Videogame engines inspired by D&D discussion.

[Lago PARANOIA]

This thread is pretty much here to discuss the tropes certain videro gamez cribbed off of D&D and how it effected the gameplay experience.

I'll start with an unobvious one; Quest for Glory.

Now, Quest for Glory's emphasis on puzzle-solving and single-person combat does make it diverge wildly from D&D, but a lot of the tropes are still there. The idea that only 'fighters' can use swords and shields, wizards being squishy babies, and thieving actually being a class rather than just something that's done in peoples' spare times. I also found the paladin class to be kind of odd. They don't really do much more than what you're supposed to be doing in the first place as a hero. Paladins do get a couple of unique quests and get some kick-awesome powers, but since Quest for Glory doesn't require paladins to do that 'lawful good lol' bullshit that was popular at the time these games were being made, it does strip out a lot of what we saw as 'paladin' back then.

[Surgo]

The Black Isle Studio games:
- Icewind Dale (and Expansion) / Icewind Dale 2
- Planescape: Torment
- Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2 and expansions.

I'm planning on getting around to playing all of these at some point. I own the Icewind Dales but not the other two entries. I guess that makes this post pretty useless because I haven't played them yet. Oops.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Torment messes with a bunch of tropes of the time, both D&D and D&D-based computer games. It also manages to keep quite a few. The main character never wears armor, and as far as I know there are only two swords in the game (one of which is non-removable equipment of one of the possible party members). Powerful warriors tend to use warhammers or axes, thieves use clubs and spiked knuckles, and wizards use blades. One of the main sources of upgradeable equipment is a tattoo shop. The experience points you get from learning things often outweigh those you get from killing. You will die repeatedly to advance the story, which starts with your corpse being wheeled into the mortuary. A number of the major villains were under your thrall at some point. None of the standard PC races appear except humans.

On the flip side, being a wizard is still the most kickass and entertaining option.

One purely mechanical feature which broke with AD&D is that constitution gain or loss is always applied retroactively.

[Doom]

This thread is pretty much here to discuss the tropes certain videro gamez cribbed off of D&D and how it effected the gameplay experience.

I'll start with an unobvious one; Quest for Glory.

.

In Florida on holiday right now, and, as luck would have it, I'm wearing a Quest for Glory t-shirt (swag from some distant E3)...otherwise, I probably wouldn't have responded.

Even worse, I'm going to respond with a game that VIOLATED the tropes of D&D, and yet still worked...even as those tropes came back, anyway.

Asheron's Call, the red-headed stepchild to EverQuest, had a completely classless system, at least in theory. You used special points to gain skills, and improved those skills through use and through more points...as you leveled, you gained more special points from which you could gain skills. When your character was first created, you also had the chance to specialize in a skill, causing it to improve very quickly, reaching levels beyond non-specialists...it was easy to mess up your character over-specializing.

And yet...the tropes came back. Characters heavy with 'arcane' magic skills tended not to wear armor. This wasn't simply because of low strength, but mages had to carry so many components that wearing armor was fairly impractical for encumbrance reasons. Characters with magical healing skills tended not to wear armor for the same reason, although also tended to be a bit weak as weapon/shield users, since their healing spells in a way doubled as their damaging spells...it was inefficient to maximize these AND spend points improving other weapon skills.

The warriors, melee or bow, naturally tended to shy away from spell skills, and focus on just one weapon...until high level, when they had the points to spend to learn magic (there was little reason master more than one weapon, although it wasn't utterly and totally stupid).

In any event, characters that went 'down the middle' met the old trope of being good at everything, but a master of nothing, making it difficult for them to deal with mobs of the same level as specialists, even as they had an easier time fitting into any random groups that came along.

And, ultimately, Asheron's Call turned into a wizard's game, with no high level characters being completely without magic skills.

[sake]

And yet...the tropes came back. Characters heavy with 'arcane' magic skills tended not to wear armor. This wasn't simply because of low strength, but mages had to carry so many components that wearing armor was fairly impractical for encumbrance reasons. Characters with magical healing skills tended not to wear armor for the same reason, although also tended to be a bit weak as weapon/shield users, since their healing spells in a way doubled as their damaging spells...it was inefficient to maximize these AND spend points improving other weapon skills.

Actually everyone wore that damn hooded faren robe due to to a number of reasons.
1) Item enchantment spells affected a single piece of armor at a time so you wanted your armor in as few pieces as possible to make buffing (which was required later on in the game's life) quicker.

2) The game determed what dropped on death based on item value, so a cheap vender robe was very handy for pvp'ers or anyone who hated having to do corpse recovery.

3) Metal armor had zip, zero, nada, protection to elemental attacks, so a buffed cloth robe was actually better when fighting many mobs.

And, ultimately, Asheron's Call turned into a wizard's game, with no high level characters being completely without magic skills.

Ehh... aside for some damn mega armored creatures that should have never existed in the first , Hybrids reigned supreme in AC, actual direct damage spells were generally the worst way to kill something.

To Asheron's Call's credit, they are probably the only mmog that didn't require healbitches to do anything.

[Doom]

You mean the Hoary Mattekar Robe? I know the game changed alot in the years or two it was still viable after I left (at level 65ish). Absolutely at those levels, everyone with Item Enchantment wore robes (and most every had item enchantment), but there were still plenty of folks that wore armor, especially that high level stuff whose name I can't remember(Celedonian?).

Yes, direct damage wasn't so hot at high level, at least if you didn't debuff first (hence the value of life mages, which were necessary, even if not necessarily as healbots).

But, again, the game changed ALOT over its course, so my recollections may well be different from yours due to those monthly rules changes. The end result, that magic using characters ruled eventually, is the same. You can call them 'hybrids', but, seriously, every 'hybrid' in the game was a melee character who picked up magic at high level, and buried all his exp into it after that point, and not the other way around.

Pvp is a considerably different issue, and I didn't want to address it, being a RPG concept very far from Lago's original post.