Dungeons & Dragons Online Forum News (Jan. 30, 05)

Remove all ads!

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

quest for ECL character?

We've discussed "unlockable" ECL races, and at a high level, we think it's a fun idea. No immediate plans for it, though. Definitely not for ship.

Anyone seen the 'Anniversary of D&D' book?

A couple of us Turbies are quoted in there, actually. Due to an unfortunate misprint, my article is actually in there twice. Double xp for me!

Keeping Evil under Control, allowing PvP

Gunther, thanks for the good discussion points, and welcome to the community. As some of the other posters mentioned (though they could be a little more polite about it...ahem!) we came to our stance on PvP after a great deal of deliberation, and it's provided a good clarity of focus to the rest of our game vision. While we do discuss ideas for future expansions, please understand that we are 100% focused on the game as it will be at ship.

Talk of future expansions and such is always interesting, but until we have a game to build a future on, well, we're going to be focused slightly elsewhere.

Thanks

Respec when new content is released

All good discussion points. Respec is still in the "maybe" category - for a number of reasons, not least of all the un-D&Dness of it, we're leaning toward no. At the same time, there's been a lot of valid points here. I think we're more open to the respec of feats and skills than we would be class levels, but we'll see.

Xundau, Community Relations

Whys its a bad idea to play as a party of spellcasters......

---

Why it's a bad idea to play as a party of all fighters ...

---

1. http://www.nuklearpower.com/daily.php?date=011207

W.W.W.D

Good discussion here. If I can give my thoughts:

• As others have mentioned, there are plenty of feats for a Wizard or Sorcerer to take other than the Item Creation feats. In addition to the various metamagic feats, a lot of the regular feats make sense for an arcane caster -- things like Dodge, Mobility, Improved Initiative, and Great Fortitude all come to mind. Actually, I'm not sure if all of these feats will actually be in the game or not, but suffice it to say that there will be plenty of feats to choose from if you're a Wizard or Sorcerer.
• Crafting is simply not on the table right now. This doesn't necessarily mean that it will never be in the game, but it's not a feature that we're actively working on. We decided very early on that our focus would be on dungeons, the adventuring party, the city, the campaign and storyline, and real-time combat -- what we consider the essence of D&D. We're spending all of our time and effort from now until launch perfecting these aspects of the game. Once we launch, we'll start considering new systems such as crafting and PvP, but please note, there is no timetable for these features.
• One thing about crafting in particular is that we aren't sure if the PnP crafting system will translate well to an MMORPG. I'm not saying that it definitely won't, but we need to do more research. If/when we do crafting, we want to do it right -- much like our combat, we want to make it fun and exciting from moment-to-moment, not a boring grind that you slog through to get the big shiny at the end of the road.

I understand that some of you do in fact consider crafting to be very much part of the essence of D&D, and for those of you, I apologize. As I've said before, we really wish that we could make a game that could be all things to all people, but we simply can't.

We decided very early on that we were going to be about quality over quantity, and that entailed making some hard choices early on. But I daresay it's a good thing that we made these decisions up front -- we've had that much more time to perfect what we *are* doing, and the things that we're pushing off will get the same amount of attention and polish when we decide to do them.

Widescreen support?

As long as your video card(s) can handle it, we'll support just about any resolution you can think of, including 1680x1050.

Quest Experience Bonuses

Good question.

Our dungeon quests generally have one or more primary objectives, and can have a number of secondary objectives as well. So for instance, the primary objective of a dungeon might be to recover the hobgoblin chief's plans. But you might have a secondary objective to free his kobold slaves, and another secondary objective to destroy some of his supplies.

Only the primary objective(s) needs to be completed in order to successfully finish the quest. Completing secondary objectives will increase your the xp you receive, and possibly reward you in other ways as well.

Play nice, guys.

The warforged as an opponent?

Right on. Statistically speaking, a warforged without special armor plating is no more or less quiet than a human, and a warforged rogue can be quite silent (and deadly).

A warforged with the Mithral Body feat is considered to be wearing light armor, and has a -2 armor check penalty, which does apply to Hide and Move Silently. These penalties can be reduced by taking the Mithral Fluidity feat.

A warforged with the Adamantine Body feat is considered to be wearing heavy armor, and has a -5 armor check penalty, which can't be reduced.

And yes, warforged in DDO would be well-advised to steer clear of Rust Monsters...

Naming your character

Many of the names you mentioned will probably be against our naming policy -- names of real people, trademarked names, etc. On the other hand, a lot of people like to give their characters non-RP names, and there's not a whole lot we can do about this. We are considering (but not commiting to) roleplaying servers, and any such server would have a stricter naming policy.

Another thing to keep in mind is that, according to the Eberron Campaign Setting, warforged can have names that wouldn't normally be considered RP -- for instance, "Tin Head" isn't a very good name for an elf, but it's perfectly appropriate for a warforged. (Come to think of it, I'd wager that most good role-players could come up with a plausible explanation for an elf named Tin Head).

Some quests will be repeatable, and some won't. Similarly, some quests will have random elements (monsters, traps, placement of quest objectives, etc.), and some will be mostly fixed. I'd imagine that there's some correlation between these (i.e., repeatable quests would tend to have more random elements), but I'm not sure.

XP will scale based on your level -- if a dungeon is considered easy for your party's average level, you'll get less xp for completing it.