking about that, and I had this image in my head of a guy on a twenty-pixel horse. I couldn't remember if that was Hillsfar or some other game. But you're right, you did get generic horses at some points in that game.

Owlbear, Owl Bear

Will there be Crap-onics..I mean psionics?

Does Owlbear have psionics? Let's find out!

Owlbear thinks hard ...

Owlbear thinks very hard ...

Owlbear thinks very, very hard ...

Owlbear thinks harder than he's ever thought before! (Except the time he ate a bunch of Epic Potions of Fox's Cunning.)

Owlbear's brain hurts.

Owlbear is hungry.

What's this? A fat, juicy, overripe thread that has run its course and should have been closed a month ago? Just what the doctor ordered!
Nope, no psionics here. Oh well, maybe next time.

Jason Booth, DDO Dev Team

confessions of a RPG-loathing action gamer

Turbine has a huge mix of gamers, many who play all different types of games. Personally, I'm much more of an action gamer, but I certainly enjoy good strategy and character building as much as the next person. I'm hopelessly addicted to puzzle games as well. Suffice it to say, my preferences are heavily felt in the combat system; but at the end of the day, we are building a D&D licensed game, not my personal vision of what I would like to create for my own personal fun.
In my preferences, I would do away with most of the traditional level/power curves (time = power) in favor of possibility space width (time = options). Tempered with a dynamic of limited choices (choose n of your skills) this removes power differentials between new and old players, allowing anyone to play with anyone.
I'd also remove static class roles in favor of dynamic allocation of abilities, allowing people to adjust their characters to the given situation and party. This removes a lot of content and grouping restrictions found in these games. The dynamic becomes "need four people" instead of "need these four classes"; and quest dynamics that require strange party allocations become much more viable.
These are the primary reasons for character separation in current games, which is fundamentally a bad thing. Now, the hard part is that every aspect of this you remove really needs to be replaced with something else to allow people to feel progress; but that can be managed, it's just a different line of thinking.
I'd also remove all notion of "too hit" rolls, and use physics/player skill exclusively for these calculations. I'd greatly reduce the number of spells, but increase the usefulness of each spell. Think of the way super hero powers work; someone who can create ice can do so many wonderful things with it, not just shoot it at someone else. Buff's would always be debuff's as well (protection from fire? great, but watch out for ice..).
Finally, I'd use instancing and quest restrictions to control the N^2 problem of player power (Generally, adding another player decreases the difficulty of a scenario by a power law function, not a linear one. In other words, 6 players are over twice as effective as 4 players are).

For me, games are about navigating the array of options successfully; and we only think about those options when an obstacle forces us to find alternate solutions to a problem. In many MMPs, the power curve (leveling) allows you to very quickly override any of these problems. Too hard? Add more people, or wait until you level up some more. This doesn't force you to think creatively about the given scenario and try new tactics. Instead, it places almost all focus on building the perfect character template, which should only be one aspect of the game.
One thing that really excites me about D&Do is that we have a lot of tactics available for people to use; both from the core rules, and from our real-time combat system. As designers, it's going to be important for us to prevent the power curve from obscuring the usefulness of those tactics (because using tactics successfully is half the fun). This is another reason why instancing, limited resources, and controlled party sizes are so vital to our design; they allow us to control the difficulty level in a manner that can't be done in a normal MMP layouts, and allows us to force creative thinking onto the play space. Too hard? Use stealth and sleep spells to get by instead of brute force; catch the monsters on fire by blowing up that barrel of explosives instead of fighting them directly; there are options, use them, or your toast.

confessions of a RPG-loathing action gamer

Of course, the problem with that is that many of my personal preferences are not D&D, and thus, not DDO. But like most things, there are ways to temper any dynamic to better fit your goal; we have introduced an element of user skill into DDO that hasn't existed in other MMPs. At first, some players might take this as "Not D&D", but I see it no different than making the smart choice of actions while sitting around the table. We've introduced various grouping and instancing dynamics to help us better control the power curve of players; again, some players may get the wrong ideas, but it is no different than a DM choosing a senerio thats right for your party. We've placed the rewards at the end of quests, but I see this no different than the DM awarding you XP after the encounter. I believe that many of these decisions are the right ones to advance the stigma's of the industry's output into a better position. Real time combat and physics is such a huge leap from where we were a few years ago that I'm not sure I'd want to make many additional leaps even if they worked better with the licence. It's much better to take one solid step forward than to leap and fall flat on your face, and both this licence, and our partners, have been very supportive of making such a step forward..

confessions of a RPG-loathing action gamer

There is nothing about the term "Role Playing Game" which implies that Time Played = Power, or Turn Based combat. Those are strictly your opinions on what you want an RPG to be, not the limits of what they can be. In fact, there is nothing about "role playing" which actually requires either of these elements to exist at all, and many forms of role playing do not use such constructs in any shape or form; some don't even have combat at all.
Many RPGs are derived from D&D, which does use both of these dynamics, but saying a game cannot be an RPG using different dynamics is like saying a game cannot be an RPG unless it uses dice.