I’m truly hoping WotC has finally been able to pry the rights away from the licenser that has held them for over a decade.

But I can’t decide if a new movie by either company is a good thing or not.

Couldn’t Get Worse

There is the initial worry about another bad movie. But as natural as this worry is, it would be hard to make a movie worse than the first theatrical release.  Dungeons & Dragons the Motion Picture has a RottenTomatoes rating of 10%, low enough that—had it been more noteworthy—it would rank it among the worst movies ever. As a comparison, Batman & Robin has 12%.

Ironically, the quality of the storytelling and special FX in the movies only increased over the course of the first and second sequels. Again, this isn’t saying much: when you start at rock bottom you can only go up. Unless they give the film to Uwe Boll or a a reanimated Ed Wood I think we’re safe.

But that doesn’t mean it will be good.

Complicational

The thing is, D&D is a hard property to turn into a movie. Really hard. Harder than board games. Seriously.

Simply put, what is D&D about? Well, it’s about adventurers exploring dungeons and fighting monsters. But it’s also about friends hanging around a table making jokes. It's equally about problem solving, role-playing, and game mechanics. Even if you go with the first answer, “having adventures” this is a pretty broad description. There’s no singular goal, protagonists, consistent setting, or enemy. There’s no plot.

In contrast, let’s expand on my board game example. Clue comes complete with a murder mystery plot full of colourful characters who are all suspects. Even Battleship is easier having the built-in narrative of two opposing naval fleets firing blindly (although they totally dropped the ball with that movie by forcing aliens into what should have been a period movie).

While the open narrative of the game is a strong plus for the game it’s a big ol’ negative for the movie because it requires more scripting. You’re starting from scratch. It requires a better class of writer, one not just good at making a movie or adapting a story but a writer capable of telling their own story. Let’s be realistic here, a writer capable of creating characters, a story, and world of their own will be more interested in telling their own story and will already have their own scripts they’re trying to sell. This might easily result in something like the first live action G.I.Joe movie where the director wanted to do a movie on future soldiers and the studio pushed the franchise on him, so nobody got the movie they wanted.

The generic nature of the fantasy is also problematic. As a game having an assortment of by-the-numbers races such as elves, dwarves, and halflings (read: hobbits) is a feature; players want to play as their favourite race from books and film, to have an opportunity to make a character similar to Legolas or Thorin. As a film these are huge negatives as they emphasise the generic nature of the races and setting, making the movie seem like an unimaginative rip-off.

I relate this to the difficulty in making a good Punisher movie. The Punisher is a fun character in Marvel Universe (and comics in general) because he’s different: Frank Castle has no special powers, uses lethal force, relies on common guns, and often battles realistic foes such as the mob. He’s a non-super superhero. A grounded and realistic character in a world of fantasy. But in theaters the idea of a gun-wielding ex-military vigilante has been around for decades. I know Death Wish was released in 1974 and Dirty Harry in 1971 but there are likely earlier examples. There’s precious few new ideas the Punisher can bring to the screen. Simmilarly, with Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones already out in the public consciousness, D&D seems lacking.

Film Faerûn

One solution to this is to dump the idea of making a “D&D” movie and instead making one based on a published campaign setting or even a novel. Admittedly, they’ve tried this already, with the eye-gougingly bad Dragonlance animated movie. But that doesn’t mean the concept is bad, just that particular execution.

Making a D&D movie is hard because you have to create everything, and there’s so much room for error. You could have a good plot and setting but terrible characters, or the world and characters could be great but the plot terrible. There’s too many variables. Starting with an established world or even series reduces the variables. If you’re making a Forgotten Realms movie you have the setting and a wealth of characters and you just need a good story.

There’s the minor problem of audience. Not everyone wants Drizzt or Elminster movies and those characters have their share of detractors. However, for a movie to succeed, it needs a far larger audience than just D&D players can provide. If every single D&D player went to the same movie during the same weekend the film would be lucky to crack the top 10. There’s simply not enough of us. You need a larger audience. Heck, you need an audience and order of magnitude larger. If you can make a better movie by picking a world or characters that aren’t the first choice of the majority of D&D players... that might just be an acceptable price to pay.

TV Show versus Movie

I’d honestly prefer a new television show rather than a movie. Movies have a single narrative that runs from beginning to conclusion while a TV show can have a series of connected or unrelated narratives over a length of time. D&D, with its sessional campaigns lends itself much better to a TV show. Heck, when planning a campaign or even individual sessions, basing the structure off television is a good trick.

There’s also much more room for different stories highlighting the diversity of the game: there’s can be action-based episodes, dungeon crawls, investigations, murder mysteries, intrigue, horror, and so much more. It’s hard to cram all that is D&D into a single movie.

A D&D TV show would be easier to do than Game of Thrones requiring a smaller cast and fewer large battle sequences. There might be more SFX but much of it (signature spells) could be reused.

There’s also less need for a singular tone. A D&D movie can either play things straight and be serious drama or it can poke fun at itself and plant its tongue firmly in its cheek, but it’s exceedingly hard to do both. However, with a TV show there can be serious episodes where the world is played straight and there can be episodes that get a little goofier, poking out the absurdities of the game and setting.

Making a Good Movie

That all said, let’s end the negativity and do some fanwanking. How would one go about making a good D&D movie? Or, at the very least, a not-terrible D&D movie.

I see three ways of approaching a D&D movie: straight fantasy, playing the game, or world crossover. The last three movies were straight fantasy, where the world simply is and the movie is just a story being told in a fantastic world. There’s nothing differentiating the movies as being inspired by a  role-playing game, and the film could just as easily be an  adaptation of a novel (or video game). Playing the game is demonstrated by the two Gamers movies (Gamers and Gamers 2: Dorkness Rising) , where there the action of the film takes place in the minds of players. The actors play characters and in the “real” world and their characters’ characters in the fantasy world. Lastly, there’s world crossover. The best example of this is the old D&D cartoon where teens from the “real” world enter a fantasy world.

I just don’t see straight fantasy working. D&D is just too generic and this type of movie lacks all that makes D&D the game different from other games. Even if you pad it with D&D Intellectual Property such as beholders, mind flayers, and more it’s just another fantasy movie. Even if you write a great story, fill it with great characters, and play to D&D’s strength with unique races like goliaths or the dragonborn it’s still more of a generic fantasy movie and less a D&D movie.

I also don’t think seeing people play the game would work either. While I loved the two Gamers movies and eagerly away the third, the movies are just too esoteric to appeal to the mainstream. Too much knowledge of the game, its tropes, and conventions are required for full enjoyment. Even adding a “new player” to a group and introducing the concepts via them would be awkward. Plus, there’s far less drama and tension when the characters are not in any actual danger.

(This might work as a TV show though, where the game can also mix real world drama, tension, and problems while reducing costs by having a portion of each episode take place in simple real world sets, such as a basement.)

This leaves the same approach as the D&D cartoon: moving people from the real world into a fantasy world. It works now for the same reasons it worked then: it puts relatable characters in a fantasy setting and lets you see the magic through their eyes, explaining the world and plot to the characters and audience at the same time. It also acts as a lovely metaphor for playing the game. Dumping people into “the world of Dungeons and Dragons” also sidesteps the world being so generic fantasy, as real people being thrust into a generic world is different enough. The world being relatable and somewhat familiar is a plus. Additionally, it allows the movie to play-up the friends-working-together aspect of D&D with joking around, inserting pop culture references, and making genre savvy wisecracks while still having tension, danger, and a sense that what is happening actually matters. The characters can mock the plot and obvious cliches just like players would, but the world itself can be played straight. Most importantly, this prunes down the potential plot down from “anything-and-everything” to having the protagonists solving a problem and trying to get home in your standard Wizard of Oz fashion.  

It might almost be worthwhile to just make the movie a reimagining of the old cartoon, or just acknowledge it in some ways such as having the new protagonists learn they are not the first people from their world to enter the fantasy realm. This might depend on who owns the rights though and if they’re willing to sell. But even if the rights can’t be acquired, it could still be hinted that it’s the same world: the references just need to be more subtle and winking, such as just finding a golden bow without a string or cloak of invisibility.

How Watchable?

In all honesty, regardless of the quality I’ll see it. How I’ll see it is the variable. If I’ll eagerly pay and attend a screening in the first week, if I’ll drop a few bucks to my cable company to stream it, or if I’ll just shrug and wait for it to stumble onto Netflix.

I'm hoping for the first but expecting the latter. 

Seriously, stop reading this now, check out those links and then come back.

Wrecan

For those of you who never ventured into the WotC Community, Mark “Wrecan” Monack was frequent poster in the community. Prolific really. He seemingly posted daily and contributed numerous blogs. He wrote house rules and speculated on the design of the game, blogged about the past and future of the game, and for fun he penned haikus related to each week’s Rule-of-Three. The bulk of his personal rules can be found under “Unearthed Wrecan”.

Wrecan did not just write blogs, he read them. A lot of them. At the end of every month, Wrecan would compile a list of the best blogs of that month, drawing attention to lesser seen authors not on the “Featured Bloggers” list. And he ran and judged contests for DMs on the message boards, generating content for everyone to use in their games. This summarizes Wrecan nicely: he wasn’t content with writing content, but wanted to highlight the excellence in the community.

When WotC started interviewing members of the community for their regular Playtester Profiles series, Wrecan was one of the first interviewed.

He was well liked by the entire community for his wit and intelligence. Even those that disagreed with his opinions and views liked and respected him. Which is what made Wrecan so special and important to the community: he was never afraid to let people know what he thought and disagree with them, but he never let his posts get personal and argumentative. He was always respectful and polite.

Okay, the above statement is not entirely true. Wrecan did get personal once. Personal and hurtful. And I totally deserved that little kick in the bum.

My Experiences

Suddenly... he’s gone. I’m surprised by how much his death has affected me. I can’t even remember when I started talking with Wrecan. It must have been in early 2009, after I’d been blogging for a few months. We linked to each other’s blogs, read each other’s work, and commented on what each other wrote.

Wrecan made me try harder and think more about what I was writing. Inspired by his blogs, I began to edit much more and used headings to break-up my blogs into sections. Wrecan set the bar for what it meant to be a Featured blogger.

No matter how burnt out I was feeling over Edition Wars or cyclical debates, I always wanted to see what he had to say. I cannot even guess at how many forum threads I read and participated in because I saw Wrecan had commented on the discussion. I’m not even sure I would have continued blogging had Wrecan not kept bringing me back to the forums with his blogs and thoughtful posts.

This is my 275th blog, a milestone number. And while I wish the situation would be happier, I’m happy to to dedicate it to Wrecan.

Legacy

There’s already talk on the boards about doing something in memory of Wrecan, such as dedication in D&D Next or an in-world tribute such as naming a lizardfolk god or tribe after him (due to his prefered avatar, the lizardman from the 1st Edition Monster Manual).  I’m personally fond of the idea of naming some part of the forums after him.

Regardless of what anyone else does, the legacy of Wrecan on the boards will be the deep respect he earned from all he interacted with. An excellent reminder of the value of being diplomatic and polite, of avoiding rudeness and not being argumentative.

I think we should all try and be a little more like Wrecan and honour his memory through deed and action rather than through a token reference in some book. He showed us that it was possible to make your point without being insulting, that it was possible for us all to get along. He reminded us that first and foremost we are a community.

He loved this place. We should make these forums a better place to post.

Bye

Goodbye Wrecan. I had hoped one day to bump into you at a Convention somewhere, shake your hand, and offer to buy you a beer; although we never met in person I considered you friend.

TL;DR

This is long. So if you want the sound bite, here it is: Neverwinter is an action RPG that doesn’t provide solid enough action to really satisfy action aficionados. Similarly  the story is too light to really hold story fans for long, starting well but quickly moving into filler.

As a free2play game it needs invested fans willing to pay, but there’s not enough content to keep people reliably playing repeatedly or enough bonuses that seems worthy of paying for. And it’s easy for people who are invested to skip paying and grind to get that same content.

Prelude

Announced in August 2010, Neverwinter was initially supposed to be released in August 2011 to coincide with the release of the Neverwinter campaign setting book and a novel series by R.A. Salvatore. However, the game was delayed and on October 5, 2011, Cryptic announced the game would be shifting from free multiplayer game to a Massive Multiplayer Online Game.

In interviews, Salvatore mentions the Neverwinter book series (Gauntlgrym onward) was started at the request of WotC and Cryptic, with Salvatore given the responsibility of setting up the city for the state it would be in during the campaign setting and the MMO. With the first book having been released in 2010 and writing taking a little over a year, it’s safe to estimate Neverwinter began production in early 2009 or late 2008, setting the development cycle at four years and change.

Crypticon

Cryptic Studios is the company given the licence to make a Dungeons & Dragons game, so let’s get to know them a little. I like to describe Cryptic as having made three-and-a-half MMOs. Cryptic is an MMO company that was making MMOs before MMOs were what they are now. Their resume includes City of Heroes, City of Villains, Champions Online, Star Trek Online, and now Neverwinter. They’ve never released a game that isn’t an MMO.

I spent a LOT of time playing City of Heroes and it’s sequexpansion City of Villains. I preordered the game, participated in the closed beta, and logged in the first day the game was live. And I was dancing in Atlas Park when the servers went down. It was a decent game and scratched my super-hero PC game itch despite being 94.7% combat driven and overlooking all the non-beating up bad guys aspects of being a superhero. I like to compare the gameplay with Diablo in that you fought through wave after wave after wave of minions before getting to slightly harder boss monsters. But without the loot.

I also played some Champions Online which was really CoH 1.5. It had a nice free-form power system of CO, an improvement over the fixed powers of CoH, but it was really the system they wanted to do in CoH but could not get to balance at the time. Champions Online has a very simplified combat system and feels very much like a console port of a PC game, which makes sense as it was primarily  designed to work on XBox in addition to the PC, however the XBox port never emerged. CO was also announced shortly after Cryptic’s Marvel Universe Online was cancelled, suggesting they just acquired the Champions characters and pasted that over the unfinished game.  CO was similar to CoH in that you spent much of the game endlessly fighting waves and waves of mooks. Only moreso. In CoH it was common for missions to be “Kill 20 badguys” while in CO it became “Kill 100 badguys”.

I won’t heavily discuss Star Trek Online as I have not personally played it. (However, A friend I regularly game with has and when it went Free 2 Play I asked if he wanted to try it again and he declined, not wanting to do all the missions over again, which is telling and relevant.)

Neither Champions Online nor Star Trek Online were particularly well received. The CEO of the company said that they designed those games just like they had designed the well recieved City of Heroes, missing the fact that half-a-year after CoH was released World of Warcraft hit the scene. In the same year CO and STO were released, Wrath of the Lich King had been out for a year and dramatically changed how MMOs could tell a story with its focus on phasing over instances.

Cryptic has also frequently launched their MMOs without endgame content. Both CoH and CoV launched with 4/5th of the game, releasing the final zone and levels as a “free update”. While there is always going to be content that was not quite ready for release, the first three updates of CoH (the better part of a year’s updates) focused on content that was not quite ready for launch. In fairness, holding back end-game content is a standard MMO tactic. Under the assumption it will take some time before players reach those levels giving developers time to polish. This forgets the speed MMO players can consume a game and hit cap. It takes months to generate content that players compete in an afternoon. There are many, many gamers who blow through an MMO and then move onto the next game.

The Open Beta

Cryptic likes its “Open Betas”. They’ve had them for all their games, typically followed immediately with launch. They’re not so much Betas as Demos, only with the “beta” tag as players are often more forgiving of balance and technical issues. Then they wipe the servers and everyone starts fresh and you have to pay. So it wasn’t that surprising that they have an Open Beta for Neverwinter.

With that in mind, what we saw wasn’t really a beta. They weren’t really “testing” anything anymore, almost all the content was available (one class and race is absent) and there are no more wipes. Plus, they were taking payment in their e-store for items. Yeah... it was the launch. A "soft launch" maybe but still a launch.

Still... releasing an unfinished game and actually saying “hey, this is an unfinished game” is remarkably refreshing from Cryptic. It’s not “here’s the game, it’s finished” followed in a couple months by “here’s an extra class and zone as a *ahem* bonus”. And the missing content isn’t the last 5-15 levels or the end of the game but peripheral content, so there’s a complete play experience if less flexible.

Installation

The website gave two options to download: direct or torrent. I started downloading at around 11:15 am, MST, a couple hours after the downloads became public. I had checked the day before, late night on the 29th (read: very early on the 30th) and couldn’t download.

This was a little annoying. They could have easily allowed people to pre-download and install the game but not log in until the Open Beta officially began. And when the game launched there would have been far, far more people seeding than the paltry number I saw, and the load on their servers that morning would be far less.

Instead, I had to wait a number of hours to actually play (over four-and-a-half to be precise) with the direct download initially being much faster than the torrent, which promptly caught up and “won”. But barely.

The cynic in me wonders if this was intentional so the number of players early in the first day would be lighter, spreading the load away from the starting zone.

Now, with many more people seeding and less load, installation should be far easier.

Starting Out

The game currently has 7 races: half-orc, half-elf, human, halfling, elf, tiefling, and dwarf. Drow is in the game but is pay-only at the moment but will be available later. There’s a fair assortment of facial customizations, better than average for an MMO. However, you don’t get to initially customize your clothes or physical appearance as that’s handled by gear. So the game does not serve as a character visualizer. (There is limited customization of gear available, allowing some pallet swapping, but this seems to require spending real money.)

Speaking of armour, I was less than impressed by the gender disparity in armour:

*sigh* It looks so silly. And with body appearance governed by gear people won’t be able to making characters without  curve fitting armour and a boob window.

After race you choose from 5 classes: Guardian Fighter, Greatweapon Fighter, Control Wizard, Devoted Cleric, and Trickster Rogue. There’s a ranger also on the way. Or rather, the Adverb Ranger. As it’s based on classic 4e, each class has a set role, although I wonder if they could have just called the greatweapon fighter the “slayer” or something as there’s only a single version of the other classes. But I suppose they might add a second cleric or wizard later.

You also get to choose your starting region, picking for over a half-dozen places in the Forgotten Realms each with a choice or three for fine-tuning. I’m not sure what the benefit to this choice is, if there’s a skill bonus or small passive bonus. It does give you a free title, so can announce where you’re from. Whee. But it seems mostly cosmetic. You also get to choose your god, which grants another title.

You also roll your stats. Kinda. It “rolls” by handing out a randomized array, arranged to suit your character. So there’s a little variation. There's not a lot of tutorial on what the stats mean though, which is very different than standard D&D. Each stat does an array of things. I'm uncertain if a balanced spread would be better than a standard 4e specialized arrangement.

Other than that, there’s not a lot of customization. You don’t get to pick powers at first level or feats. Customization comes later, at level 5 and then 10.

Following character creation there’s the big cinematic that establishes the story of the game. There’s an evil lich necromancer, her army of the undead, and a dracolich that is attacking the city of Neverwinter. This is mostly combat between a female rogue that is teleporting all over the place like a fey pact Nightcrawler. Martial power at its least mundane. There’s maybe two lines of dialogue in the entire piece, no motives or story and just action. But it sets a tone for a desperate besieged city.

First Impressions

My first impression was “yup this is a video game”. Standard WASD controls. It’s more First Person Shooter than your typical MMO, with mouse-look is always enabled. It took some time before I discovered that to interact with the UI via the mouse you have to click Alt (click, not hold) or pull up something like inventory or the character sheet.

The game holds your hand for questing. There’s a little sparkly trail that directs you right to the next quest objective. Because following big blinking icons on a map is apparently too hard. But Neverwinter is cut from the action game cloth, so the sparkly trail is similar to the directional arrow you often see pointing to your next story goal. It fits the genre.

You get the standard introductory quest with pop-up tutorials that tell you the basics of combat while you recover your gear from a ship sunk by the dracolich. Yup, starting on a beach washed up after a shipwreck. A dash cliche. Upon rewatching the cinematic, I was disappointed there was no establishing shot of the sea, or quick scene of the dragon strafing ships to further establish the cinematic is NOW. There’s not even really a shot of the sea. You can half-see it in the first shot of the city, but with the lighting and colour you might mistake it for more plains.

After the initial NPC’s mouth didn’t move while talking, I was pleasantly surprised that other NPCs seemed fully animated and all the NPC dialogue was spoken (with moving mouths). After Star Wars the Old Republic, going back to a non-spoken MMO would have felt cheap. However, your PC is still silent throughout. NPCs in chat have an unnerving tendency to stare blankly above you and to your right, like everyone is talking to another adventuring slightly behind you and off to the side. I often looked around to see if someone was standing behind me watching me play the game.

Quest text in MMOs has always been a soft spot of the genre. They often feel like the writer was being paid per-word. Which is ignorable when you can just skim the text and move onto the quest. But having the NPC dialogue spoken aloud really drives home how wordy and chatty every NPC is; I made a modest effort to listen before giving up and reading  text and walking away, leaving the NPC talking away as if I were still there. You have to hit a button to cancel the read aloud quest, which is a feature-bug. If I wanted to hear the text I wouldn't be walking away, but it does allow you to keep listening while moving towards the quest, checking your bags, or healing at the campsite.

Your first couple quests are amazingly standard MMO fare. You have to heal a few wounded soldiers while sparse opponents wander around letting you choose to engage or not. Lacking the phasing technology of Warcraft, the field was littered with injured bodies so there was the standard MMO experience of walking away from injured soldiers because you had helped all the soldiers you were told to help. There wasn’t even the attempt to justify ceasing to help with a limited use item (“Sorry, I can’t help, I’ve run out of bandages” ) or the ability to continue helping without reward, as you stop being able to interact with the injured soldiers once you hit your quota.

After that you’re gathering arrows to replenish the supplies of archers, pulling arrows from corpses. You’re not gathering dropped quivers of arrows or lost crates of arrows but individual arrows, albeit in bunches of 3. So you quickly turn in your nine arrows and everyone seems really happy with your contribution despite the innumerable arrows behind you.

Meanwhile, while gathering those nine arrows, you’re blasting zombies in groups of two or three, flattening a good dozen opponents. This is the type of game Neverwinter is: the quests are a flimsy excuse for you to run around blasting through enemies and little effort has been made to make the quest anything more than a said flimsy excuse. The game very seldom has “Kill 10 boars” quests because you’re going to kill 30 boards trying to get the single MacGuffin at the end of the zone.

Running through the opening tutorial, you also meet the tiefling wizard/warlock/something from the opening cinematic who goes on about the dracolich seen in the same cinematic (dead-ish at his feet) and how it might be permanently defeated. And then it's never mentioned again.

After some short adventuring you reach a bridge with a young Red Shirt companion. You catch a glimpse of the Big Bad Evil Gal from the opening cinematic who “kills” the Red Shirt before sending some massive boss monster at you - despite the fact she’s an all-powerful NPC she doesn’t just squish you herself but vanishes, likely to appear again closer to the End Game.

Having defeated the boss monster you exchange words with the dying Red Shirt who has enough life left to ramble off half a Dostoevsky novel while slouched on a wall telling you your next quest goal. Then the Red Shirt falls over dead. Or rather there’s a camera change and he’s suddenly laying down, having died in the half-second screen refresh. And your character looks all sad over the death of the chatty nobody Red Shirt despite the dozens of dead people you’ve passed along the way. The funny significance of the Red Shirt (whose rank is literally Private, meaning expendable nobody) is echoed by the next quest giver NPC (also from the opening cinematic).

Moving into the city proper you enter one of the districts of Neverwinter and apparently the battle has ended. Guards are all calmly at their post and all the merchants are going about their business. Apparently, killing the low level ogre thingy (or really big orc) ended the war and saved the city and the lich just gave up. It’s very off-putting.

I think this is where I miss the phasing tech of Warcraft the most. It would be nice if low level characters not far along the main story saw explosions, siege weapons, fires, and soldiers running around. But high level characters who have saved the city see a calm peaceful place. This thought occurred to me even more after completing the next plot, where I killed the leader of a gang of rebels that took over a district but nothing in the district changed. It was still full of gang members who were still attacking me. As an alternative, employing Cryptic's fondness for instances might work. It should be possible to have a separate Before & After instance of a zone, so you can have a sense of progress and achievement. But far too late for ideas like that now.

Gameplay

Gameplay is vaguely reminiscent of 4e. Inspired by 4e. You have the At-Will powers that lack a cooldown and Encounter powers with a short cooldown. Unremarkable for MMOs. However, you also have Daily powers, which show some interesting design. During combat you slowly gain Action Points, represented by an icon that resembles a d20 (nice). When you have a 100% Action Points you can use your Daily Power and then you have to wait until it recharges via adventuring before you can use your Daily Power again. Different classes gain AP for different things, such as healing or taking damage or using encounter powers.

After level 5 you start gaining Power Points, which can be used to improve powers, making an At-Will or Encounter power better, or increasing your number of available powers. After level 10 you start gaining Feats, which are really just standard MMO talents with a reappropriated D&D name.

Combat is quick, typically against many foes. The game tries to be a mobile action game with a dodge option and warnings of enemy attacks, so you know to get out of the archer's line or fire or back away from the big bruiser. (Except for the guardian fighter who raises his shield to block.)

However, the animation of attacks stop movement and often the time between the warning and attack attack is so short you don't have time to react after your attack animation has ended. And you can’t choose to abort an attack and dodge. Quite often I'd also be hit by an enemy after I was out of range, because I moved away after the animation had started. This could be the result of lag/ rubber-banding but it happened a little too often. Soloing with a ranged character (cleric) the game descended into me dashing away from enemies and then standing perfectly still while attacking. This felt clumsy and was exceedingly awkward (especially as I’ve been playing a lot of mobile FPS lately).

Hitpoints are handled curiously: you begin with hundreds of hitpoints and these quickly increase. By mid-levels you’ll easily have thousands of hp. Which is odd since even at low levels damage seems to be in the double digits. Reducing hp by 1/2 or 1/5 or even 1/10 would have been a nice way to keep the number bloat down. But the high numbers were likely to accommodate the curious choice of healing.

4e has a very video game friendly health system where you can rest and charge to full between battles. I expected swift out-of-combat healing like Champions Online or a Rest power like City of Heroes or Neverwinter Nights. Instead, healing while adventuring is minimal and even the cleric has limited  healing options, as their powers recharging a paltry portion of your staggering hp total. Instead of having full health your hp atrophies slowly over a number of battles until you find a campsite that heals via proximity (and acts as a new spawn point if you die) or you drink a health potion. It’s actually a better representation of Tabletop RPG adventuring than I’ve seen in most video games, but doesn’t feel particularly 4e.

Missions are heavily instanced, like dungeons are in Warcraft. So when you’re in questing in a small zone you’re the only one there. You’re seldom competing with other players, interacting with other players, or even seeing other players. Apart from the opening or when running around the city you might as well be playing a single player game. Group play is strictly optional. It’s comparable to an always online single player game that has a graphically rendered lobby and auction space. That said, there are a number of outdoor zones with filler quests between the big instanced story missions where you do interact with players. This allows some cooperative play, even in impromptu situations.

The instanced dungeon maps are standard nonsensical affairs. Here’s one of the early dungeons.

It’s a long giant crypt that doesn’t even try to match the structure it originated from or the space available. There are huge dead areas and negative space. Blizzard always worked very hard to make the dungeons and instances of Warcraft look like they matched the exterior, especially in later expansions. If the dungeon exited onto a balcony then you could see that balcony from the air when flying overtop the dungeon structure.

As a extra example, here's a map of the exteriour of an orc structure and its interior.

Story

As mentioned, the story begins with a city-threatening siege by an army of undead. And then this story just seems to go away, instead focusing on people trying to steal the Crown of Neverwinter and then orcs that have taken over a district in the city.

In an interview, the CEO of Cryptic said "It's not an MMO in the sense that there aren't zones with hundreds-and-hundreds of people. You are not fighting for spawns. There's a very strong storyline throughout the game. So it's more of a story-based game closer to things like Dragon Age or Oblivion, which we really try to follow." This struck me as odd as the last two Warcraft expansions have had pretty heavy stories and Star War the Old Republic was ALL about the story with numerous side quests. If you’re making a game that’s going to be competing with other MMOs you should keep abreast of what other MMOs are doing.

Unlike Warcraft that as two factions and often deliberately has two zones of the same level, or SWtOR which has two factions and eight classes each with their own story, Neverwinter has the one story. It’s quite possible to play WoW or SWtOR two times and never repeat a quest and a third time with only minimal repetition  And even the single player games used as examples have some story variation and choices that generate replay value. Past Cryptic MMOs have been criticised for their single set of quest chains and story and I was hoping Neverwinter would avoid this. Instead, the game continues to offer content for a single playthrough.

I also found it interesting that right after you get to Neverwinter and the game actually begins, the game immediately drops the initial story and starts new unrelated stories for five level. And immediately after wrapping up that story you’re shunted to another zone for another story unrelated to both the main plot or the previous plot.  It's very tacked on.

But even this limited content isn’t really enough. The Nasher plot is ostensibly meant to take you from level 4 to 10 before you start fighting Many Arrows orcs, as reflected by the level of the gear given to you as a reward. But both solo (and especially grouped) I was nowhere near my expected level. So I faced level 11 orcs with my level 9 cleric and promptly got my ass handed to me. Repeatedly. I had to stop and grind a full level to get enough power to continue the story (and even then some timely intervention from other players was necessary).

Curiously, we're also told very quickly that there are a number of factions fighting for control of the city. I thought this would be an interesting way to have some story divergence: pick a faction and push their agenda with related faction missions. Instead, we're locked into supporting the guard and Lord Neverember. A very, very obvious missed opportunity for some repeat gameplay.

Except for the addition of player created content via the Foundry:

The Foundry

BioWare’s Neverwinter Nights was famous for its adventure builder and vast community of writers, who slavishly created stories and campaigns larger, grander, and even better than the official story. While tricky to use, this engine powered a wealth of content. NWN2 tried to do the same with some lesser success. And now Neverwinter is doing the same with the in-game Foundry that lets players create, play, and rate stories by other players.

At level 15 you can start making Foundry missions, and can do so without needing to be logged in as a character. Missions can be taken from Job Boards readily available in most zones.

Of all parts of the game, the Foundry seem the least polished. And by "unpolished" I mean "glitchy mess". I spawned outside of maps more often than I spawned inside maps. Once while testing the game I spawned well outside the city but close enough that I was in play and died and died and died yet couldn't get into the city no matter how many times I released, refreshed the map, or exited the test and resumed play. It’s frozen on me a couple times, buggered my mouse, and refused to save after much editing. And when I leveled-up a character to test the adventure, it didn’t always give me the appropriate gear (or any gear. I had a few naked runs).

There's currently no tutorial or wiki but links are set up so they'll eventually be there. Hopefully for launch. At the moment you have to learn how things work yourself. Having done some NWN modules and Architect missions in City of Heroes before figuring out how most of the featured worked was fairly simple. It’s really quick to learn the basics, and I imagine the Foundry will very quickly be flooded by innumerable basic “kill all” adventures.

There are some fun features. You can customize the look of monsters quite nicely, and add standard gear to humanoid monsters then change the colour palette of the gear. And you can change proportions and the size of some body parts. Plus you can position individual mobs and traps for nice effect, and do expected things like have patrols, triggered spawns, and the like.

Adventurers are also at no particular level. They vary to match the level of the person playing. So you can run through a Foundry mission at level 5 and then run through the same mission at level 25 or 55. And you can choose to playtest a run through your  mission with character of any class at set levels, which are assigned appropriate gear. So you can see how the mission handles for each class.

However, you're mostly limited to the few monster groups and zones already in the game and it look like there's only a few monsters not already included in quests (although, that's hard to say for sure not having seen all the content planned for launch). And you’re limited to pre-built encounter groups. You cannot, for example, add an ogre to a goblin encounter or just have a wandering ogre. Ogres are fixed parts of orc encounters. Nor can you add boss monsters.

Likewise, there doesn’t seem to be options to have treasure chests or crafting nodes. This is likely for balance reasons. So you can’t just hand out treasure like candy.

There is the option to make your own maps, but these are limited to adding structures to outdoor zones and there’s no ability to make your own interior dungeon. Which is a shame because there are really few dungeon maps to use, a fraction of the ones in the game. This is likely because you place items using the same maps used for the ingame maps. Which means you cannot easily use any maps with multiple floors. And anything with special scripting like secret doors and puzzles is likely beyond the Foundry.

Edit: The above paragraph is wrong. There is a make-your-own dungeon feature which is pretty slick, allowing you to piece together rooms. There's some pretty glaring clipping issues but it's otherwise nicely done. I don't know how I missed it earlier as I really looked for it. Glitch? Moment of blindness? 

Not all maps are equal. Where walls end and floors begin is a little fuzzy for caves, and the uneven floor makes placing some items difficult. I recommend running through an empty map first to get a feel for the layout.

Multiplayer

I recruited a friend to play with me and duo through the game. There was the initial annoyance of not being able to group until after the tutorial, despite running around beside each other.

The game also doesn’t seem to modify instances to accommodate parties. The missions my cleric soloed without much problem my friend and I tore through. A couple boss fights I had to play tactically with my cleric we effortlessly shredded as a team, despite the fact Action Points seemed to be gained at quarter-speed.

That said, I was playing a rogue which currently seems quite powerful when paired with a fighter. So perhaps it’s a class balance issue.

Sharing loot in a group is adequate. Coins are automatically shared, but seem to favour the person who picked-up the coin pile. While it might average out, melee characters closer to the loot might get a disproportionate share. But this is likely a low level issue when you cannot half a copper piece. Picking up items was trickier for a couple reasons. First, you have to choose need-or-greed via clicking ****-1 or shift-2 (as the mouse is locked into auto-look) but you aren’t given any information on the item so you still need to free the mouse to hover over the item - which is typically unidentified so you really don’t know if you need it or not. I can easily see this getting really frustrating at high levels with two of the same class but different builds.

There are two other ways to get group play: skirmishes and dungeons. The former is a quick match against waves of enemies that takes 10-15 minutes and gives you some gold and treasure. Dungeons are, well, dungeons. If you’ve played an MMO before you likely know what to expect from dungeons.

Edit: I should mention the one dungeon I played through was pretty much by-the-numbers. There were a couple tank-and-spank bosses that seemed very much like the single player bosses only with more hitpoints. There wasn't a whole lot of gameplay change, just the standard stay-out-of-zones and watch-adds.

Pay 2 Win?

Neverwinter is a free game but has a market that takes real world monkey for perks. So you can pay real dollars for the ingame currency “zen”, which can be spent on bonuses like companion pets, the ability to rename or redesign your character, mounts, and the like. Cryptic has been firm that you won’t have to pay and that payment is strictly optional and that paying just lets you get things faster.

That said, they certainly want to encourage you to pay. The bank is tiny and you regularly get chests that contain special items that can only be opened by a key that you can only get via zen. $1 gets too 100 zen so you can drop $6 to get a bag of holding, $5 and get a mount, $5 to get more than 2 character slots, or $6 to double your bank space. So the aforementioned key is $2 or so.

But can you pay and win? Yes. Easily. There are a number of level 60 characters already who have done just that.

You can buy zen and exchange them for astral diamonds, which can then be used to speed crafting missions to rapidly gain experience. And astral diamonds are the currency used in the auction house to buy gear, so you can buy zen, convert to AD, and then buy whatever items you want. So if you have enough money, you can just buy a level 60 character and give them decent gear.

Of course, this does mean if you do many daily quests and auctioning, you can earn astral diamonds which you can then sell for zen, bypassing the need to pay. So nothing in the zen store requires payment. If you have enough time to grind astral diamonds. This is actually well done. There have been times playing MMOs I wished I could just drop $50 and get a few extra levels to catch up with friends. And times I’ve played some freemium MMOs and wished there was some way to work towards one of those fancy perks without spending cash.

That said, the store looks a little empty now. I’d love some more fancy clothing and customization options, especially cheaper ones. If you're one of the people who paid $200 for the big fancy pack of goods, there’s likely precious else to buy in the zen store.

Rapidfire: Good

Bags have a sort feature. And you automatically have two bags: regular and crafting.

You have a second set of clothing, a purely decorative outfit you can swap on with the click of a single button. I love the idea of casual clothes, although I expect getting anything fancy will cost real money.

Harvesting is handled via skills tied to your class. Fighters get Dungeoneering, Clerics get Religion, etc. An interesting take on skills. But you can also buy kits that allow you to have a chance of accessing other skills’ nodes, which is a nice option.

It’s easy to help people in an area without feeling like you’re kill stealing. There is separate loot for different people, ala Diablo 3.

The controls are very keyboard and mouse centric. You attack via mouse buttons and all your powers are close to your WASD keys.

Edit: Additional Thoughts

I forgot to mention crafting. This is similar to the Star Wars the Old Republic system where you have a flunkie that crafts while you adventure. So you can always be crafting. It's actually well done if simple but fits the game. There's one type of crafting for each of the armour types as well as the bonus crafting profession of "Leadership" which gives you more experience and astral diamonds. 

The game also has a combat advantage feature, which is easy to miss as I never saw it described anywhere. When attacking with a friend you can see a coloured semicircle around the base of nearby monsters. If you attack from that direction you flank. So positioning matters. 

Naming is well handles. Like Champions Online characters are have names tied to the display name of your account. So if your display name is Bob and you make a character named Doug the character's full name is Doug@Bob. Which sounds weird but means you can always name your character whatever you want, no matter how many people named their character Doug before you. This is nice.

Rapidfire: Bad

Currently, the game does not automatically move you to a friend's instance when you log in. You need to switch manually, which is a pain (and can descend into tag if there’s poor communication).

When below half hitpoints (aka bloodied) an injured FX appears that makes the screen hard to see. So when you’re getting beaten-up the game makes it harder to play.

I hate the reappropriating of feats as talents. Standard MMO talents don’t fit the game, and even Warcraft began moving away from finicky talents with Cataclysm. I’d much, much prefer a single big feat every 3 levels rather than small "feat points" every level.

If you accidentally hit escape while looting a chest, you can't re-loot. You’ve just lost treasure.

Quest rewards have a required level like dropped loot. So it’s possible to get a reward too high to use. If you’re powerful enough to do the quest you should be able to use the reward. Period.

There's a two character limit per account and you need to spend money to unlock more slots. Or, given it's a free game, you could just create a second free account. So that’s silly.

There are three currencies in the game: coins (regular), zen (paid), and astral diamonds (misc). It’s not particularly clear why this third currency exists. You earn diamonds by daily quests, refining, and miscellaneous tasks, all typically mid-level.

Auctioning is poorly done. Auctions use astral diamons for payment and the deposit, so you can’t auction anything early in the game. And you can't auctioned unwanted items to get more gold to get better gear.

When items drop they’re unidentified, and the only way to learn what they are is to use a scroll to identify them. Which means you’re burning money on scrolls and down an inventory slot. It’s a bit of a pain for very little benefit. (I also haven't found vendors that sells identification scrolls either and once ran out and had a couple items I couldn't even sell. But I don't want to say this is a bug as it could just be me looking in the wrong places.)

You’re not given any instruction on some items, like portable altars. As far as I can tell, these act like portable campsites that you cannot respawned at. But I don't see why they're called "portable alters" instead of "temporary campsites" then.

Crafting isn’t given a tutorial.

Healing in a group is a pain in the ass, as you can't target portraits and have to just try and hit the right person.

Non-instanced zones can be crowded with monsters, especially with things that can knockback. I’ve lost count of the times I was sent into another mob or dodged and AoE and aggroed a second group, or had more monsters spawn atop my fight. I’ve ended up in pitched battles against two or three groups.

There's a mini-event in one zone where you compete for lost relics, golden items made in the name of a goddess. And after the event and all that effort you keep the items but can't sell them or turn them in for a reward and just have to kinda throw them away. LAME.

And there was that time the "go here" sparkly quest trail led me right over a trap. Thanks.

Edit: Additional Thoughts

Zones are a pain to travel across. You slog through waves of monsters while looking for quest items, end up on the far end of the zone (especially if there's a quest/instance there) and then have to slog your way back. There's no "hearthstone" option. Given there's no real death penalty (if you have a spare injury kit or 5 minutes to kill) it's easiest to just commit suicide and grab a drink while your injuries heal.  This is a pain if you have to leave the game suddenly, your bags fill up, or a friend logs in and you want to change zones. 

There's precious little powers variation. The pre-reqs for putting points into powers are high, so you end up having having spare points you have to spend learning powers you already chose not add points to and have no space for in your action bar. You're picking the order you want powers, not what powers you want. 

There's little lore on things like the destruction of the city or the Spellplague unless you go looking for it. I saw an NPC that described this stuff but walked away to do a quest turn in and now I can't find him again to read the lore.

There is no swim animation or interaction with water. You just pass through it and run normally. 

You cannot swap characters easily. You have to log out all the way and then type in your login information again. This would be a pain if it just made you enter your password and reconnect, but it also wipes your email/account name requiring that to be re-entered.

Conclusions

The game design is similar to Cryptic’s earlier efforts: a simple hack-and-slash experience. It’s mindless. Now, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing as it also describes many other games I’ve enjoyed, such as the Diablo franchise and its clones. And it’s not a gameplay style anathema to D&D, demonstrated by games such as Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, which I spent endless hours grinding away, typically with a friend manning the other controller.

Really, it’s a Dark Alliance MMO more than Neverwinter. I've also heard comparisons to DragonAge II which is a pretty good comparison.

In that respect the game does what you want it to. The story keeps pointing you at the next zone and the new groups of enemies to fight before shaking things up with new enemies that have new tactics and powers.You can play alone but you’re more effective as a group and everyone gets to contribute and blast away. You get new powers and options, but you never have so many powers at once that you have too many choices. And the game really shines in multiplayer. While I can't give the game a great review I am enjoying playing it with a friend.  In a group things just go faster, so I spend less time noticing the little problems, like the inability to attack while moving, outdoor zones where you can’t take 5-steps without aggroing, the slightly imperfect hitboxes, etc. It’s not that my problems go away, it’s just that there’s much less time for them to happen so I see them less frequently and are thus more easily ignored.

But the game has its problems. The static world reflects a style of MMO design on the way out. It’s very much a third-generation MMO despite every MMO in the last three or four years trying to become an early fourth-generation MMO. There’s not a whole lot of innovation. Excluding the Foundry, it's an unremarkable game I would have not looked twice at had it not been using the D&D licence (and even then, only because it's free).

There’s also only enough official content for a single playthrough. There are a lot of players who just play MMOs, who will blow through the content and move onto the next game. It’s quite possible to reach cap in two-days (without paying). If people feel like they’ve seen everything the game has to offer in a long weekend they’ll move on to their next game. If the game cannot hold a fanbase’s attention for long, few people will become involved enough to give it money. I'm enjoying it now

The existence of the Foundry, which exists to scratch people's need for side quests and tangential tales, makes the extremely tacked-on main story all the more needless. If I wanted to spend ten levels wasting my time with rebels and orcs I would have picked Foundry missions focused on rebels and orcs. While player-generated can help, this content can be extremely hit or miss. And unlike the official content, it’s less likely to be continually checked for bugs and balance after each update and patch. At best, this makes the game feel like a limited single player game with a lot of fan mods.

Combat is also problematic. Not just for the small balance issues but for the inability to move and attack in a game designed around mobile action. Plus the slight disparity between the graphics showing a hit and the engine acknowledging a hit. But this isn’t insurmountable and is fixable after launch with a little effort.

There also isn’t a whole lot of D&D in the early game. It has some lip service to the Forgotten Realms with the names of gods and places, but the game could just as easily be set in any generic fantasy world (that has reptilian kobolds). The D&D experience is a large one, so this may vary due to personal experience. Really, if you find D&D 4e doesn’t feel like D&D than neither will Neverwinter. Although, the lack of tactical play in favour of button mashing doesn’t particularly emulate 4th Edition very well either.

Neverwinter is emblematic of Cryptic Studios. It’s a hack-and-slash online multiplayer game that isn’t quite “massive”. Their graphics have improved over the last decade by the gameplay and design is pretty much the same. If you liked Dark Alliance or Diablo but wanted something a little more 3rd Person then Neverwinter might be for you.

This blog is really the counterpart to the entries on Race and Nation and focuses on the third part of the trifecta: culture. Specifically, this blog looks at the elements that make up cultures, with the aim of customizing and creating interesting and memorable cultures.

Chapters

Below are links to the other chapters in this series.

Introduction

Part 1: The Hook

Part 1.5: Factors

Part 2: Conflict

Part 3: Geography

Part 4: Races

Part 5: Nations

Part 6: Room for monsters

Part 7: Deities

Part 8: Cities

Part 9: Factions

Part 10: History

Part 11: Economics

Part 12: Culture

Part 13: Starting Zone

Culture versus Race & Nationality

How much culture varies from ethno-race and nationality very much depends on scale: if you're looking at populaces globally, regionally, or locally. On a global or continental scale, culture and nationality might be fairly interchangeable: someone from Japan could be described as having the "Japanese" ethnicity, nationality, and culture.

Looking at culture with a wide lense does invoke stereotypes, which should be done carefully: not all stereotypes are wrong, but not all are right. And some traits that may be accurate can be presented as negatives. But when looking at an average member of the populace, many generalities will be accurate. For example, if you were to grab a random passerby off a Japanese street, odds are they would be middle-aged, because Japan has an aging population with a high median age. While the country is not lacking children, youths, and seniors the average age is one of the highest in the world.

This is a little easier in worldbuilding, where the creator can decide which stereotypes are accurate and which are horribly flawed. And the GM can present a people comprised of horrible stereotypes without offending (unless the people are analogous to a read group).

When you reduce the scale subcultures emerge, such as looking at a country on a national or regional level. These subcultures might even be distinct cultures, especially if the scale is zoomed-in enough that everyone would share the same ethnicity and nationality.

For example  there is no shortage of Japanese sub-cultures, most of which have just as much right to be called "Japanese" as the majority culture. In a campaign set entirely in a fantasy Japan, “Japanese” does not distinguish anyone, and differentiating people by clan or subregion works better.

While nationality can be equated with the culture of the majority, sometimes the values of the nation drift away from the traditional culture. The culture of a nation becomes less representational of the actual populace, or the culture is an idealized state that no longer reflects the day-to-day activities of the populace. There could be two cultures at once, the classical culture for special occasions and holidays, and the everyday culture that has grown over time. Similarly, there could be an ethnic minority that has a very different culture than the majority of the nation.

Trait Exaggeration

The Star Trek method of defining culture tends to focus on finding a single human trait and exaggerating it, expanding it into the dominant cultural value. Vulcans are logical, Klingons are honourable warriors, Romulans are Imperial, Ferengi are avarice, Changelings are orderly, Bajorans are spiritual, Cardassians are Orwellian, etc.

This is a little simplistic and it’s a little unrealistic to describe an entire population by a single value, but it works. Television writers and GMs alike have to introduce and convey the nature of a people as quickly as possible. Subtle nuances of cultures will be missed and there’s no time for deep immersion in an alien culture.

Once the basis for a race or culture is know it can be expanded with other details, even subtle ones. While exaggerating a single trait is a good place to start it’s a terrible place to end. It’s essentially a cultural  “Hook” that serves as inspiration and drives later ideas.  The trait can also offer inspiration, raising questions that need to be answered. Returning to Star Trek, knowing that Vulcans are emotionless raises the question “then where do little Vulcans come from?” which inspires new aspects of the culture and maybe a story or two.

Names

A good start to culture is names. An exotic name can really define a character as not being a member of a standard fantasy world. I once played a Baklunish character in Living Greyhawk with the name Komiser Muavini Husam ibin Kharif al Barakhat. “Komiser Muavini” was his rank in the Spahis organization, “Husamn” was his given name, “ibin Kharif” denoted his family and “al Barakhat” denoted he was from the Barakhat province.

Do names have a deeper meaning or are they just syllables? Is there a naming tradition, such as babies named after a certain family member? Do children have a “son of” or “daughter of” in their name? Is there a geographic element? Do names include a clan or caste? Names could also be colourful actions and descriptions, like the stereotypical Amerindian names: Lives in Woods, Joined Together by Water, One Who Lives Lone, Leaps Over the Mountain, etc.

There could be some belief in true names, given young and seldom used or shared save by close friends and allies.

Names might be impermanent, with names changing or evolving over time. In cultures with high infant mortality, babies might not have permanent names until they reach a certain age. There might also be a difference between adult and childhood names, with the transition to adulthood being marked by a naming.

Language & Speech

Language is important. Charlemagne once said "to have a second language is to have a second soul." To discover what is important to a culture, you look at their language. The easy example is how the Inuit have dozens of words for snow; while not factually true it sounds true, as language describes what is people view as important enough to need subtle differences in communication. (To emphasise that point, in Canada alone we use: snow, sleet, hail, slush, flakes, blizzard, flurries, rime, graupel, powder, drifts, packed, and squall before getting into composite words and esoteric scientific terms.)

An uncomfortable example is how mental retardation is viewed in western society. The common term for people wth MR has varied over the year: retarded, challenged, developmentally delayed, special needs, learning disabilities, etc. This is an example of a euphamism treadmill where none of the terms are inappropriate (or inaccurate) but are made inappropriate because of how society uses (and abuses) the terms. Which stems from the negative cultural view of the individuals.

There’s a great deal of variety in languages. Languages can be literal and rational or full of subtle emotions. Languages can be lyrical and poetic or harsh and aggressive. They can be simple with limited vocabularies but modified by suffixes and prefixes or there might be an expansive vocab with myriad different words.

Beyond the actual vocab is the phrasing: not what is being said but how. The language of a culture might establish if they respect politeness or terseness. A polite society might have brusque words, but the culture uses longers or less direct phrases "I wish" or "it would please me" rather than "I want". This includes description and how abstract concepts are conveyed. Commonly used expressions are another example, such as how people curse or express surprise. What is an insult to the culture?

Food

What a people eat and what they don't eat are determined by culture . This can be animals; many cultures eat dogs and horses, but this is frowned upon in North America. There are also non-standard sources of food such as insects and organs that are not typically consumed.

An example of how culture can radically change how food is used is semolina. Coarsely ground wheat, this is just a heavily processed grain product. In North America it’s commonly known as Cream of Wheat, and is a breakfast food (a non-wheat variant is the corn-based grits). In much of Europe, it’s instead sweetened and served as a dessert, occasionally chilled into a pudding. Same food, but very different implementations.

Preparation is another variable: ingredients might be cooked and kept separate, cooked separate but served together, or mixed and combined. There may be single servings or multiple small courses. Food might typically be raw or it might always cooked. Soft food might be prefered of the culture might lean to crispy. Food might be a casual affair with people eating quickly just to fill their bellies or it might be a slow ritual and an important part of the day.

Seasoning and choice of spices are also a nice variable. Some nations might default to plain food, others might prefer simple seasoning, while others might regularly have spicy dishes.

Utensils also vary. The big two sets of eating utensils are cutlery (fork, knife & spoon) versus chopsticks. Kebabs/ skewers are another utensil, as are combinations like the spork. Other cultures eat with their fingers or have a bread dish as an edible utensil.

One option for a worldbuilder is non-standard animals. What if ducks were more common than chickens or bison were the domesticated cattle of choice? There are plenty of exotic fruit we don't see, and that's without thinking of foods from mythology or fantasy flora and fauna.

Marriage

How a culture defines and handles marriage varies greatly. Without getting into the same-sex debate (which does get a little easier when you can just cast a spell to speak with your god and ask if they're cool with it) there is a lot of diversity in how you define “marriage”.

Start with the bigger question: does a particular culture even have marriage? With races that live for centuries, marriage might not exist and there might only be longer relationship. If there is marriage, is it for a lifetime or a short term? Are weddings private affairs, familial ceremonies, or big public events? Even love as the basis for marriage has varied over time with marriage being an economical of political affair for much longer. The parties involved might have a choice or betrothal might be involved.

There’s also polygamy, which is divided into polygyny (multiple wives) and polyandry (multiple husbands). Polygyny tends to be more common in cultures with a high infant mortality rate, as the survival of the tribe depends on the number of children that reach maturity; fewer men are needed to sustain the population and thus are allowed to have multiple wives.

In the western world marriage has both a civil and spiritual component and is marked by the exchanging of rings worn on the left ring finger. Other cultures might view marriage as secular and strictly a contractual arrangement while other nations might forgo the legal portion and keep it a religious ceremony. Marriage could be marked by rings, bracelets, tattoos, brands, necklaces, etc.

Arms, Art & Leisure

How a culture decorates and adorn themselves and  their homes can show how they think and what they value. Natural motifs and subjects such as plants or animals can suggest a connection or nature or effort to meld their lives with green spaces. Abstract patterns can suggest a desire for order or value of symmetry and balance. A lack of decoration and adornment suggest a utilitarian focus. Religious symbols suggest the importance of spirituality to a culture.

What people choose to decorate and adorn shows what is important. In our culture as computers became more and more important we’ve seen a change from plain beige boxes to vibrant and decorative cases with superfluous lights and detailing. While to most it is simply a method of transportation, you can spot the people who love their car as it might be airbrushed or feature a custom paintjob.

Art also includes dance and music. What instruments are played? Do people sit quietly to music or is dancing mandated? Do the songs tell a story (or history)? Is the music happy and jovial or somber and serious?

Armour and weapons overlap with art as there are elements of style and design in both. A culture might have stylized weaponry and armour or utilitarian arms, it might be blocky, crude, or sleek and elegant. The Lord of the Rings movies highlights this well; compare the ugly angular weapons of orcs with the curved and beautiful elven weaponry, or the dwarven weapons with their sharp angles.

Choice of weapons can also differentiate a culture. Such as if they use tool-weapons (axes, picks, hammers), blunt weapons (hammers, clubs, flails), or exotic and unusual weaponry unique to that culture. It sets the tone of the culture being offensive or defensive, or having overt weaponry or traditionally reappropriating tools as weapons.

Lastly there are sports and leisure. How do people pass the time? Are board games the prefered leisure activity or physical sports? Do people participate in team based sports or is competition between individuals? It’s been commented that many early sports were a replacement for war, either using martial skill for entertainment (wrestling, jousting, or archery contests) or to defuse aggression via friendly competition or to keep fit and skilled at violence despite weaponry being unavailable. Early board games tended to be wargames that emphasised and educated strategy.

Other forms of entertainment tended to be violent, such as bear baiting, fox hunting, falconry, etc.

Making Cultures

The examples above are a small number of the ways cultures define themselves. Death rites and the view of death, the views of sex and violence, view of wealth and money (and what is considered wealthy), economics, government, and the like. Far more than could be covered here in a single blog.

There are lots of ways of distinguishing a people. There are two-hundred odd cultures on the planet, some with overlapping cultural elements and some with myriad different cultures. There are innumerable subcultures and countercultures on top of that. Attempting to accurately and realistically portray all the cultures in a fantasy world would be maddening.

As such, a worldbuilder must work efficiently, defining a couple key traits for each major cultures, be it a race, a nation, or other. It helps to focus on a couple big and memorable elements of the culture. These should be a little larger-than-life to make them easier to recall. These are essentially a cultural mnemonic

After settling on the culture's distinguishing element(s), use the theme to influence other elements of the culture. Look at how it might impact how the people live, what they like and fear, and be reflected in their behaviour.

A culture with deeply rooted ties to nature might build out of wood whenever possible and use carved vine and leaf motifs in their construction. Buildings might be designed to have large courtyards in the middle with gardens and green spaces. Armour and weapons might have natural designs and patterns. Important events and ceremonies - like weddings - might take place in natural settings, in glades under the sky. Their language might have many natural words and descriptions might focus on nature-based analogies: “as strong as an oak”, “as proud as a mountain” and “as temperamental as the sea”.

While it’s possible to continue the example into food, names, and the like that might not be necessary as the theme of the culture

War World

With little art and constant warfare, the culture of war world is a little subtler. Weapons and armour would be utilitarian, as would most buildings. Art is nonexistent. I have to get creative to differentiate the world and its cultures.

Going with a non-standard food can emphasise this is not just a renamed Europe. I’m thinking of adding tapirs as a common food animal, replacing pigs and cows. Sheep and goats might be common, but more as a source of wool and milk respectively. Guinea pigs might be a source of smaller meals (although I might refer to them as cavy to avoid referring to the nonexistent pig). With food being scarcer - being rationed for troops and supply lines - people cook as much as they can, stewing and food to get the most out of usable meat. With soup, stews, and curries being the default utensil is likely a spoon.

Horses are useful for warfare and a heavy cavalry is vital to winning battles, so fewer horses are used as beasts of burden. Something like water bison or might replace them on the fields and pulling carts. This means riding horses are an expensive luxury and most commoners walk everywhere. Carriages would be exceedingly rare and non-military wagons would be pulled by bison  at a slow yet steady pace.

Sports and athletics are unknown and games tend to be military training. Bouts are a common entertainment, with festivals holding archery, wrestling, quarterstaff, and hammer throwing contests. Dueling is also common, with disagreements settled in public on a weekly dueling day. These encourage people to practice their martial skills but are not to the death, either to first blood or someone is disarmed. Dueling weapons are commonly used and typically blunted or made of wood. They’re held publically as entertainment in dedicated spaces, a form of unprofessional and voluntary gladiatorial matches. 

Death is a little more common and accepted in a world at perpetual war. It’s just a fact or life. The populace is likely more than a little jaded and accustomed to losing family members. As such, marriage is likely less permanent and widowhood commonplace. Remarriage is common. Marriage is really an extended support system for children; both extended families agree to raise any children from a union, and thus assist the raising of the child after one parent dies in battle.

The population needs to be maintained. There needs to be future generations to sacrifice in battle. The kingdoms cannot wait for people to find love, and once a child reaches adulthood a marriage is arranged by their family. Adultery is common and all but expected, as people invariable develop feelings outside of their arranged marriage.

With some ideas for human culture done, I can brainstorming a few quick traits for the other races. I won’t detail all the secondary races, but provide a few thoughts for the big three and whatever else jumps to mind.

Elves

Living for centuries, elves see the world change before their eyes. They have a worldview of impermanence and change. They do not get attached to people, places, or objects because those will only go away. Elves often come across as flighty or removed from the world.

Eves are predominantly left handed (but frequently ambidextrous). Where many other races thing left-to-right, elves think right-to-left. They read starting at right, their alphabet is flipped, and they sort things starting on the right. As such, elves seem to do much backwards, shaking and saluting with the wrong hand. Paired with their worldview of impermanence they are alien and difficult for humans to understand.

Elves do marry but enter into short-term partnerships of cohabitation and cooperation. These relationships typically last several decades and a century at the longest. These are voluntary unless a dalliance results in pregnancy in which case partnership is mandatory. Elves mark their partnerships with tattoos on their right arm representing that person, starting at the wrist and working up as they enter more partnerships. When the tattoos reach the shoulder the elf can no longer marry.

When an elf does swear an oath of allegiance or service they add a tattoo to their arm, showing that they will not marry while under their oath. But as they leave space above the service tattoo, this emphasises their obligation will eventually end. Elves also know they have to pick their allegiances carefully, as all their past oaths are visible on their arm.

Dwarves

Having adapted partially to aboveground life, dwarves eat human food. Those mountain dwarves that live underground make do with whatever food they can scavenge, frequently surfacing when food cannot be found. They have typically lost access to the vast warrens of dwarven fungi, delectable moulds, and ranches of meaty deepworms. Even now dwarves still prefer earthy food: insects, worms, and mushrooms.

Once, before the wars, dwarves divided themselves into extended clans that were sub-kingdoms that were greatly extended families. Marriages were kept inside the clan save for marriages to cement alliances between clans or end feuds, the latter being rare during the times of prosperity and peace. With the fall of the dwarven nation, the clans can no longer stand alone and intermarriage is the norm. Children take the clan of their mother (to guarantee lineage). With so many dwarven men killed in the wars, there are too few males for the females, so polygamy has become common: a male dwarf marries a woman and all her sisters.

Halflings

The little people survive by staying neutral, going with the wind, and keeping out of sight. Most halflings live quiet lives as the ranchers and farmer who providing food for the owners of the land, or acting as traders and merchants along the coasts and rivers.

Halflings live lives of neutrality and servitude. Even those halflings who become spies and smugglers are indiscriminate regarding their employer. Even thieves seldom work just for themselves but tend to act under the employee of a master thief, a thieves guild, or employer. While halflings have their own desires, goals, and drives they prefer to work under someone. They feel comfortable under authority.

But halflings are not slaves, and a master that mistreats their halflings will discover that quickly as they awake to see multiple small lives in the candlelight.

As they are neutral, halflings are a little more festive than other races. They are fond of lively music using a variety of instruments and dancing. Halfling trader caravans are one of the only sources of entertaining, often offering small shows when they stop for the night and as they trade their wares.

Dragonmen

I already decided on the dragon-folk of the north being amoral raiders, akin to Vikings. They sail their seas with dragon-prowed ships. To add some spice to this I’ll make the ships ice, magically preserved when raiding south. They can magically enchant ice to be as hard as steel and many use weapons of ice. As they have endless resources of ice, they can take the time to personalize and carve their weapons prior to enchanting them. They prefer weapons they can attach to wooden hafts (saving their hands from clutching ice) such as axes, maces, and spears.

The dragonmen live in a harsher terrain of ice and mountains and think in terms of the elements. They commonly use fire, stone, ice, and the like as descriptors. The elements are given attributes with earth being steadfast, cold being merciless, water being persistent, thunder being boisterous and boastful, etc. 

Hitpoints are terrible for verisimilitude and an awful reflection of reality. They’re also not particularly good at emulating cinematic combat.

This old argument has come up again and again (and again and again), most recently resurfacing on various message boards due to the continued warlord debates and the option of martial healing. This seems like a topical discussion to write about.

Are Hitpoints Fatigue or Health?

Yes.

And no. Here’s an amusing flowchart on the topic.

Jumping right into the debate, are hitpoints a measure of energy, fatigue, luck, and skill? No. No amount of skill can stop a fire from burning you, or acid dissolving you, or diminish a fall from breaking bones. When your hitpioints drop low enough a PC does not faint like a Pokemon, but passes out from their injuries and is in very real danger of death. Likewise, skill at turning blows into scrapes and lesser wounds is of no use against surprise attacks, coup de graces, and the like.

Hitpoints are also tied to Constitution, the representation of physical health. If hitpoints were meant to represent deflecting blows, Dexterity should also be a viable stat to use for hitpoints. Wisdom, representing willpower, would also be a viable stat representing the ability to keep fighting despite weariness.

Additionally, many of the justifications for hitpoints not being health overlap with other mechanics. Skill at deflecting blows turning them into near misses or reducing damage is handled by parry mechanics. Glancing blows that inflict no damage is handled by Armour Class (which itself is an oddity given people in heavy armour are easier to hit given they cannot move). Similarly, powers or bonuses that grant a bonus to deflecting attacks typically give a bonus to AC not to hp.

Many monster attacks rely on physical contact. Attacks that “hamstring” or cause any poisoned imply physical contact of some kind. No amount of skill will reduce being chewed and swallowed by a purple worm. Similarly, attacks that target vulnerabilities must make contact. You don’t injure a werewolf by almost hitting it with a silver weapon.  A trolls regeneration is less impressive without actual injury.

There’s also the language of the game. Healing spells are not cure light fatigue or moderate scratches (plus they’re referred to as "healing" ). Hitpoint loss is referred to as “damage” or “injuries”. Alternate means of recovery are called fast healing or regeneration. Being reduced below half hp in 4th Edition is called “bloodied” not “winded”.

But then are hitpoints a measure of physical health? Also no.

Hitpoints increase with skill and experience (i.e. level). A solid sword blow will kill anyone regardless of skill, although a person might survive a couple lesser stabs. In most editions, a longsword wielded by a strong individual can do as much as 12 damage, lethal to a rookie adventurer (usually) but ignorable to an experienced adventurer. Even a wizard can shrug off a full sword blow with enough levels. The sword blow does not do less damage, is not any less leather, and the wielder no less strong, and yet the effect is lessened.

While an experienced adventurer might be more fit than a rookie adventurer, fitness and physical hardiness is fairly independent of skill. An adventurer that spends their days eating rations and sleeping on stone floors for weeks in a dank underground dungeon should be less healthy than a farmer eating three square meals a day in the sun and fresh air.

Hitpoints are also reduced by things that do not cause actual injuries. Fatigue, poison, starvation, and the like do not cause actual physical injuries but reduce a character’s hitpoints as surely as a sword blow.

Adventurers also manage to continue fighting at full proficiency regardless if their hitpoints are full, halfway, around 10%, or a single hitpoint. When someone is beaten half to death, their skill, speed, accuracy, and strength decrease. Even accounting for adrenaline and the short duration of fights in D&D, there should be some minor dip in performance. But there isn’t.

And in the most recent two editions the rate of hitpoint recovery is keyed to level, so you heal faster based on your level of skill. But one’s amount of experience is unrelated to how fast someone recovers from injury.

Other Problems

Hitpoints add a pretty large buffer between alive and dead. There’s no way to knock out a guard or sentry without stabbing them repeatedly. The cinematic single blow to the back of the head is unknown in D&D.

Similarly, capturing a party generally difficult without overwhelming odds. Even grabbing a PC and holding a knife to their throat does not work as PCs generally have a sizable hp buffer.

Because hitpoints continually increase, the game has a damage creep where monsters have to deal ever increasingly amounts of damage to be dangerous, which renders low level monsters unthreatening. And because hitpoints increase at different rates for different classes, the damage needed to bloody a warrior class will all but kill a glass cannon like the rogue and splatter a wizard.

There’s also a need for player damage to continually creep upward, otherwise fights become increasingly long slogs as the party pounds away at a monster’s seemingly endless pool of hitpoints.

Because hitpoints rise and fall it’s a continual source of math in the game. Hitpoints have a high degree of tracking and fiddliness. They’re also seldom dramatic; PCs tend to die at the most inopportune and least dramatic times.

Past Definitions

For review purposes, I’ll quickly copy how various editions have defined hitpoints in the past.

Basic

Your character's hitpoint score represents his ability to survive injury. The higher his hitpoint score, the more damage he can sustain before dying. Characters who survive long enough to gain a good deal of experience typically gain more and more hit points; therefore, an experienced character lasts longer in a fight or other dangerous situations than does an inexperienced character.

1e

These hitpoints represent how much damage (actual or potential) the character can withstand before being killed. A certain of these hitpoints represent the actual physical punishment which can be sustained. The remainder, a significant portion of hitpoints at higher levels, stands for skill, luck, and/or magical factors.

2e

Sometimes, no degree of luck, skill, ability, or resistance to various attacks can prevent harm from coming to a character. The adventuring life carries with it unavoidable risks. Sooner or later a character is going to be hurt.

To allow characters to be heroic (and for ease of play), damage is handled abstractly in the AD&D game. All characters and monsters have a number of hit points. The more hit points a creature has, the harder it is to defeat.

3e

Injury and Death: Your hit points measure how hard you are to kill. No matter how many hit points you lose, your character isn’t hindered in any way until your hit points drop to 0 or lower.

Loss Of Hit Points: The most common way that your character gets hurt is to take lethal damage and lose hit points.

What Hit Points Represent: Hit points mean two things in the game world: the ability to take physical punishment and keep going, and the ability to turn a serious blow into a less serious one.

4e

Over the course of a battle, you take damage from attacks. Hitpoints measure your ability to stand up to punishment, turn deadly strikes into glancing blows, and stay on your feet throughout a battle. Hitpoints represent more than physical endurance. They represent your character’s skill, luck, and resolve - all the factors that combine to help you stay alive in a combat situation.

Edition Variation

Hitpoints and healing have changed between editions.

In 1st and 2nd Edition healing was capped at 1hp per day so non-magical recovery was much slower. And at higher levels hitpoints increased much more slowly with PCs no longer gaining new Hit Dice.

Healing and hitpoints increased in 3rd Edition where a high Constitution granted slightly more hitpoints per level and Hit Dice continued to be added until level 20.

The biggest change was 4th Edition, which more than doubled starting hitpoints but added non-magical healing to the game via the second wind mechanic, use of healing surges during short rests, and the warlord. Characters also heal completely overnight regardless of the percentage of hitpoints lost.

While in earlier editions, abstraction became more pronounced at higher levels when a once fatal blow becomes ignorable, 4e started with some measure of abstraction. Even a critical hit was unlikely drop drop a 1st level character. And based on the choice of healer by the party, hitpoints might entirely be fatigue and energy and not health.

5th Edition returns to lower hitpoints but retains the faster healing of 4th Edition while also loosely defining hitpoints as half health and half fatigue. And it’s uncertain if non-magical healing will be included.

I’ll end this section with a minor cartoon I did in response to hitpoint debates at ENWorld:

Good For Nothing?

With all the debates, why continue to use hitpoints? What are the benefits of hitpoints over other systems?

The primary benefit is the increased survivability of characters. The longer a PC adventuress the hardier they are, to avoid having to start at 1st level again. There’s something unsatisfying about characters being as fragile at tenth level as at first level. Hitpoints also generally prevent a single lucky strike from ending the career of a character.

Hitpoints are also easy to understand. It’s one big pool of numbers. The singular health bar. The lower it gets the more in danger you are of dying. It’s simple to understand and has been adapted widely in most games where you take the role of a singular protagonist. Video games continue to use the health bar, often paired with the even more implausible healing of endless first aid kits.

Hitpoints are also fast. One person rolls, compares it to a static number and if favourable rolls again and then says the result. It’s simple and it’s quick, which is attractive in a game with combat being frequent. There is negligible counter rolling, back-and-forth across the table, or interaction with the result.

Other Ways

Hitpoints aren’t the only method of health tracking found in role-playing games.

One method D&D had tried in the past is separating skill and fatigue from physical health. The most recent attempt at thing was in the 3e product Unearthed Arcana which included vigor and wound points. WP did not increase as levels were gained, as people’s physical health is static. Attempts at this were often problematic because some attacks would target Wound Points, adding the risk of a few lucky hits killing even a high level character. As adventurers are typically involved in many more encounters per day than monsters, WP/VP systems disproportionately punish PCs who can find their Wound Points whittled down over time.

Another option is less health but greater avoidance. So the PC has a more active party in avoiding damage, such as parrying, rolling to dodge. This option works best in fast games where doubling the rolls doesn’t overly slow down combat or variants where the PC roll all the dice.

A similar method is damage soaking, with the PC rolling to resist damage or flat damage reduction. Hitpoints can be lower and increase more gradually, but PCs gain more damage avoidance or ways of reducing damage. But this also increases the amount of rolling and the complexity of basic combat.

There’s also a greater number of outcomes. With basic hitpoints attacks have two results: hit or miss. Once other variables are included this doubles the variables. And adds the possibility of having a PC roll well only to have their awesome moment of glory defeated by an equally good roll from the monster.

Duality

The argument over hitpoints reminds the science nerd part of me of the light debates: if light was a particle or a wave. Three centuries of arguing ended up being moot due to wave-particle duality that said both sides were right (and all participants were wrong). The hitpoint debate has a similar needless divisiveness because hitpoints have to represent physical health in some way but they cannot solely represent health. There must be a meat-fatigue duality to hitpoints for them to function.

In this respect, more abstraction is good, as the DM can fudge the percentage depending on what is happening on a round-by-round basis. Using a favourite example, if a PC is hit by a red dragon’s fiery breath and knocked off a cliff where they fall thirty feet into a pool of scalding lava where they float for a few rounds before being dragged out, the PC might only have taking health-based damage. If the PC is instead bull rushed off a shallow slope into a marsh full of toxic swamp gas where they sink into quicksand and almost drown the PC might not have any actual injuries and all hp loss is related to fatigue and exhaustion.