Dreamblade’s online demo is much better than the live demo I played back at Gen Con SoCal (and wrote about here). It does a lot of things right, from letting the newbie player make a few mistakes without affecting the flow of the game to offering bits of advice. It does some things badly, too, like not explaining certain oddball exception rules very well.
But it also does something I didn’t expect, and that I don’t think is quite by design: It tells a little story.
A screenshot of Weathertop in Lord of the Rings Online, taken from actual play.Out of curiosity, ever since the first day I played LOTRO, back in August, I’ve been informally polling players in the game with a few questions. I’ve asked on open channels, I’ve asked the members of kinships and Fellowships, I’ve asked strangers and in-game friends. Most of the questions I ask are about people’s history with paper RPGs, but the question that gets ignored the least: “Why are you here? Why did you choose LOTRO?”
A lot of the people I talked to had strong, positive opinions about their choice of MMORPG. I was expecting most answers to somehow involve the global MMORPG superpower, World of Warcraft. Some answers did. But three of the answers I got the most often surprised me.
In the most recent issue of Comics & Games Retailer, there’s a news item about Wizards of the Coast’s plan for 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons.
Each characters class will have a specific, defined role within an adventuring party, and the designers’ goal was to give each class interesting options for gameplay at every level.
This approach to characters — although I know many of my D&D-loving brethren love it to death — leaves me cold. Although I’ll admit that it may be reading too much that one little sentence, what I hear is this:
