The Gaming Den

Stubbazubba wrote:If WotC really wants to take D&D digital, they should just make in-depth custom mission-building the norm. All they have to focus on is making really slick tools for that, and people will make their own content. Instanced worlds and quests could be run in real-time, then saved to a library of sorts so others could use it later. I would recommend a brief "official" game with an official setting and an official plot that is fully voiced-over, etc., etc., but that's only one campaign; DMs and players can generate their own content on the side way faster than a dev team could. Admittedly, this is not an MMO, it's more like a battle.net for D&D.

Alternatively, you could have a single, expansive setting, wherein DMs could design custom missions, etc., and only ones which become popular or are otherwise deemed worthy would be stapled into the official setting. I'm not as sure how well this one would work, but it would maintain the MMO aspect.

Stubbazubba wrote:If WotC really wants to take D&D digital, they should just make in-depth custom mission-building the norm. All they have to focus on is making really slick tools for that, and people will make their own content. Instanced worlds and quests could be run in real-time, then saved to a library of sorts so others could use it later. I would recommend a brief "official" game with an official setting and an official plot that is fully voiced-over, etc., etc., but that's only one campaign; DMs and players can generate their own content on the side way faster than a dev team could. Admittedly, this is not an MMO, it's more like a battle.net for D&D.

Alternatively, you could have a single, expansive setting, wherein DMs could design custom missions, etc., and only ones which become popular or are otherwise deemed worthy would be stapled into the official setting. I'm not as sure how well this one would work, but it would maintain the MMO aspect.

ModelCitizen wrote: NWN tried that. The module toolkit was great, but I don't think anyone in the entire world used it for a once-a-week campaign. There is no way in fuck that anyone could generate a evening worth of content every week in their spare time. It took me at least 10 hours of work to generate one hour of playable content that didn't suck. (Also, you had to know basic programming to do pretty much anything. I don't think there's any way to make a flexible enough toolkit without asking the designer to write scripts.)

Swordslinger wrote: Did anyone actually use DM mode in NWN? Or did they just generate standalone modules that were hardcoded to run themselves?