Dungeons & Dragons Online

…and I’m ending it as I began it…

Here we go again. The top 38 MMOs in the last 30 days in the USA, as reported by Google Trends.

I'll heal you, but it might hurt a little bit. This is the first beta weekend for Cryptic’s “Neverwinter”, an action-oriented MMO set in one of the more famous of the Forgotten Realm’s cities. We’ve seen Neverwinter brought to life before in “Neverwinter Nights” and its sequel, titles that kept their relevance by offering every player the chance and opportunity to create and run their own dungeons for themselves and their friends. ...

Helpless! What I want to know is, if the Spinner of Shadows could “hold person” everyone in the party instantly, with no saving throw, for as long as she wanted, anytime she wanted – how did we win the fight? Not to say that it wasn’t a fun fight – it was. The whole Web of Chaos arc was a lot of fun, for all that the last adventure turned into an extended advertisement for the expansion, giving some reason for the sudden merger of the world of Eberron and the world of Forgotten Realms. ...

I have a bad feeling about that floor After last week’s mass dragon death in Gianthold Tor, we were back in the Cornfields of Catastrophe Greenhouse of Gore Tidepools of Terror Orchard of the Macabre. These civic leaders really need to work on coming up with better names for their neighborhoods or nobody’s gonna want to move there. The module failed to impress last time we went and this time was no different. We had our choice of beholders or vampires. Spode really wanted to get his vorpal freak on with vampires because, the problem with beholders is you can’t really cut off their heads! But after dispatching some nameds in the Orchard, it was at Doomsphere’s doors we found ourselves. ...

Go ask Alice, when the white dragons fall None of us was happy about the way we left Gianthold Tor; expert at getting through the dungeon and killing the Gatekeeper, unable to kill the three dragons at the end. We’d all gained a level since we left the Tor, though, and the Harbingers of Madness gear was a literal game changer for most of us. The rewards for grinding Gianthold Tor for rare dragon scales are not that great, given the effort involved. I estimate it would take killing a dragon thirty times in order to get enough scales to make a piece of armor. We were never going to spend half a year farming this instance. ...

Is something ... missing? Having spent the last month or so running errands for lazy journalists in the Harbingers of Madness module, we all felt it was time for a little change. Thus we were soon returning to our old haunts (heh heh) in the Necropolis, looking for a little adventure in the Orchards of the Macabre. I can just imagine what the Stormreach zoning board thought when they got the property proposal for review. “So, you wish to build an orchard along the northern border of the city? Well, I see no reason to object… Hold on. An orchard of the macabre?” “Well, yes. Don’t you think apple trees look really scary? I know I do.” ...

Auraxyllon None of Team Spode much liked working so hard on In The Flesh and failing it Sunday. We were so close, but we were just out of time. We decided to meet mid-week and try it again – on normal mode – to finish the quest series and get the rewards. We grouped up on time, went into the instance, summoned the clerics, and thrashed the instance – Yaulthoon for sure, and even the undead beholder that thrashed us again and again a few weeks back. First try. My respec definitely helped, but these instances have raised our level of gear, and they’ve also taught us how better to work as a team. It’s a lesson we desperately need – because there’s no reason we can’t win every instance we come across on normal mode. Losing a normal mode instance means we failed. ...

In the Flesh? All we wanted to do last night was finish The Harbingers of Madness quest for the second time, this time on Hard mode. The quest on Normal mode the week before last had kicked our butts; the Ghost of Pyzjyn slaughtered us, and Yaulthoon the Mind Flayer walloped us several times until we found out his trick. In the time between then and now, though, I’d respecced into a damage build instead of a fairly useless trap-focused build (though I am still able to find and disarm traps). I wondered if this new focus on damage would let the group take on the hard content we really should be doing when we can. Normal mode is for solo and small groups; we head in with four PCs and two dedicated cleric hirelings. And Gleek and Spode have devoted a lot of time outside of our weekly gaming toward making their characters utterly uber. ...

Drow in Spaaaaace My first Dungeons and Dragons character, I had no idea about. She was a dwarf cleric, a Hobbesian cleric – solitary, poor, brutish, nasty and short. Healing was more fun when hirelings would do it, so I picked up a fighter level and made her into a melee cleric. I put points into whatever stats seemed good at the time. I had fun, but she was a horrid healer. No idea what I was doing. ...