Dungeons & Dragons Online Forum News (Oct. 24, 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.

Thomas Oakstaff, Dev Team

Dungeons and Druids

Just to avoid confusion, when I refer to D&DO as a dungeon crawl, I'm referring to a style of gameplay. For example, in some games the style of gameplay is "camping and pulling to the same spot for hours".

Do not take this to mean all of the content in D&DO is in dungeons. There will be outdoor areas.

Cheers!

Xundau, Community relations

PvP

Hi Everyone,

Since we opened up this site, one of the most-discussed topics has been player vs. player (PvP) gameplay -- will there be PvP in Dungeons & Dragons Online? If so, how will it be implemented? Full-scale PvP areas? PvP servers? Duels? Arenas?

PvP is an important component of many massively-multiplayer games: Asheron’s Call, Shadowbane, WWII Online, Dark Ages of Camelot, and Star Wars Galaxies are a few examples. As such, it's natural that the question be asked about DDO, and it's something that we've thought about since we first started working on this game early last year.

Spurred in part by all of the community discussion, we've gone ahead and made our final decision. I'll go into the details of the decision below, but the short answer is this:

PvP gameplay will not be a part of the initial launch of Dungeons & Dragons Online.

I think we've been pretty clear from the beginning that DDO was never going to be a game with a heavy PvP component. If this wasn't explicitly stated, it's always been there between the lines -- our focus is on party-based adventures, dungeon crawls, a living city, and an epic campaign. Not large-scale PvP combat.

The strongest argument for this decision, in our opinion, is the fact that PnP Dungeons & Dragons has never been a PvP-oriented system.

Yes, we know that the bad guys in D&D can be human sorcerers as easily as they can be, say, owlbears. But in the PnP tradition, that evil sorcerer is played by the DM, not another player. And while PnP sessions that pit characters against each other can be fun for a temporary campaign that lasts one or two sessions, the classic D&D campaign is all about the characters working together (or mostly together) to solve their problems and advance the story.

Now, it's true that some of the problems that exist with excessive player conflict in PnP D&D -- namely, having only one DM for two or more opposing groups of characters -- are not as much of an issue in DDO, where our server acts as the DM for all characters. This is why PvP is something we discussed in depth during the early stages of development.

But the thing that we kept coming back to was that PvP gameplay just doesn't fit our idea of D&D, either in a PnP format or a massively-multiplayer format. We know that some of you are going to disagree with us, but ultimately it was not a good fit for Dungeons & Dragons Online.

So that's our explanation for not having a heavy PvP component. But what about a light PvP component? Just because the primary focus of our game is the PvE campaign, that doesn't mean that we can't have some PvP on the side, right?

We didn't decide on this one until more recently, but the decision ended up being the same -- we aren't going to have duels or arenas in the initial launch either. The primary reason for this is that the D&D rules aren't really balanced for one-on-one fights, and we don't want to have to mess with them in order to make dueling work.

One of our key development mantras is that we're keeping the game specs tight -- we're not doing everything, but what we are doing is going to be really, really good. I really wish that we could be all things to all people (it would make my job a bit easier), but unfortunately we can't. To those of you who were looking forward to PvP in DDO, I sincerely apologize, but we honestly feel that this is the best decision for the game as a whole.

- Xundau

p.s. Feel free to post your reactions below, and remember to keep things civil. Thanks!

Xundau, Community Relations

Charisma

It's true -- the Eberron campaign that I play in here at Turbine includes a Paladin with an 8 Constitution and a Warforged Fighter/Barbarian with a 15 Int. We used the 4d6 method of chargen, which makes for slightly more "irregular" characters than a straight pointbuy, but we also have some characters that are a little more min/maxed.

Personally, I agree with Thin Lizzy that it's really up to the individual player -- if people want to play a half-orc barbarian with 20 Str, 6 Int, and 6 Cha, so be it -- they'll be slightly better in combat than the same character with 18 Str and 12 Int. Personally, I would choose the latter, since I don't like to play dim-witted characters, but that's just my choice.

To address the original question, I wouldn't expect Charisma, or any other stat, to behave much differently than it does in PnP D&D. It'll be an important stat for Sorcerers, Bards, Paladins -- maybe Clerics to a lesser degree; for other classes, it won't have much of a direct effect on gameplay.

Nik Davidson, Administrator

If Ruleset Updates from 3.5?

A few of us looked at this topic, tilted our heads, and said "Huh."

WotC hasn't said anything about a timeframe on 4.0 - it'll probably happen eventually, and I would think that we'd get a little advance warning on such a thing. Still, this would be years away, so it falls under the category of problems we don't have to solve today.

Xundau, Community Relations

Drow Tiefling and Aasimar.

Just to be clear, we are not designing this game with the expectation or requirement that people have the Eberron Campaign Setting or the core 3.5 books. When the game launches, there should be enough documentation available that the game will be accessible to everyone, regardless of whether they're familiar with D&D or not.

Of course, having these books and knowing the PnP game will probably help shorten the learning curve, but we don't want it to be a requirement.

Sorry for leading the thread off-topic ...

Xundau, Community Relations

Question about monsters: Skeletons

Heh, actually, in our current test build, skeletons are a big problem for some of the lower-level characters. You see, damage reduction is in right now, and unfortunately shops aren't, which means that you're stuck with the weapon(s) that you start with.

This is fine for clerics and fighters (who start with maces in their inventory), and barbarians (who get a club in addition to their greataxe), but it's kind of a problem for rogues and rangers (who just get swords and bows). Especially the poor rogue, who has trouble getting past five damage consistently in the first place

Jason Booth, Dev Team

Jason, can we have AC2-style character music in D&DO?

Everything is a compromise; but not always one of time. It would actually be pretty easy for us to do a player music system again, since we've allready done the hard research of figuring out how to compose such a system. We also did the research after AC2 on a system that would allow players to write melodies using a very simple interface.

The problem though is that there were lots of tradoff's made in the AC2 system to allow that to work which we're not always willing to make for each product. For instance, the background score in AC2 took a HUGE hit in quality because it had to work in such a manner as to allow all the other elements to work over it. This ment that all the music had to be in the same time signature and tempo (6/8 at 80, which allowed us to achieve a 3/4, 4/4, 6/8, 9/8 and 12/8 feels through polymeter), and had to be modal in nature. All the music had to be composed using Midi and DLS2 banks, which greatly compromised the sound quality and feel. Basically, you can think of the music in AC2 as really being one giant stack of music: roughly 400 seperate components (320 player melodies, 50 monster melodies, 8 backgrounds in 3 keys each) that always work together, no matter which combinations are played, or how many are played at once. Lots of musical compromises were made to achieve that "compatability". In other words, we sacrificed flavor for functionality.

We're choosing different tradeoff's for this project, and many of those tradeoff's rub against the grain of how an AC2 style music system would need to function. I think the route we're taking for this music system is the right direction for this project though. More info... later... haha

Vessekai, Dev Team

So how does quest-only advancement work?

Hi Kryloc. Great post.

Yes, exp will be awarded by completing quests. Exp will *not* be handed out on a per-kill basis. This lays the foundation for getting rid of "the leveling treadmill" in D&DO. No repetitive killing of the same creatures over and over.

You're right. Quest-based advancement is a big challenge to develop. But the payoff is huge. In my opinion, its going to be one of the defining aspects of our game.

To keep up with the content demands of an MMO, we've had to be pretty smart about how we design content. I probably shouldn't give away too many of our tricks just yet. But I can say that our content designers are focused on creating good action, good gameplay, and good story for the players to experience. This will help lend D&DO more of a hand-crafted feel than you might find in other MMOs. As much as possible, we want our game to feel similar to modules/campaigns of pen&paper D&D. Part of our job is to figure out how to adapt this into an MMO. We've focused a lot on creating a world model and quest system capable of supporting this kind of design.

This is one of primary things I've been focusing on while developing D&DO.

-V.

[ October 24, 2004, 12:26: Message edited by: chevalier ]