Dungeons & Dragons Online Forum News (Nov. 23, 04)

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

Can Fireballs hurt your party members?

This is something we're currently discussing and prototyping. The two front-runner ideas are to have AOEs only hurt the caster, or to reduce the effectiveness of an AOE that would affect friendly targets. Fireball the party, do less damage to the baddies.

We won't decide until we playtest, but that's where we are today.

HighEnd game/Raiding?

I have no idea where the 300-500 number came from, but it was NOT from us. Please expunge the entire range of numbers 300-500 from your brain. At least as it applies to our servers. Unless the question is, "On a scale of 1 to 300-500, how awesome are our servers?"

Jason Booth, DDO Dev Team

HighEnd game/Raiding?

---

misinformation..

---

Since the first days of the project (long before you heard about it) we've been internally talking about a number around 1000; so nothing has changed with us. Almost every time I browse the boards I run across someone saying something to the effect of " The dev's said in 'some interview' that blah is true", and quite often, there's no basis for the statement. Often people intertwine what they think, want, or fear something to be into a statement, and others pick it up as fact and pass it around. Even if something is coming from a profesional site, reporters often make mistakes; for instance, one interview reported we were only going to have a dozen dungeons in the final game. Generally, if it's not on this site in an official manner, treat it as hear say.

Xundau, Community Relations

Interesting non-dungeon dungeons

Yes.

As Raistlin points out, rangers in 3.5e D&D have a lot of flexibility, and don't necessarily have to conform to the solo outdoorsman stereotype. In fact, 3.5e rangers have Knowledge (dungeoneering) as one of their class skills.

This is one of the things that I love about 3rd edition D&D -- the flexibility in defining your character. Even if you stick to a single class, there are so many choices: your fighter can be a nimble duelist or a hulking brute, your rogue can be a stealthy cat burglar or a fast-talking charlatan, and your ranger can be the consummate outdoorsman, a gritty dungeon-crawler, or even a streetwise bounty hunter.

Codog Cuisinart, DDO Dev Team

How will levelling work?

---

How Leveling Works

---

Vectner –

Once a player gains enough experience to level their character, they must seek out the level trainer for the specific class that they are intending to train. This trainer will handle all stages of advancement for that player (skills, spells, feats, and special abilities). The cost of training will be distributed through your choices. It is currently planned that feats, spells, and skills will all have associated costs to train at an individual level. Special abilities a character class implicitly gives a player (e.g. Aura of Good for Paladins) are planned to be granted to the player for free. The training session will apply the adjustments to the character instantaneously allowing the character immediate access to their hard earned new skills, spells, feats, and abilities. One idea we are kicking around is whether we will also make certain character abilities that you can earn only through quests that do not count against your normal advancement slots (e.g. a feat you can earn that does not take up a feat slot).

There are no current plans to have degenerative aging effects on players.

Thanks for your questions!

Thomas Oakstaff, DDO Dev Team

The consequences of non- AOE spell party damage

"If you think your local mage will get you killed, don't bring him.

Simple as that."

Well, that's kind of the problem isn't it? All talk about griefing aside, the last thing we want is to create a situation where wizards are constantly blacklisted for accidentally killing the party with a fireball.

In pen and paper D&D, this often comes up, and the way it usually goes is one of two ways:

1) The person playing the wizard looks carefuly at the map and calculates the best spot to place the fireball based on the range of the spell. The front-line fighters are barely missed, and the maximum number of monsters are affected.

2) The person has never played a wizard before, and targets too close to the party, and is smacked down by the other players, who are then promptly scolded by the DM for using foreknowledge and playing out of character. Everyone then has a good story to tell about the first time Fred cast fireball.

Anyway, the main point: Fireball is much harder to use in a real-time, fast-paced game like D&D Online or even multiplayer NWN, where you don't have 2 minutes to plan where you're going to put it.

If there are any party members near the monsters, which happens constantly, they might move during casting... assuming you manage to target the right spot in the first place... so you're going to hit them. Maybe not every time, but often enough that it's a problem.

Another key point: We don't want to make wizards harder to play than they are in P&P.

They're hard enough to play as it is, with their vast array of spells and the requirement that they choose spells ahead of time.

I'm not saying how friendly-fire will be handled, but the situation is not as simple as "don't party with them if they get you killed." Wizards are frequently going to kill other players by accident if full friendly-fire is turned on, especially with the high-level spells. And it won't necessarily mean they're a bad player.

Besides, there's other ways you can penalize a poorly-aimed fireball without killing other players.

PS When we first implemented fireball, full friendly-fire was turned on. During our weekly playdays, nobody could even get out of the starting area because of the non-stop fireball PKing. You'd log in to immediate fiery death. We had to turn it off, at least internally, to actually test anything else.