Neverwinter Nights: D&D 3E Done Right

So after writing my Sword & Sorcery short, I started jonesing for some kind of video game hack-and-slash action.  I had played Neverwinter Nights Diamond Edition a few years ago, but didn't get all that far in it.  I decided to get back on the wagon and play again.  I of course created "Nanok the Barbarian" and gave him a Weapon Focus in Greatsword (like you do).  I put the game on Easy because smacking the crap out of AI goons is just that much more fun, and I began to loot and pillage to my heart's content.

For those not in the know, Neverwinter Nights is a video game that came out a while back that uses the D&D 3.0 rules to run everything.  It is actually explicitly 3.0, not 3.5, so certain things might seem a little odd if 3.5 was your 3E of choice.  I'm not a huge computer game person, but I do like the occasional FPS or RPG-style computer game (Deus Ex is one of my favorite CRPGs of all time).  When I do play a game like this, I am one of those people who gets really "crunchy" with my character - what weapon do I take, tweaking stats, skills, etc..  I'm not a WoW or other MMO type player, so don't get that far into it, but I do like the ability to "fiddle" with my character like that.

One of the more pervasive criticisms, I felt, of D&D 3.X was that there was far too much crunch - people wanted more customizability, but not THAT much more.  With class and race abilities and mods, skills, feats, various types of bonuses, and so forth, if you weren't more of a hardcore "crunchy gamer", and just someone who wanted to build a character to beat up orcs, you were faced with something of a choice-explosion.  What's worse is that, if you weren't at least semi-intelligent as to how you created your character, you could really do yourself a disservice and make choices that definitely dropped you down the backward slope of the power curve.

Now, I'm not going to go on a tirade about how this is why older editions were better or why 3E sucks.  I actually enjoyed a lot of my 3E gaming, but I can see arguments for and against.  It was a "modernization" of the D&D mechanics, which I didn't have a problem with, but I think it just got over engineered; Castles & Crusades, in my mind, is a much better approach and still makes the game a lot more "modern" (unified core mechanic, so on and so forth).

But for a CRPG, D&D 3.0 is great.  It provides the computer with a very tightly-woven, crunchy, almost-every-situation-covered rules framework, something that a lot of CRPGs were already going for at the time and the player based love it (see Deus Ex...).  Also, because of the way a computer can offer up (or hide) information to the user, a lof of that "choice-explosion" goes away.  When it's time to pick a feat, it only shows you feats that you can actually take.  When you pick up a weapon in the game, you're told immediately whether you can use it or not.  You can see all your relevant modifiers worked into the final bonuses or penalties without doing the math yourself. 

At the end of the day, 3.0 might have been passed by these days, but I still think that generation of D&D rules were perfect as transition fodder for moving people back and forth from video games to RPGs and so on, because the rules could work in both media quite well, and one reinforced the other.  I'm curious (because I don't know) if there have been any video games based around 4E rules - my guess is no, but if someone can say for certain, I'd appreciate it.

Game Mechanics: Smoke Em If You Got Em

Over this past week’s vacation from work, I broke down and picked up a first-person shooter for myself. I’m not much of a console gamer - there’s something about using console controllers that I just find awkward, and if one is using the TV to play a console game then no one else can use the TV for it’s more common purpose. So I tend to prefer computer games, especially for FPS-style games (I find the reaction time and precision afforded with a mouse and a keyboard way better than a console controller).

Anyhow, I picked up Rogue Warrior, a so-so computer game I bought mostly because I think Richard Marcinko is a hardcore throat-stomper who’s more or less made a second successful career out of being a well-marketed bona-fide badass after his first career as a Navy SEAL ended at the hands of a wrathful US government-delivered jail sentence. the FPS game would have been decent maybe ten years ago, around the era of Rainbow Six and the like, but these days is woefully outclassed. However, since I don’t play a lot of video games, the novelty of a new game, filled with ridiculous profanity and all sorts of gratuitously brutal “kill moves” kept me entertained for a handful of evenings.

And yes, I’m getting to a point...

One thing I noticed was that every level I played, there were opportunities for utilizing some of the little perks of the game. For example, the beginning of every mission, your enemies aren’t aware you’re there, and you have the option of taking out the first half dozen or so bad guys in hand-to-hand “kill moves” which are pretty entertaining. Most every mission also has at least one area where you could enjoy yourself sniping at the bad guys with a handily available sniper rifle. There’s also at least one close-quarters battle area where a shotgun or SMG can be very handy.

Now, the cool part is that you don’t HAVE to kill people quietly in the beginning of the mission, or snipe at them at another point in the game, etc. etc., but there is an option to use these features and while you don’t have to, it makes it fun to do so.

This got me thinking about role-playing game mechanics. While it is perfectly possible to play an all-human, no-spellcasters game of D&D where there is no magic and no magic items, and no one ever goes into a “dungeon”, you’d be hard pressed to give me a reason why this is a good idea. Similarly, playing a Traveller game where you never leave the low-tech planet you’re on, or a Shadowrun game where there’s no cybernetics, or an Ars Magica game where no one plays a mage. There’s nothing stopping you from ignoring the primary “draw” of a certain RPG, but it gives me pause to consider it because if you ignore what makes that game unique, I feel there’s little point in using that game in favor of another, far more generic and flavorless system.

Of course, this is different than “picking and choosing rules” or coming up with homebrew solutions. I’m talking more about ignoring whole reasons why the game was created. Using my own homebrew Tankards & Broadswords RPG as an example, I’ve designed the game from the beginning to facilitate episodic play. For someone to take the game and use it in a linear campaign wouldn’t be “doing it wrong”, but on the other hand, why pick my RPG out of all the hundreds out there and then not use that which helps set it apart a little from its peers?

So my question to the reader is, when would you or when have you taken a game system and then completely ignored or thrown out that which most strongly defines that system, and why would you or did you do this?