What D&D Online SHOULD Have Been

[Goken100]

D&D Online is a disapointment; its the same sort of game as EverQuest, FFXI, and a host of others. What it could have been is a high-end internet utility for PLAYING D&D! Just imagine it: no need for all the utilities that people that play online use. A single program that allows adventure and/or campaign design, control of NPCs, communication with players, high-end graphical interface, number crunching, battle simulation, and a host of other bells and whistles. Its not impossible! We have the technology!

I just think something like this has gotta come along eventually to compete with better and better video games where the only DMs are the program creators. Such a product could tap into a whole new generation of gamers, in addition to people that want to play D&D online and need a good utility.

It could be set up so that 1 or more DMs could have a persistent campaign, to which characters are tied. Other areas could be set up for freelance characters, so that any DM setting up a short-term adventure can grab some characters and run a 3 or 4 hour adventure. Whats more, a group of friends with some laptops could get together like they always do in someone's living room or basement. Then they could use D&D online just to keep track of HP, EXP, and conduct their battles. But all dialogue would be live.

Am I crazy, or would this not be totally cool?

 

[Evil Monkey]

D&D Online is a disapointment; its the same sort of game as EverQuest, FFXI, and a host of others. What it could have been is a high-end internet utility for PLAYING D&D! Just imagine it: no need for all the utilities that people that play online use. A single program that allows adventure and/or campaign design, control of NPCs, communication with players, high-end graphical interface, number crunching, battle simulation, and a host of other bells and whistles. Its not impossible! We have the technology!

I just think something like this has gotta come along eventually to compete with better and better video games where the only DMs are the program creators. Such a product could tap into a whole new generation of gamers, in addition to people that want to play D&D online and need a good utility.

It could be set up so that 1 or more DMs could have a persistent campaign, to which characters are tied. Other areas could be set up for freelance characters, so that any DM setting up a short-term adventure can grab some characters and run a 3 or 4 hour adventure. Whats more, a group of friends with some laptops could get together like they always do in someone's living room or basement. Then they could use D&D online just to keep track of HP, EXP, and conduct their battles. But all dialogue would be live.

Am I crazy, or would this not be totally cool?

I haven't played it too much, but isn't Neverwinter Nights pretty much exactly like you described, and only getting more refined as time goes on?

I don't think DDO was ever supposed to be a mirror of PnP gaming.

 

[KenM]

D&D Online is a disapointment; its the same sort of game as EverQuest, FFXI, and a host of others. What it could have been is a high-end internet utility for PLAYING D&D! Just imagine it: no need for all the utilities that people that play online use. A single program that allows adventure and/or campaign design, control of NPCs, communication with players, high-end graphical interface, number crunching, battle simulation, and a host of other bells and whistles. Its not impossible! We have the technology!

I just think something like this has gotta come along eventually to compete with better and better video games where the only DMs are the program creators. Such a product could tap into a whole new generation of gamers, in addition to people that want to play D&D online and need a good utility.

It could be set up so that 1 or more DMs could have a persistent campaign, to which characters are tied. Other areas could be set up for freelance characters, so that any DM setting up a short-term adventure can grab some characters and run a 3 or 4 hour adventure. Whats more, a group of friends with some laptops could get together like they always do in someone's living room or basement. Then they could use D&D online just to keep track of HP, EXP, and conduct their battles. But all dialogue would be live.

Am I crazy, or would this not be totally cool?

We have it, its called Neverwinter Nights.

 

[Morrus]

We have it, its called Neverwinter Nights.

I was about to say that. NWN is the closest you'll get to that. And NWN2 comes out soon!

 

[Goken100]

well uh... never mind then...

I was about to say that. NWN is the closest you'll get to that. And NWN2 comes out soon!

HOLY !(@#^$)(! That's awesome, thanks guys. I just now read all about it on Wikipedia!

So... is it gonna be good? How easy is it going to be to create your own adventures? Campaigns? Worlds? What about implementing house rules... is that possible? I'll take what I can get, but doesn't hurt to hope.

 

[KenM]

The thing with NWN is you can't really create huge worlds. But with the right DM and group of players, its the closet thing i have played that comes to pen and paper DnD. But the one that is the DM can make each adventure and have the characters stored on his drive.

 

[takyris]

I really love the versatility of NWN. For awhile, we actually prototyped plots for our upcoming games in Neverwinter -- it didn't always look perfect, but you could test the plots and the dialogues, and you knew you were getting a stable engine, as opposed to whatever engine the actual game had that week. (Beyond just-plain-crashes, I've run into fun things like "Randomly falling through the floor" and "Became stuck to a low-hanging ceiling for all eternity" while trying to test games in the actual game engine as it was being developed.)

To answer the large-world issue, I'd note that while people have sometimes bagged on the NWN original campaign's writing, it has a BUNCH of side-content out there in the world. Beyond the critical-path plots, there are a ton of little side quests that you can take care of while in a given area. The big world isn't seamless, and you will definitely have to choose between reality (long areas of wide open space in which there's nothing fun to do) or game-ishness (all kinds of nasty monsters within spitting distance of each other) if you design a module yourself, but I think you can create the FEEL of a big world pretty easily.

The biggest thing I've noticed in NWN when trying to build modules for friends to play (I never got into DMing on the fly -- I preferred to make modules and then give them to people) was that combat went a LOT faster in NWN. The bad news was that the module the DM thought might take five weeks to play actually got done in about four hours. The good news is that you can put in a lot more combat as a DM, then -- the half-dragon manticore and the dire stirges don't take all night to defeat as everyone looks up the rules for how the tail spikes work and whether Dwarves have special resistance to Constitution drain.

 

[takyris]

Extra note: I don't play many MMOs, but the one thing I DID like about DDO over NWN is that it added the third dimension to some extent. Swimming, jumping, stuff you don't get in Neverwinter.

My dream online-gaming-game would take the Neverwinter functionality and pack it into a next-gen engine -- the Half-Life engine, the Unreal engine, whatever. Something that lets you jump, climb, and so on. The ability to have a player try to climb a wall and either succeed or fail based on his skill ranks would be really really neat.

You can ALMOST do it with NWN, but it involves slapping triggers near all the walls to ask if the PC wants to try to climb them and by each cliff to ask the PC if he wants to try to jump. It's an ugly workaround.

 

[KenM]

Anyone know if NWN2 will have swimming and or climbing?

 

[Daijin]

Anyone know if NWN2 will have swimming and or climbing?

Nope, insofar as I know.