Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach

Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach Designer Diary #2 - A Designer Talks Combat, Economy, and Doughnuts

You could say that Dungeons & Dragons is the grandfather of all modern role-playing games, which is why it's a bit surprising it hasn't made the leap online yet. That's going to change next month, when Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach is expected to launch. The game is set in D&D's campaign world of Eberron, and it will let you create your own character using your favorite D&D classes and races and adventure online with thousands of other D&D fans. The game is currently in its frenetic, final stages of development. Thankfully, one of the game's lead designers managed to find some time to give us a glimpse into what it's like working on the project.

A Day in the Life of a
Systems Designer

By David Eckelberry
Lead Systems Designer, Turbine Entertainment

So, many of you want to know what life in the game-design world is like. Here's something close to a chronology of my last Saturday.

10 a.m.: A groggy arrival. Coffee, triple extra sugar. I'm not a morning person. Thankfully, [Turbine CEO] Jeff [Anderson] brought in the Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and soon I have a high enough blood-sugar level.

11 a.m.: I'm working on some new action points today--action points are basically reward points you'll earn in between experience levels. I'm always on the lookout for new ideas, and my project of the day is the cleric class. Not, of course, that the cleric desperately needs more raw power. (To review: clerics have a reasonable base attack bonus, can wear the best armor, are great spellcasters, and yet, the class is somehow pitied.) Clerics still need the ability to customize themselves with their action points. Action point choices like "defenders of the faith" and "complete divine" give as good an answer as I can conjecture. I was always a pretty big fan of letting clerics find new ways to "channel positive energy"--like, using their ability "turn undead" (that is, banish undead creatures like zombies and skeletons) to do something else. You know, having clerics use this ability to give a boost to their saving throws (dice rolls used to determine if a character can avoid an unfavorable effect), or maybe grant some kind of limited health regeneration...or maybe just cause damage directly to undead creatures. Things like that.

Implementing these occupies most of my working day, interrupted by stuff like...

1 p.m.: Lunch. Pizza, the lifeblood of a development team. While most of us attempt to drag the carrion back to our desks and resume work, some mild pressure from Jeff encourages us to share a moment or two--OK, 15 minutes--in a more-social setting. A lot of the staff is in today.

1:15 p.m.: I'm pretty happy with how the cleric's new action points are working. Turn undead has a nice limitation in the way it can only be used a limited amount of times per day. So, this situation is actually fairly easy to balance. And by putting more emphasis on the "turn undead" ability, we're also boosting the importance of characters' sometimes-neglected charisma attribute, which is always good. Plus, we can factor in extra turning feats, and so forth.

2 p.m.: Informal meeting with Ken [Troop, lead designer].

3 p.m.: Back to work on action-point implementation. Thinking about whether paladins should get any of this stuff.

3:30 p.m.: Ken wants to talk about the visit from Wizards of the Coast this coming week. Nothing major, just a checkup. We discuss what new stuff we want to show them, and what feedback we can expect from them.

5 p.m.: Secret stuff. Prototyping somet features that probably won't make it into the game before launch...just to see what it would take to get this kind of feature into the game.

7 p.m.: Ran into a couple brick walls. Bashed through one; the second is proving more resistant. Probably ask for some help from my go-to engineers Cain and Andy. I think they hate me. Maybe I should buy them lunch first. After that, it's into the car and home for me. It's late, and I can play the alpha version tonight from home. And so the day ends. No emergencies, no great excitement I'm afraid, but for me it's happily meeting-light.

Most of the "big" design work on Dungeons & Dragons Online is, thankfully for this stage of the project, complete. That means the fundamentals of the game for release are done: character classes, races, skills, spells, monsters, treasure effects, and the like. With that said, my job is nowhere near complete. Sure, we have the classes all in the game and we are working with their abilities, but those abilities continue to need polish, better feedback, and occasionally a bit of tuning, revision, or bug-fixing.

An example of revision: Last week, we turned on attack bonuses for flanking for both monsters and players. Since combat doesn't take place on a grid from a big sheet of graph paper, like in the the pen-and-paper game, flanking basically means an attack delivered from behind the target. That meant that a class ability that we had adapted--"improved uncanny dodge"--needed to be, well, readapted to provide its most identifiable benefit, which is immunity to flanking. For the record, both uncanny dodge and its successor need to do something more for us than in the pen-and-paper game. In the real-time combat of Dungeons & Dragons Online, there's no infamous dice roll for initiative, where players roll dice to see who gets to take action in battle first. So, most of the strength of uncanny dodge doesn't translate well to a computer game...yet. That's why we're putting some more work into adapting the two class abilities of the barbarian and the rogue.

And here's an example of fine-tuning: Economy stuff. My first pass on item wear--the damage to weapons, armor, and other items and equipment over time--was completed a while ago. Our system worked very similarly to the pen-and-paper game, but we found that simply importing the system "as written" left us with broken items all over the place. So we adjusted the probability of an "item wear event," tying that generally to an item's hardness (read your Player's Handbook, people!). All fine and good, but the equations behind the scenes will need some monitoring as we work through beta. The ballpark I'm shooting for is that a typical, non-delicate item should survive three long dungeons before needing repair. That said, adventurers wielding weak weapons or armors against the tougher opponents should beware.

Finally, an example of a bug. Winding down in the last part of a game's development, pretty much all team members have bug queues--lists bugs in the game that still need to be fixed. The interesting one I was tackling involved an amusing juxtaposition between the line of engineering and design. Cain hooked up the ability for design (that's me) to tinker with certain skill and feat bonuses, but oddly enough, a few of them don't seem to be working properly. I check out the databases and to my mild surprise, everything there is set up properly. So, it's not just a data problem. Then I check the code with Cain's help to make sure that that data is getting called on by the code. It is. There are only a few things left. One of them is the template for this data itself--and there's our problem. The data isn't getting passed from the database at all for certain things. So the template gets a review of its own, and soon enough the bug is fixed. Not an exciting bug, perhaps, but it allows me to blame Cain for something for once. Usually I'm the one breaking stuff (while he's the one who built the system.)

Beyond the bugs, tuning, and revision, I know in my heart the work on Dungeons & Dragons Online will never end. No online role-playing game is ever truly done. After launch, we designers continue to build upon our work, with new content, new abilities, spells, monsters, and magic items. For this game, we tack on more major items, more levels, new races, and new classes and prestige classes. I guess this means I should be tired just looking at the mountain of work to do in the next few months, and in the year beyond. But I'm not tired at all. This is some pretty cool stuff I'm working on, and there's only more to come.

Gamespot