Dungeons & Dragons Online Forum News (Nov. 14, 04)

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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

Will beta be only North America again?

The beta will almost definitely be English-only, and we will expect our testers to be reasonably fluent in English.

No word yet on whether there will be geographic restrictions -- we'll announce this when we announce beta signups.

Spells per day

Good questions. Right now, I can say that:

• We're not planning on using anything like mana, spell points, etc. -- the fire-and-forget paradigm is something that we consider very central to D&D, and it's pretty important to us that we use the same (or a very similar) system.
• Spells won't be refreshed based on any kind of real-time clock. On the other hand, you won't just be able to rest whenever you want. We'll release more details on how we're handling resting at some point in the future.

BTW, one thing that I really like about our system is that there's no regeneration-based downtime. That is, if spells don't regenerate, and hit points don't regenerate, it follows that there won't be any sitting around waiting for these numbers to go back up.

Sure, you might want to take a break to cast some healing spells or buffs, drink a couple of potions, let the rogue or ranger scout ahead, plan your next move, etc. But you won't be sitting around for 5 minutes waiting for your hit points and mana to refill.

Interesting encounter that could keep servers on their toes!

Hi Folks,

I'm going to hijack this thread for a moment, because I want to address two common misconceptions that seem to pop up on this board with some frequency:

First of all, there are currently no plans for any type of player housing, instanced or otherwise.

Secondly, as far as server populations go, our line of thinking has always been "small enough to feel like you're not just a face in a crowd, but big enough to not feel like a ghost town." We want our servers to feel close and intimate, but we also don't want them to be so sparsely populated that Stormreach seems deserted or that it's impossible to find a group.

I think that at some point in the past we did say we expected about 1000 simultaneous characters per server. And while this is still a reasonable estimate, the truth of the matter is that this is a ballpark figure, and we won't know the final target population number until sometime during beta. In any event, the "100-200 simultaneous" figures people have been throwing out there is way too low. This is a massively-multiplayer game, after all.

Now, as far as the thread topic goes ... this is yet another area that we're not quite ready to talk about in detail. I will say that the situations presented above are the types of adventures and encounters that we (the dev team) remember from the PnP game, and we're working hard to replicate these types of situations in DDO.

After all, who's ever played a PnP D&D game where the DM says "The mysterious hooded figure leans towards you and says, 'I would not normally turn to a group so young and inexperienced, but time and circumstances have conspired against me, and I am left with no other choice ... I need you to venture outside of the city gates and slay no fewer than eight giant rodents.'"

Nik Davidson, Administrator

Why does the Vault have more screenies?

Chances are good, I'd think.

Number of Classes

One of the things about D&D that I love and fear when using it as the basis of an MMP character system, is that there are very bad choices. We can't really stop people from making very bad choices. You can multiclass a wizard/sorcerer. We can't stop you. You can take nothing but cross-class skills with your rogue or ranger. You can take amazingly poor or redundant feats for your class. You can play an 8 wisdom Cleric.

We can try to categorize and identify these Very Bad Choices (VBCs) and give warnings and such when you're about to make a VBC. "Are you sure you want to take the Stealthy feat? You're a fighter in plate mail, with no ranks in those skills. McFly?" Except there are SO many combinations of VBCs that I don't think we'd be able to cover them all.

Too much multiclassing is just one of many, many VBCs available. Maybe we should just call it a "feature" and move on.