More flavorful game play

[Gorbadoc]

I love the way game play has been tied to flavor in recent quests. I want the devs to be aware of this and to keep up the good work.

In the quest Blockade Buster, players are asked to infiltrate and destroy Droaam mine layer ships. The quest rewards stealth and cunning with its alarm bell system. The quest is legitimately easier when the monsters are not alerted, yet a completely unsubtle party of barbarians and clerics can still succeed with enough brute force.

In the same adventure pack, the quest Undermine features explosives. While players HAVE to use the explosives only a couple times, I managed to find a use for the explosives every fifty feet. By treating the explosives as both a weapon and a trigger for a variety of events, the quest was flavorful and encouraged outside-the-box thinking.

These flavor elements were not limited to any single class. Some builds are better able to take advantage of the explosives or alarm systems than others (a sneaky wizard with Web and Finger of Death will have a better time keeping alarms from going off than a barbarian, for example), but anyone could try to be clever.

There were class-specific items, though. Rogue mechanics got an explicit game play advantage in both quests. The advantages were small, but they tied a game play element to a character element, reinforcing the idea that the differences between characters goes beyond the numbers on their character sheets. I like this idea. Maybe in the future we'll see a quest where an elderly church lady is more trusting if you have a paladin in the party, or where a bard's knowledge of lore saves the party from having to check some archives in a quest.

And this isn't even mentioning the end fight in Eyes of Stone. There, the "clever way" is a bit cliché, but it's fun, and I frankly would have been disappointed if you hadn't included it. After all, sometimes a thing is cliché because it's a good idea.

I do have a caveat. Consider the Stormreaver Fresco from The Sharn Syndicate adventure pack. This quest has some clever flavor items, including the option to sneak past some guards to deactivate some alarms. Unfortunately, it also presents a situation where, in terms of storyline, common sense dictates that Dimension Door is an ideal alternate solution to a puzzle. In practice, using Dimension Door bugs the quest; an objective cannot be completed, so the quest must be restarted. Outside-the-box thinking is penalized. Please, pay attention to detail, and if you refuse to permit outside-the-box thinking, AT LEAST tweak the storytelling so it makes sense. The Stormreaver Fresco bug completely obliterates any sense of immersion the player might have had in the story.

Anyway, I love the quests we've been seeing these last several months. I wanted to start this thread to say thanks for the good work. I hope we'll see more of it.

[mindlessdrone1991]

I concur with pretty much all of this. I also really like the end fight of the last quest in Attack on Stormreach (Siege breaker, I think) where you have to solve a puzzle while fighting. :)


*Edit* I also really like the DM narrator in the Droamm quest chains. Some funny lines, but mostly really great immersion.

[Gorbadoc]

I liked that fight, too. Soloing it the first time was tough, but it was definitely a cool fight.

I actually thought of another criticism of the new content, and of old content: Wild animals. Sometimes they add excitement and flavor. Other times, they're obnoxious, boring, and completely inconsistent with the story. In some cases, the bad wildlife could be improved if guard monsters were replaced with ambushes.

Well-Implemented Wild Animals:
Stormcleave Outpost
You're in this huge expanse of wilderness, and you encounter a pack of wolves standing over a carcass. Come too close, and they attack you, presumably to protect their dinner. It's plausible, and it's not boring.

The Vale of Twilight
The animals here defy everything I learned in biology class, but that's a good thing; different planes are brushing up against the area, dumping creatures from goodness-knows-where. You get a variety of creatures (both magical and nonmagical) and a variety of fights.

Diplomatic Impunity
When you're near the panthers' den, they attack you. Makes sense. They're not a very interesting monster, but it's basically just one encounter, and there's no penalty for sneaking past them.

Poorly-Implemented Wild Animals:
Frame Work
Outside the city, there's a wolf or a panther roughly every ten feet. This is incredibly boring. Encounter after encounter consists of melee-only opponents that all use the same tactics. Not only are they boring, but the animals in Frame Work make zero sense in context. Their population density is way too high for a nonmagical biome. Besides, presumably minotaur patrols would kill any predator large enough to threaten their commercial interests.

Then there's the way they attack you. I know, it's a monster's job to attack adventurers. But if they're being territorial, why don't the panthers attack the wolves, or vice versa? And if they REALLY want to kill adventurers, why don't they stalk the party like any other predator stalking prey?

A Small Problem
This quest has many of the same problems as Frame Work. The wolves and lions are boring to fight, and they're all over the place. The only difference is that players HAVE to go through the areas with the wolves and lions. Twice. Here I'm on a quest to convince a tree-hugging giant that I'm an okay person, and it's highly disadvantageous NOT to butcher the local wildlife.

A Suggestion: Ambushes!
DDO focuses heavily on encountering monsters. Usually that means there's some kind of guard blocking the path between you and your objective. Very few people want to guard any given patch of wilderness, though, and wild animals don't make believable guards.

I recommend ambushes by predators. Imagine:
In Frame Work, as soon as you're a certain distance from Dorris, you get attacked by 5 wolves. Thereafter, you see an occasional wolf run past in the middle distance. After some time, if you're still outside, you are again attacked by 6-15 wolves. The exact number will depend on how long it has been since the last attack (more time = more wolves joined the hunt) and whether someone in your party managed to kill any of the wolves at long range. Note that chasing them before they attack is unhelpful; the wolves should move 1.5x as fast as the fastest possible player character speed. You'll still encounter SOME wolves just sitting there, but with the threat of ambush, there's actually a penalty for letting them slow you down.

Of course, this makes the quest LESS dangerous for zerging parties. To deal with this, instead of having a countdown to ambush based solely on time, have a wolf counter that goes up with time elapsed, distance traveled, and objective items accomplished (e.g. +2 wolves per ballista part acquired). Maybe make the counter go up slower when party members are hidden or invisible.

Flavor-wise, such ambushes would at least pretend to make sense (more than can be said for the landscape littered with predators). These predators are coming in from off the map, because they've been tracking you. They're not lounging around waiting for a convention.