Dungeons & Dragons Online Forum News (Feb. 15, 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

Grumpy Friday!

I don't really spend too much time psychoanalyzing you guys. The reason being, I have met people in real life who were in person, the polar opposite of the picture I drew in my mind of them based on their forum posting. One guy I remember in particular, awful grammar, spelling, punctuation, no capitalization, the whole "i think ur crazy dood" style of posting. Turns out the guy's an engineer, brilliant, well-spoken, and he had been doing it as a joke the whole time. We're talking years. Years of a joke that nobody got because it was just too believable.

So I don't put too much stock in style anymore.

Dear Nik Davidson

I've heard several people suggest that "The Realm" was the original source of "toon" to describe an MMP character. I may do a bit more digging...

This is what I think of mmorpgs that are called "rpgs"

This thread has gotten weird.

Anyway, to the original point, it's quite the conundrum. Something about persistant world games gets players in a mindset that leads to LOTS of playtime. Amazing amounts of playtime. I mean, I love the recent remake of Pirates!, but you won't find me playing it for more than an hour or two at a time. With MMPs, though, I occasionally find myself in truly marathon play sessions. And here's the kicker, it's not because I'm having more fun. I'll be so bold as to say that all current MMPs are less "fun per hour" than single player games of equal caliber.

We've spent a long time looking at why. Without going into too much detail, we've found some of the points that bear changing, much of which has lead to our combat and content systems. But, here's the worry: the higher-intensity play which we believe leads to more moment-to-moment fun may not mesh with the expectations that people have of a massively multiplayer game. MMP play is, for the most part, a more relaxed, social activity. So we strive through playtests and iteration to find that balance.

Good commentary so far, it's something we spend a good amount of time contemplating and trying to address.

superstitions

Here's a big ol' truth for you: Fortune favors the bold.

The gods of dice smile upon those who rely on luck for honorable heroics. I'm playing a d20 modern game set in 1930, and when I attempt something that a pulp action hero should do, odds be damned, the dice have my back. The dice know what's up.

Xundau, Community Relations

starting stats

If I can hijack this thread for a sec ...

When I logged into today's playday (in case you don't know, the whole team has a playtest every Friday afternoon/evening so we can keep up to date and give feedback on recent changes and additions), I was pleasantly surprised to see that the pointbuy is now implemented -- previously, your stats were automatically assigned to you based on your starting class.

I was feeling a little, er, bard-ish, so I created a human bard. I started assigning my stats without paying attention to the points remaining, and ended up with the following:

Str 14
Dex 14
Con 12
Int 12
Wis 8
Cha 14

These were better stats than I had hoped for, and I still had two points left, so I ended up assigning them to Con. Pretty good character overall - +2 to hit, damage, AC, hit dice, and spell-related stuff, +1 skill point/level, and -1 to Will saves. Bards tend to be one of those classes that rely upon lots of different stats, but I was perfectly happy with these.

Not quite sure what my point is here -- I guess the moral of the story is that I think 28 points is plenty

Stories that make your hair stand on end...

We currently have a series of quests in game that deal with the ghost of a noblewoman who has quite a bit of (tragic) background story -- over the course of the quests, the players will need to learn about who she was when she was alive and how she came to be a ghost; in order to resolve the story, they'll ultimately need to unravel the mystery behind her tragedy. Good stuff -- but then again, we have some really good content developers, so it's to be expected.

As for the original question, we have a lot of talented level designers too, and there's no shortage of scary, tension-filled sequences that are more along the lines of what you'd expect in a console or single-player PC game. This is really helped by the fact that all of our dungeons are instanced and private for each party -- it's hard to keep things scary when you know that there are three other parties ahead of you, deeper in the dungeon, but we don't have that restriction.

And the Turbine Engine's scripting system lets us do so many cool things. For instance, some of us were playing through one of our dungeons in a recent playday. Everything was going smoothly until two of us rushed ahead to grab a treasure chest -- the gate we had just ran through crashed down, separating the party, and a bunch of undead crawled out of the ground and surrounding crypts to ambush us. I looked over at the level designer who had made these changes and was watching us play through them, and he had a huge grin on his face.

So in summary: undead? Plenty. Tense, gripping situations along the lines of what you'd expect in a survival horror game? Yup. Complex plotlines where not everything is quite as it seems? You got it.

Stories that make your hair stand on end...

Not in the scenario I mentioned, and not in our game right now. But I just spoke to one of our designers, and yes, there is at least one crew of undead pirates on the drawing board right now.

Oooaakstaafff!

...

To answer the original question, we haven't had any updates on the campaign because we haven't played since sometime in the fall. Most of us already have our own long-term D&D campaigns that we're involved in; we started the Dev Team one last summer when the Eberron Campaign Setting came out, in order to get a feel for the world.

However, we've gotten very busy in the last few months (not that we weren't busy before...), and the campaign has been put on indefinite hiatus, and in truth is probably finished. People weren't willing to give up their own campaigns, and between those, and work, and other games it's just been too much to keep the Dev Team game running. We all have a very good feel for Eberron now, so I'm pretty sure it served its purpose.

Nevertheless, the legend of Thomas Oakstaff continues to grow: you might have noticed that the dev playing him liked the character so much that he decided to use him as his forum handle. And who knows -- the campaign ended in Xen'drik, and I imagine Oakstaff, Tertius, Tungsten and company are probably still kicking around somewhere down there. If you ever see them, you can say "hi," although personally I'd be more inclined to run.

News Flash -- Turbine changes name, launches new website

Hi Folks,

We've got some non-DDO Turbine news for you.

As of today, Turbine will now be known as (drum roll please) ... Turbine! Well, actually, we're officially changing our name from "Turbine Entertainment Software" to "Turbine, Inc."

And no, this doesn't mean that we are no longer in the business of making entertaining software

We also have a new website up at http://www.turbine.com -- check it out and let us know what you think.

The official press release is here:
[link]