I felt it was time that someone reviewed the game of Neverwinter Nights from a true Pen & Paper Dungeon Master perspective. Does Neverwinter Nights take us a step closer to what most Dungeons & Dragons player long for in a computer game?
This is not a review of the single player game. This is not a review of the graphics, the hardware requirements, or the loot in the game. This is a review from a Dungeon Masters point of view.
I have Dungeon Mastered going on 20 years now (yes, I am a geek and proud of it). I am a role-player in the truest sense of the word. I try and bring my game alive with props, interesting accents, and situations that evoke the imagination. To me, a Dungeon Master lives to create a sense of wonder and excitement in the players and the characters that they are responsible for. Players give up a large portion of their time to live in the fantasy world we, as Dungeon Masters, create.
Every Dungeon Masters goal is to give those players the perfect game. When a player stands in front of perfect strangers and recites their character’s experiences as if they were real, we have done our job.
So how does one translate that in to a computer game?
Bioware has done one exceptional job. Are there shortcomings and problems? Sure there are, however, I believe they have taken a step that out distances all previous incarnations of the CRPG.
Let me start off by discussing the problems with the Dungeon Master Client. I am just going to write an itemized list so we can get them out of the way:
- As of this writing the Dungeon Master Client is fairly unstable. We recently played a 4-5 hour game with 3 Dungeon Masters and 5 players on a dedicated Windows 2000 server with nothing else installed. It crashed about every 30 minutes. I am sure this will be resolved soon with the release of the Linux server (I hope). Last night we played using the new Linux server. When we crashed, we were unable to return to the game, we kept receiving windows errors on the client, even after reboot.
- There are also a bunch of odd quirks in the game. Such as when calling all the players to your location via teleport, it grabs all the DMs including the NPCs that they may be occupying! That was a shocker the first time, it almost wrecked our adventure when the NPC’s the DM’s were using to setup an ambush appeared with the players!
- Also, when a Dungeon Master inhabits an NPC, instead of the NPC’s dialog being spoken and stored in the text message window, it is instead hidden from the text message window until the player turns on “Include Dungeon Master Messages” in their chat window.
- You cannot create items directly in to someone’s inventory. You must spawn them on the ground. Correction! Marcel Smith informs me that you can, by selcting the item from the creator and then clicking on the person will spawn the item directly in their pack!
- The inability to remove an NPC from the game without killing them or moving them to limbo. Of course, we may just not know how yet.
- You can create any placeable object, although once it is dropped on to the terrain, it is no longer selectable. So be careful when quickly spawning a table that may block a door.
- Not quite enough variety, yet, in the tile sets. This is really out of the scope of this review; however, I really felt I needed to say it.
There are some other quirks when it comes to actually building the module but I am just focusing on the ability to Dungeon Master a game.
As a Dungeon Master I have always craved having multiple Dungeon Masters, however, this is generally not very easy in the Pen & Paper world. For one thing the other Dungeon Masters must be versed on every aspect of game play. For another most groups don’t have enough extra players to afford to do this.
This is where Neverwinter Nights truly shines. Imagine a Computer Role-playing game where a Dungeon Master plays every NPC and that their only purpose was to provide a rich story for a party of PC’s?
MUD’s and a few Massive Multiplayer games toyed with this idea. However, the scope is generally on a different scale and you usually have to work with what is already in existence in the game.
Several nights ago we ran our first game at http://www.neverwinterconnections.com. We had 3 Dungeon Masters and 5 players. The game was a total success (other than the repeated crashes) and everyone involved enjoyed it immensely. While running the game I was absolutely amazed at how large of a step was just taken towards that holy grail of a pen & paper game. The players were role-playing! They stayed in character! They walked instead of running everywhere! They questioned the citizens of the town, which were of course live Dungeon Masters… It was just awesome.
Not only was it extremely easy to possess NPC’s and to move about, it was also extremely fast. We were able to stay ahead of the party most of the time and luckily the party stayed together.
I could go on and on about the ease of Dungeon Mastering a Neverwinter Nights game, however, I think you realize it will just be more gushing over such an amazing product.
Before I wrap this article up I want to pass on some tips and tricks we learned while Dungeon Mastering our game. These tips apply to any one wanting to create an excellent role-playing experience. - Try and have more Dungeon Masters then players. It makes it much easier.
- Keep your number of players to the same size you are comfortable with Dungeon Mastering a Pen & Paper game.
- Ask your players to bind a key to walk. Tell them not to run unless the situation dictates it. This is for many reasons, but the big ones are: Easier to keep a step ahead of the players, and it promotes role-playing and a realistic environment.
- Tell your players you want them to role-play and that you’ll enforce it!
- Throw together a real adventure; don’t just reuse something built by Bioware.
- Keep a DM with the players at all times… so you know what they are doing and what they are talking about doing.
Feel free to send me tips so that I may add them to this article.
Happy DMing
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