Community

The first real Dungeons & Dragons video game in years is out. It’s called Neverwinter, the most recent in a long line of D&D video games to be centered on that city starting with the oft-overlooked SSI game Neverwinter Nights released in 1991. The name was recycled by BioWare hot off the success of their Baldur’s   Gate  series, who released Neverwinter Nights in 2002. A sequel was released by Obsidian Entertainment, unsurprisingly called Neverwinter Nights 2 . And now we have Neverwinter by Cryptic Studios.

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 

Flashback time. The year is 2006. D&D is in its third and a half edition. Bird flu was the panic de jour. Taylor Hicks swept American Idol and went onto a lasting and influential career. And I, your friendly blogger, began playing Living Greyhawk.

For those not in "the know", as the kids say, Living Grayhawk (or LG) was a RPGA organized play campaign. You played a character in adventure modules that were produced by geographic region, gaining experience and treasure normally. Similar to Living Forgotten Realms it had a much more rigid bureaucracy that tried to both emulated a home campaign an add verisimilitude to the fictional world. You paid an "upkeep" which included food, board, and a set amount of ammunition. You tracked experience and gold down to the single digits and had to purchase

This week I'm looking at throwbacks and vestigial elements of the game, ones that were either removed for 4th Edition or kept for reason only the Holy Bovine knows.

The Holy Bovine only accepts minotaurs as clerics and is the reason runepriests were added to the game.

Today I'm starting with random magic items. The tables that gave your 2nd level rogue a +3 greatsword and your 13th level fighter a +1 hand crossbow. Good riddance, right? Right?!

History Lesson

D&D has long had random magic item and treasure tables, where a roll determines how many coins the party receives, of what denomination, and what magic items – if any. There's a great Gygaxian rant on page 92 of the 1e Dungeon Master's Guide about how "thoughtless placement of magic items has been the ruination of many a campaign."

It was a common complaint and comparison when 4th Edition was released: it is World of Warcraft for the tabletop. Since I'm discussing video games this week as a very loose theme, I would be remiss if I didn't look at the elephant in the gaming room.

Races                             

Warcraft has a collection of common and uncommon fantasy races, with a couple grounded heavily in the back-story of that world. The undead Forsaken are a good example, being contrasted with the mostly mindless undead Scourge controlled by the Lich King. Likewise, D&D has had a long mythology and fairly consistent back-story and world with its own dominant races and sub-races.

So it's curious that 4e started by dividing elves along the same lines as night elves and blood elves (woodland