Dungeons & Dragons Online Forum News (Mar. 07, 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

are there going to be alignments

Yes, though we have yet to go into detail about what effect they will have. Stay tuned!

We need a "Protection vs. Marketers" spell in DDO

We are not planning on doing this.

Crisis of faith for the "quest-based" system?

Nothing's really changed on the quest-based-advancement front. This is really an unrelated issue. Spellcasters were running into issues on a couple major fronts - user interface, and low-level utility.

As to the larger issue at hand...

The "big rules" of magic haven't changed. You still can't cast 3rd level spells until you're 5th level. (as a cleric or wizard, of course) You still scale your damage dice per caster level. Saving throws, spell resistance, they're all still resolved the same way. One of the areas we are very focused on it maintaining the stylistic and functional differences between Wizards and Sorcerers, which we acknowledge seems to blur somewhat with a spellpoint system. But we're not ignoring the issue, nor are we ignoring the feedback. Now that we've settled on a "what," we can start worrying about the "how much" question - that's all balancing feedback we're going to be looking for in beta, from players like you.

What about special abilities?

Yeah, the "x5" was an example, it's not a firm number.

How close will DDO be to PnP DnD?

How close with DDO be to PnP? Closer than you might think, farther away than you might want.

Races, classes, settings, monsters, feats, skills, spells, items - all very D&D. That's a start, right? Ok, we get some freebies there.

Combat mechanics are strongly based in the ruleset. There are a bajillion D20s being rolled, and at the moment (first test iteration implementation only) those d20s spew out at alarming speed in a little "dice rolls" window. We've made some changes to emphasise player interaction and player skill, but when the fireball goes off, you make a reflex save. You swing, add your attack bonus, compare to armor class.

When we make a larger change, like switching to a spellpoint system, we don't do it lightly. We're strongly biased in favor of the rules. In fact, this particular change we made at the urging of Wizards of the Coast; we resisted the change for a while, but it's the smart thing to do, and if WotC can't tell us how to make a D&D game then I don't know who should.

I filled the numbers on my first dice with that white wax crayon, too, you know. As a D&D player, it's not easy to stomach any changes from canon. But as a game developer, you've got to put gameplay first. It's the one and only trump card, and we only play it after thorough playtesting. Thanks for the feedback and questions.

How close will DDO be to PnP DnD?

Heh. I knew someone would say it, and my money was on you to be the guy to do it. Free soda for me!

The problem with that answer is that people never agree on anything, even with all the information in front of them. Just judging on post counts, (which is a lousy way to judge, mind you), opinion is roughly split on the change. That's where the gameplay trump card is strongest.

I wish you guys knew how much attention we pay to these forums. There will be a lot of people who, when they get deeper into beta, will see something and say "Hey! We were talking about that on the forums!"

Anyway, off to enjoy my delicious soda. Mmmmm.

Will DDO keep up to date with PnP D&D

I guess our answer on this one is "within reason." If we ship, and WotC releases errata that changes the damage on fireball to d8s, (unlikely example, but whatever) then would we change it in-game? We'd need to examine the change on its own merits first, and decide apart from the rule update whether we thought it would have a negative effect on the game.

If future changes to the PnP rules prove to be some combination of reasonable to implement, beneficial to the game, and important to the D&D look and feel, then yes. We do intend to update the game with ongoing changes, new features and content, etc.

Roleplaying in DDO

Emphasis mine. That's the key, guys. We create mechanics. We provide backstories, and NPC characters, and goals to be achieved. We create content. We do not create behavior. You can tell us all day long what you want the behavior to be, but unless you do so in terms of mechanics that would logically lead to these behaviors, it's not up to us, it's up to the players.

And let's be honest, if there's one thing I've learned, it's that if your hopes for the future depend on the good behavior of people on the internet, you may as well give up now.

There's been some good suggestions so far. But, I've said before and I'll say again - we are not going to be roleplay police.

We will enforce our code of conduct, we will put a stop to harassment, we will take action against defamatory speech, etc., we will do all we can do to make the game environment a fun, safe, and civil one. We'll have a sane and sensible naming policy. But there's no way in heck we're going to be giving players a stern talking to because someone submits a petition saying, "teacher, teacher, Kenny's not roleplaying!" (or worse, "...is roleplaying wrong!")

Roleplaying in DDO

Hahaha, honestly, you guys are great by comparison

One other thing to think about - when you play pen and paper D&D, what percentage of the time are you actually doing the following:

- Actively roleplaying
- Playing via the mechanics of the game, and discussing things amongst the players using those terms
- BSing about off-topic stuff.

When people talk about a single off-topic comment ruining their immersion, just think about what your last pen and paper session was like. In this idealized online world, people seem to want to hold MMPs to a higher standard of roleplaying than they would have for their own pen and paper game. That seems just a wee bit unrealistic to me.

Voiced Macro's

These are all good ideas, I'd be curious to hear more about which sorts of implementations you enjoyed versus those you found less useful. For me, I found the "nested menu" chat commands in Tribes to be very handy, while Diablo II's "voice macros" were next to useless for me. Any other specific implementations to consider?

Give me some Warforged naming examples

Warforged names can be a lot of fun. Consider that most of the time they are choosing their own name; in the midst of war, they were often only given enough designation to recieve orders. For our part, we use a lot of simple, descriptive nouns - concepts that a warforged can attach an identity to. Hilt and Pommel are great examples. The names define them as part of a greater weapon, which is their purpose as close associates of the Lord of Blades.

The numeric designations in my mind should be the exception. While some warforged are content with such mundane descriptions, these are beings with freewill and most will desire something more for themselves. The treaty of Thronehold freed all the warforged, so while some of them chose to remain with their former owners, they did so as employees - their names are still their own to choose.

Imagine that you have all the mental capacity and knowledge that you do today, but no more than three to five years of memory. No real family or society, just self-awareness and emotions without context. What name would you choose for yourself?

Xundau, Community Relations

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.

David Eckelberry Dev Diary #1 (Discussion)

Hi Folks,

Welcome to the first little piece of content we're posting in our "Members Only" forum. This is a Dev Diary that David Eckelberry (who posts on these forums sometimes) wrote; it'll go up on the official site sometime next week.

It's long, but it contains a pretty big announcement on a recent change to our spell system -- read on to find out what that announcement is, and then feel free to provide feedback below -- we want to know what you think about this decision.

- Xundau

*************************************

The Anatomy of a Design Decision

For the last several months, designers here at Turbine have been wrestling with a sticky problem, and today I want to take the time to give you an update on a decision we’ve made. Just as important, I want to tell you about how we reached the decision.

As more and more of Dungeons & Dragons Online becomes “ready-to-play,” we’re spending more of our play time running through dungeons the way the game is meant to be played. This means no cheating by using admin commands like “\immortal” and “\spell god.”

When we stopped using the latter of those two cheats — unlimited spellcasting — we discovered a big problem: spellcasters were running out of spells very early into each dungeon. We always knew this was going to be somewhat of an issue, particularly for lower-level spellcasters, but we had underestimated how much of a problem it would be. All of a sudden, wizards, sorcerers, and clerics didn’t have even close to the number of spells they needed to be effective.

Why was this happening? Let’s go back and look at the source of the problem—namely, the assumptions which determine how many spells each spellcaster has. In the pen-and-paper D&D game, the number of spells that spellcasters receive each day is based upon a certain presumption about the number of encounters that the DM will throw at them:

So that’s where D&D is coming from. Four good fights, then rest. And given the time it can take for a combat to be resolved over the grid using miniatures, the pacing for the pen-and-paper game has always felt pretty good.

But that’s not the model that DDO uses at all. With real-time combat and a computer resolving actions much, much faster than a group of humans sitting over a battlemat, DDO fights play out in a fraction of the time they would take in the PnP game. Resting every four fights would be ridiculously often, with rest camps every few rooms. On a gross estimate, you can expect to run through something between a dozen and twenty good fights between opportunities for resting.

Still, our first implementation with any system for DDO has been to be as loyal as possible to the D&D rules, and so we started out using the exact numbers from the PHB for spells per day. And while we predicted the problem of spell shortage, our playtesting showed that we had underestimated its severity. Clearly, something needed to be done.

Our first try was on the conservative side. We simply increased the number of spells each spellcasting class receives, literally taking the tables in the PHB and multiplying every number by five. So, bang, the first level sorcerer had a base of 15 spells to cast. The wizard and the cleric had 10. Choosing those 10 spells to prepare was sort of cumbersome from a player time perspective. But as you’d expect, spellcasters didn’t run out of spells as much, and were more fun to play.

Meanwhile, another problem had been heating up: the experience of playing a spellcaster suffered badly starting around 10th level, which in D&D is when spellcasters should really be coming into their own. When a spellcaster had more than 20 or so spells to memorize, spell selection became long and cumbersome. Spellcasting in combat was even worse, with the player not only choosing between 20 spells, but also needing to keep track of how many slots of each spell were prepared—or at least, for the sorcerer, how many slots were available for each spell level. It required multiple pages of hotkeys to manipulate in play, and literally pages of UI to manipulate when going through spell preparation.

Maybe you can see what was about to happen. When we increased the number of spells universally, interface and gameplay issues exploded. Players were being asked to prepare dozens and dozens of spells, and to track those choices both onscreen and mentally. The UI even broke for some characters, as they had to choose more spells than the UI was capable of handling. We tried a couple of other tweaks, but it was becoming more and more clear to us that spell memorization had some very serious issues in our game.

After much deliberation, we decided to look at an alternative-yet-familiar spellcasting system presented in Unearthed Arcana, a book of optional D&D rules published by Wizards last year: spell points. To be honest, spell points were always lurking in the collective subconscious of the design team, beckoning us with answers to our problems. Balancing a hierarchy of how much spells should cost by level and how many spell points a spellcaster should receive—these things are adjustable with relative ease. Spell selection becomes easier and more user-friendly. And just about every player of fantasy RPGs has some familiarity with spell points or mana systems.

Still, for a long time, we resisted this implementation -- we want DDO to be as loyal to D&D as possible, and we still weren’t absolutely convinced that memorization in some form couldn’t work. What really clinched it for us was when some of the Wizards of the Coast designers encouraged us to implement the spell point system. They believed, as we came to, that players would have an easier and more fun experience with spell points.

So that’s where we are now. In the last week, we’ve implemented a spell point system in DDO. Spells of different level have their point costs, and spellcasters gain spell points based on their caster level and their ability scores. Over the next several months, we’ll be working closely with Wizards and our beta testers to iron out some of the kinks and set up a good system of exactly what those numbers should be.

What does this mean for how the game is played? In some ways, quite a bit; in other ways, not much at all. Spell acquisition is largely unchanged. Sorcerers and bards acquire spells during character generation and advancement, and they have that limited allotment of spells to choose from during their play. Wizards, clerics, and other spell-preparing classes select their suite of spells for the day, and they can make changes to that allotment when they reach rest camps within dungeons.

All spellcasting classes must then deal with both tactical and strategic choices as they go into dungeons and combat. There’s usually a right spell for the right situation, whether that is to deal damage, heal damage, incapacitate foes, charm enemies, etc. Those decisions vary not only with the character you’ve built, but with the situation with which you must deal. Spell points remain a limited resource for all spellcasters, and no spellcaster wants to run out of spell points when they’re most needed.

I realize that many of our fans won’t like shifts to gameplay in DDO that take us away from our D&D roots. Believe me, as a long-time player and one of the developers of 3rd edition D&D, I understand. The bottom line is that we don’t take these types of changes lightly, but we are willing to make them if necessary. I can only ask for your trust as we do everything we can to make you the best game possible, and to make DDO the best user experience possible.

David Eckelberry

David Eckelberry Dev Diary #1 (Discussion)

Thanks for the feedback guys -- let me see if I can address some of your comments:

• It is true that with a spellpoint system, wizards now cast their spells spontaneously, making them more similar in some regards to sorcerers. However, wizards will still have a big spellbook and will still have to memorize a limited selection of spells from that book -- the difference is that they no longer lose access to a spell once they've cast it (unless they're out of spellpoints). Wizards will be able to change their list of memorized spells when they rest.
• Meanwhile, sorcerers still only know a limited number of spells, but can cast any of them as long as they have the spell points. Sorcerers also get more spell points than wizards.
• The issue at hand here isn't so much that we want spellcasters to be casting all the time -- it's just that even maintaining the status quo got to be too messy. Because of the pace of our game, resting after every four encounters just isn't an option -- as Eck states, rest opportunities come after every 12-20 encounters. So to give spellcasters the same number of spells per encounter as the PnP game, we'd also have to give them four or five times the number of spell slots as they do now.
  
  Managing those spell slots, even for sorcerers, became a nightmare, and really slowed down gameplay. ("Do I want to memorize three hastes, two stinking clouds, one hold person, five fireballs, and four lightning bolts; or two hastes, three stinking clouds, two hold persons, six fireballs, and two lightning bolts? Oh wait, I want some flame arrows too -- just a sec guys.")
• Just to clear up any confusion, spell points won't regenerate over time -- you'll still have to find a resting place in order to restore them.

David Eckelberry Dev Diary #1 (Discussion)

I think you're making some assumptions about some aspects of the spell point system that we haven't really announced.

At this point, all that we've said is that (1) we will be using a spell point system based on the Unearthed Arcana rules because (2) using memorization rules by the book didn't work out -- spellcasters ran out of spells way too fast, and waiting for classes to memorize even the standard number of spells was a drag on other players. We've made no announcements as to the number of spellpoints per level, or the spellpoint cost of various spells. We're very well aware of the problems you mention, and will be paying close attention in beta to make sure that everything's balanced.

Because other fundamental properties of the game are changing -- going from a turn-based combat system played on a grid with dice and miniatures to a real-time combat system played in full 3D is a big, big change, but it's one that we (and WotC) saw as necessary in order to make this game a viable MMORPG. We are not out to make spellcasters more powerful; all we're trying to do here is make them as useful as they are in the PnP game -- no more, no less. You guys can't play the game (yet), so you just have to believe us, but before this change spellcasters in DDO were woefully, woefully underpowered.

If we weren't making these decisions, we wouldn't be doing our jobs. I've said it before and I'll say it again -- we're not doing a straight-up conversion of the PnP rules. We're making a D&D MMORPG that uses the D&D 3.5 rules as a starting point, but which also draws heavily on other MMORPGs, single-player CRPGs, and third-person console games.

This will still be D&D, full of familiar classes, races, spells, feats, skills, monsters, people, and places, and with a ruleset that should at least be familiar to long-time D&D players. But our implementation will also be significantly different from PnP D&D in that combat is real-time, there won't be a DM running each play session, we're using spell points instead of memorization, etc.

We're taking long-time D&D players to heart (heck, we're long-time D&D players) -- we want to make you all happy, and we sincerely hope that you'll stick around and give us the opportunity to do so. But if what you're really looking for is a carbon-copy of the PnP game that just happens to be playable online, you're setting yourself up for disappointment, and quite frankly you're probably better off looking for a play-by-email campaign or an online PnP campaign run via a roleplaying client like Klooge Werks.

Crisis of faith for the "quest-based" system?

Kale, I'm actually glad you posted this in a separate thread, because this is something I wanted to address, but I didn't want to do it in the massive out-of-control thread.

We are still sticking to the idea of quest-based xp, and as far as I'm aware, there has been no talk of scrapping this system. That being said, the key question as I see it is, with all of this talk of "12-20 encounters per rest opportunity," how many of these encounters will have a non-combat solution?

The answer, I think, is many encounters, but by no means all. Or even most. But combat is an essential part of D&D, and it will be an essential part of DDO as well. Yes, I know it's possible to run a pacifist campaign in D&D. But just like a PvP campaign, this is an advanced option, not the norm for D&D.

I think a good analogy for how we're approaching non-combat encounters can be found in a game like Baldur's Gate. If you look at Baldur's Gate, there are many opportunities where you can avoid an encounter via stealth, dialogue, bribery, solving a puzzle, or simply turning right instead of turning left. At the same time, there are many encounters in which combat is simply unavoidable. It isn't the type of game that you can complete without ever swinging your sword or casting a combat spell.

By the same token, DDO will have some encounters, and probably even entire quests, where combat is avoidable -- our quest engine even allows us to make combat a fail condition for a quest. (e.g., "Steal the bishop's plans but don't kill any of his guards -- I don't want the Silver Flame's blood on my hands!") But you won't be able to take your character up to level 20 (or even level 5) without ever getting your hands dirty. If we've given that impression, I apologize.

Even when combat is necessary, we're encouraging a thinking man's (or woman's) approach. Whereas in other games anything that diverges too much from standing toe-to-toe and slugging it out is often considered an exploit, in our game, you'll be rewarded if you can figure out a way to turn the tables to your advantage -- if you can trick that nasty hill giant into falling into a pit, you're free to go on your merry way (or you can pepper it with arrows and sling stones until it meets its untimely end).

Armor slots

The slots we currently have in game are:

- Primary weapon
- Off-hand weapon/shield (if you're not wield a two-handed weapon)
- Ammo
- Armor
- Helmet/headgear
- Hands
- Wrists
- Boots
- Belt
- Cloak
- Right-hand ring
- Left-hand ring
- Amulet/necklace
- Trinket (for ioun stones, etc.)

This is pretty close to what's available in PnP D&D, and I don't think we'll be changing it unless we see a significant need in beta.

starting gear

I just talked to our equipment and treasure designer about this, and interestingly enough, this isn't something that's been spec'd out yet. In our current build, you start with a couple of pieces of starting equipment, depending on your class -- for instance, rogues start with leather armor, a shortsword, a shortbow, and 100 arrows.

I guess the question I would have for you all is: how important is this to you? To be quite honest, I've never put much stock into starting equipment in CRPGs or MMORPGs. While I admit I have fond memories of rolling 5d4 and using my 50-200 gp to outfit my first level fighter (hmm... can I afford an extra 5 gp for splint mail?), in the end, it really didn't make too much of a difference after the first couple of adventures.

Guess On how long to beta.

Hmm... where's the "soon" option?

Why not set the in game day and night periods to an hour or two?

The day-night cycle in DDO doesn't really have anything to do with when you can rest -- the last thing we want is people sitting around while they wait for the rest timer to go off. There are specific places in each dungeon where you can rest (generally, each place can only be used once), and you can use a rest area as soon as you find it -- even if you just used another one 10 minutes ago.

As far as aging goes, it won't be a part of DDO. If you want a character that looks older, there should be some options in chargen that let you do this.

Number of Encounters and the Feel of Eberron

(Moving to DDO General)

Well, first of all, there aren't any rats in our game.

As far as what to expect encounter-wise, our designers are using the challenge-rating (CR) tables from PnP D&D to place encounters. In a dungeon designed for, say, level 10 characters, you can expect to face a number of encounters of CR 10 or so, as well as some tougher challenges. Specific encounters can also be made harder or easier by the placement of traps and other environmental obstacles.

Some dungeons will also have boss encounters, which will require a little more strategy and planning to overcome. We want our boss monsters to be more than bigger versions of other monsters who hit harder and have more hitpoints, so we're aiming to give these monsters specific behaviors that make the encounters exciting and memorable.

Any known minimum system requirements?

Kishar, we haven't announced any official specs yet, but your machine should be able to run DDO just fine.

The Turbine engine that DDO is built on is very scalable. With all options maxed, it can give today's high-end machines and graphics cards a pretty good work out, but we also want the game to be playable by people who don't have the latest and greatest hardware. In fact, our goal is for the game to run on a machine with a GeForce 2 graphics card -- whether or not this will actually happen remains to be seen, but that's our target for the low-end of things.

When Must We use Our Feats

There is no current plan to let players "save up" their feats or skill points until later levels -- feats must be chosen and skill points must be spent when you level up.

Why not do away with the Sorcerer?

We're not going to cut sorcerers. Despite their similarities, sorcerers and wizards have many important differences, both roleplaying-wise and mechanics-wise -- and yes, this is true even with a spellpoint system.

As Ajonti points out, sorcerers have been a core class in D&D since 3.0 was released in 2000. There would be nothing to gain from removing them (cutting sorcerers and adding monks or druids would not be a zero-sum change), so why would we do it?

Give a little love to the Psionist

Psionics definitely won't be in at release.

Whether or not we add them in the future is something that remains to be seen.

Size restrictions on gear?

For many of the reasons mentioned above, our weapons and armor won't be specifically sized for small vs. medium races, especially since halflings will be the only small-sized character race when DDO launches.

Group size

(Moving to DDO General)

As the FAQ states, we still haven't nailed down the max party size, but it's probably going to be six.

As for PnP, it really depends on the maturity/seriousness/focus/skill level of the players and GM -- if you get a bunch of dedicated gamers together, there's no reason why a 10+ person campaign can't work. Personally though, I prefer games with four or five PCs.

The largest extended campaign I've ever played in was actually the Eberron campaign that Nik ran for some of us last year, which had seven PCs in it. Frankly, all of the out-of-character discussion ("How can we put this stuff in DDO?" "Are you still playing CoH?" "Did anyone order pizza?") left Nik, umm, a bit grumpy at times. It probably didn't help that some of us (**cough**Ken Troop**cough**) decided early on that "grief the DM" would be a fun meta-game.

Why not do away with the Sorcerer?

Rules aside, the distinction in PnP has always been (IMO) that wizards are the more flexible arcane casters, able to learn and cast just about any spell; while sorcerers are the more focused arcane casters, with a limited number of known spells that can be cast in abundance. Spellpoint system or no, I believe that there's plenty of room for both archetypes in DDO.

As it stands now, sorcerers will have significantly more spellpoints than wizards, which should prove to be a pretty big incentive to play them. If they prove underpowered and underplayed despite this advantage, we can take a number of steps to balance them (note that these are off the top of my head -- none of them have been suggested or even discussed with the rest of the dev team):

• More spells known.
• Even more spellpoints!
• Inherent bonus to sorcerer saving throw DC.
• Inherent bonus to sorcerer spell damage/duration/range/area of effect.
• Sorcerer-specific feats.
• Sorcerer-specific items.

It's good to hear your feedback about wizards vs. sorcerers. But to be honest with you, I'm a little mystified by the "The sky is falling! Sorcerers are completely useless! Cut sorcerers now!" tone of this conversation. We have many months of both internal and external playtesting ahead of us, and adjustments can (and probably will) be made. Have faith that the dev team will make sure that both classes are balanced and desirable to play.

Any known minimum system requirements?

No, absolutely not.

Timed Quests

Our designers do indeed have the ability to put add a timer to quests. I'm not sure how many quests will be using it though -- from what I've seen so far, it's more the exception than the rule.

Hmm Nik, what about we just add resting?

PnP D&D has indeed been played for 30 years now, and I agree that it's a pretty balanced system, especially 3.5e (it's far from perfectly balanced though -- check out this thread on the WotC forums for a fun example!)

That being said, as Revinor points out, we're not a PnP game -- there's no DM, we're using real-time combat, the pace of the game will be much faster than in PnP, etc. -- and this means that we can't automatically assume that a rule that's balanced in 3.5e will be balanced in DDO. Rest assured, as we convert individual chunks of the rules, we're preserving them where possible -- we always start with 3.5e as our baseline. But as David's (not Nik's) article details, we often find that the rules need to be tweaked or even drastically changed -- as was the case with spellpoints -- in order to work in DDO.

As far as regeneration goes, I doubt we're going to do this. One thing we specifically want to avoid is forced downtime. We play plenty of MMOs over here, and none of us is very fond of sitting around for five minutes waiting for our hitpoints and mana to regen. When you find a place to rest in DDO, you'll be able to refresh yourselves very quickly -- the flipside to this is that you won't be able to rest wherever you want.

David Eckelberry, DDO Dev Team

David Eckelberry Dev Diary #1 (Discussion)

Yes, he would, and yes, he will. Currently in testing, clerics get a number of spell points equal to wizards. Sorcs get significantly more.

Balancing Loot and Experience...

You've noticed a good issue. The problem of some feats and the treasure system is a problem in PnP, and a bigger problem for us, since we don't have a DM to make sure you will someday get the magic weapon for which you've focused.

Part of the problem with this lies directly in the Weapon Focus (& Specialization, etc.) feats. Back when I worked in PnP D&D design at WotC and we were doing 3.5, we seriously discussed killing those feats (popularity steered us away) or altering them a great deal so that they encompassed weapon categories or groups (ie, all swords, or all slashing weapons, or even all melee weapons). We backed away, not wanting to haphazardly change too much in 3.5.

For DDO, we're looking at a few of those solutions again. We want players to have quite simply a better chance of wanting to use weapons that they find.

Jason Booth, DDO Dev Team

How close will DDO be to PnP DnD?

So let me get this straight; you'd prefer we not mess with the system even if it's broken, not fun, and makes some classes majorly annoying to bring along in groups? We've always said, since day one, if you expect an exact translation of the D&D 3.5 PnP rules, go elsewhere. At the end of the day, a user will ask himself "Am I having fun with this game?". If he answers no, it won't matter what ruleset that game is following.

Personally, I've always prefered using spell points; it's just a more straight forward system for a computer game. I would have prefered to not have spent months of development time persuing a system we knew would be frought with potential problems, and then months of development time trying to make that system work only to scrap it all together. That's not a fun use of development time; it sucks to throw time work like that. But the team has always felt that unless such a core system was proven to not work for our game, we'd impliment things as close as possible to the core ruleset. We went through that process, we did the extra work, and if that ruins your "trust" in us, well, so be it. Personally, I'd rather ship a fun game and loose your trust than ship a broken game to keep it.

How close will DDO be to PnP DnD?

Well, at the end of the day, those users will be asking themselves the same question. "Am I having fun while playing this game?". Now, some might not even get to that question because of an "issue" like this; but I've never felt catering to those that condem a game without playing it made much sense. Without any basis of comparison (ie: without playing the game), it's easy to picture how any system could "work". Sometimes I wish there was a way to quelch arguements with implimentation (ie: Here, try it), but it's just not always practical.

How close will DDO be to PnP DnD?

Which basically leads to the question, "Is D&D about the rules, or about the experience born from that construct?". I often feel many D&D fans are far too caught up in the rules to the detriment of the experience. For MMP players, perhaps the phrasing would be "Many MMP players are too caught up in exploiting the rules for XP/Hours to enjoy the experience". But thats often the way people work; our brains are about pattern recognition, so it's easy for us to get lost in exposing and breaking the patterns below the experience.

That argument would only hold true under the same medium of delivery. We are not delivering an experience that you will have with 6 people sitting around the table, tossing dice and eating pizza.