Dungeons & Dragons Online Forum News P2 (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.

Vessekai, Dev Team

So how does quest-only advancement work?

Agreed - if we drastically underestimate how fast players can complete quests, then we will also underestimate how fast they will advance. Good playtesting will be key in getting accurate figures.

There's no doubt that players will optimize the ability to solve the content/quests in DDO. I'm always amazed at MMO players' ability to defeat content in ways the devs never even thought of. But still, I'm more confident in making reasonable guesses for quest-based advancement.

With an exp-per-kill model, any exploit in a single creature's AI can lead to unpredictably fast player advancement. Generally, in an exp-per-kill model, a few small loopholes can be repeatedly exploited to gain fast levels. Quest-based advancement should be less succeptible to a single point of failure. Even if you do find a loophole, we're not going to let you do the same quest endlessly to exploit it.

Vessekai, Dev Team

So how does quest-only advancement work?

Yeah, some randomization is good. Proper use of randomization can help to keep content more fresh and challenging. Too much randomization might not be so good. You might lose any semblance of the original hand-crafted experience.

Vessekai, Dev Team

So how does quest-only advancement work?

Well, you obviously have to do something in an MMO to advance. The whole point of using quest-based advancement is so it doesn't feel like a hamster wheel. It should feel more like a ferris wheel - everyone is screaming, cheering, clapping their hands and eating candy floss, with sparkily fireworks exploding overhead.

Seriously tho, the use of quests gives our content designers a lot more leeway to make the leveling experience more interesting.

Our quests will be very integrated into the way you play our game. Even a spontaneous scenario could be a quest.

Vessekai, Dev Team

So how does quest-only advancement work?

You nailed some key design issues for private instantiated areas:

This is a tough problem. There's two competing objectives here. We want to easily allow players to group up and play together. Yet we also want our dungeons/areas to be challenging. Allowing an endless stream of characters into a dungeon would diminish this. Its certainly been a topic of debate here at Turbine.

Heh. Howz that for masterful avoidance of answering the question?

One thing we have considered doing:

• prohibit inviting players from outside the instance.
• keep "stages" of a private instanced adventure relatively short.
• allow outside players to join between stages.

This works well in some cases, but does place some restraints on the content design.

We're experimenting with awarding partial exp, based on how far you got. This may or may not be the final solution.

As my pet rock used to say, victory is made sweeter by the toil of one's journey.

-V.

Xundau, Community Relations

3.5 with or without Errata?

Our game designer who's working on the rules conversion (David Eckelberry) actually worked on both the 3e and 3.5e D&D rules -- suffice it to say that he knows the sourcebooks inside and out, including the errata. I just spoke to him and he confirmed that he is using 3.5e with errata as the basis of the conversion.

That being said, keep in mind that the difference between the DDO ruleset and the 3.5e ruleset will be greater than the difference between 3.5e with errata and 3.5e without errata.

Ken Troop, Dev Team

So... What CAN we do in game?

There are already some good answers to this question in this thread, but here's my response to the original post:

In a lot of ways, Tiran, you're right. Our gameplay is going to revolve around quests, the campaign, dungeon crawls, and not much else. We're not going to have massive (or small-scale) PvP battles. We're not going to have resource harvesting and a complicated, multi-stage crafting system. We're not going to have an complex market-driven economy with buy and sell orders, futures, escrow, and the like.

If you look at the current crop of MMORPGs, these systems are all just different permutations of the same old treadmill: get more money. Get more power. Get more items. Get more land. Make your guild stronger. Why? Because that's what you do in a massively-multiplayer game, right?

One of our design mantras for DDO is that our game should be fun at every moment. Combat is exciting and challenging, with cues from both PnP D&D and console-style adventure games. Dungeon adventures and quests are fun, with heavy influences from single-player RPGs and console games. We haven't given a lot of details on this yet, but our dungeons are going to do a lot of very cool things that haven't been seen in a massively-multiplayer game before.

Why do you play any game for a long period of time? Because it's fun, and because in whatever set of activities the game does possess, there is a depth and richness to the content that leads to lots of enjoyment combined with long periods of exposure in order to master. We're focused on making sure that our combat and dungeon experiences are easy to learn and difficult to master. This is why we neither want nor need a large variety of different and shallow experiences to throw at the player to distract them from the fact that each system in itself is only rewarding in an advancement context. Dungeons and Dragons Online rests on the assumption that if the core activities of the game are fun and interesting (combat, advancement, content), then that game will appeal to players for a long time, even without PvP, or crafting, or an intricate economic simulation.

Xundau, Community Relations

The 9th level spell Wish.

I know others have mentioned this, but it bears repeating: you don't necessarily have to buy the books to learn the 3.5 rules -- they're part of Wizard's open source-ish System Reference Document (SRD), which can be downloaded for free. The download page is at http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=d20/article/srd35 .

Of course, it's nice to have the books around, especially the Player's Handbook -- they're better organized, easier to read, they have art, etc. But in a pinch, the SRD contains the same info in .rtf format, and it's available onlineas a free download. Note that the SRD doesn't contain any Eberron-specific information; it covers the core rules only.

Anyway, sorry for hijacking the thread. I'd like to respond to the original question of the Wish spell, but honestly there's not much I can say right now. In general, we're going to refrain from talking about whether specific spells, skills, or feats are going to be in the game. The lists are generally in a state of flux, so there's not too much of a point in talking about it; this will change as we get closer to launch.

This doesn't mean that we don't want to hear you all discuss these things -- threads like this are very helpful to us.

Xundau, Community Relations

Alignments

Malfoy, how would you handle your scenario in a PnP game? I've always thought that paladins were one of the most interesting classes to play in D&D, for exactly these types of dilemmas. Does a lawful good person slaughter evil, but defenseless, creatures?

Say there's a human village nearby the kobold village, and you know the adult male kobolds have been raiding the village periodically and taking what they need, slaughtering the occasional guard or villager who gets in their way. So sure, you kill the raiders. But what about the women and children kobolds? If you leave them, are the younger kobolds going to grow up and start raiding again in 5 or 10 years? Or are the survivors going to starve to death because they were depending on the raids for their sustenance? Should you slaughter them all now so neither of these scenarios is a possibility?

Obviously, whether or not your campaign focuses on these types of choices depends on the players and the DM, but one of the things that I love about Eberron is that tries to make these types of ethical dilemmas more prominent. Good and evil can mean different things to different people -- there are no absolutes in Eberron (well, groups like the inspired and the daelkyr are pretty much evil through-and-through). It goes back to the whole pulp influence, which emphasizes shades of grey instead of black and white.

This is much more interesting to me -- I like the idea of a paladin who is constantly struggling to figure out and do the right thing, rather than the one who lives in a world of absolutes, where good is good and evil is evil. Perhaps not coincidentally, I've always been more of a Batman guy than a Superman guy.

As for how alignment will be handled in DDO, I can't really say too much right now; I can say that there will definitely be alignments in the game

Xundau, Community Relations

Do monsters 're-spawn' ?

When an MMORPG doesn't have instanced dungeons, respawns are necessary or else the server would quickly become devoid of monsters. Once every adventuring party has its own dungeon, this isn't so much of a problem.

The ThomasOakstaff post that psibot's quoting is correct -- in general, once you kill something, it stays dead. However, this isn't an absolute. There will be places where creatures either receive reinforcements or (gulp) come back to life, and either of these could be considered respawning.

Thomas Oakstaff, Dev Team

So how does quest-only advancement work?

"I guess i'm wary of a 'quest-only' advancement system. It seems very risky. I would hate to miss out on a game i've been waiting 30 years for them to make, just because my schedule doesnt give me huge chucks of time to devote to CONSTANT grouping..."

Actually, one of our primary goals is to ensure that you don't have to devote huge chunks of time. Long quests will be multi-part, and each part is worth experience.

For the most part, individual "adventures" should take around an hour to complete.

Thomas Oakstaff, Dev Team

So how does quest-only advancement work?

Regarding quest stages: This is a particularly thorny issue. We've given a lot of thought to it. Our current approach is to allow players to help others on their quests, even if you've already done it, or if they're on part 2 and you haven't done part 1.

Whether or not there will be exceptions to that rule is not something I can comment on, but in general, if your friend has a quest, you can help with it.

[ October 24, 2004, 16:39: Message edited by: chevalier ]