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March 04, 2005

For the last several months, designers here at Turbine have been wrestling with a sticky problem, and today I want to take the time to give you an update on a decision we’ve made. Just as important, I want to tell you about how we reached the decision.

As more and more of Dungeons & Dragons Online becomes “ready-to-play,” we’re spending more of our play time running through dungeons the way the game is meant to be played. This means no cheating by using admin commands like “immortal” and “spell god.”

When we stopped using the latter of those two cheats — unlimited spellcasting — we discovered a big problem: spellcasters were running out of spells very early into each dungeon. We always knew this was going to be somewhat of an issue, particularly for lower-level spellcasters, but we had underestimated how much of a problem it would be. All of a sudden, wizards, sorcerers, and clerics didn’t have even close to the number of spells they needed to be effective.

Why was this happening? Let’s go back and look at the source of the problem—namely, the assumptions which determine how many spells each spellcaster has. In the pen-and-paper D&D game, the number of spells that spellcasters receive each day is based upon a certain presumption about the number of encounters that the DM will throw at them:

An encounter with an Encounter Level (EL) equal to the PCs’ level is one that should expend about 20% of their resources—hit points, spells, magic item uses, and so on. This means, on average, after about four encounters of the party’s level the PCs need to rest, heal, and regain spells. (3.5 Dungeon Master’s Guide, pg. 49)

So that’s where D&D is coming from. Four good fights, then rest. And given the time it can take for a combat to be resolved over the grid using miniatures, the pacing for the pen-and-paper game has always felt pretty good.

But that’s not the model that DDO uses at all. With real-time combat and a computer resolving actions much, much faster than a group of humans sitting over a battlemat, DDO fights play out in a fraction of the time they would take in the PnP game. Resting every four fights would be ridiculously often, with rest camps every few rooms. On a gross estimate, you can expect to run through something between a dozen and twenty good fights between opportunities for resting.

Still, our first implementation with any system for DDO has been to be as loyal as possible to the D&D rules, and so we started out using the exact numbers from the PHB for spells per day. And while we predicted the problem of spell shortage, our playtesting showed that we had underestimated its severity. Clearly, something needed to be done.

Our first try was on the conservative side. We simply increased the number of spells each spellcasting class receives, literally taking the tables in the PHB and multiplying every number by five. So, bang, the first level sorcerer had a base of 15 spells to cast. The wizard and the cleric had 10. Choosing those 10 spells to prepare was sort of cumbersome from a player time perspective. But as you’d expect, spellcasters didn’t run out of spells as much, and were more fun to play.

Meanwhile, another problem had been heating up: the experience of playing a spellcaster suffered badly starting around 10th level, which in D&D is when spellcasters should really be coming into their own. When a spellcaster had more than 20 or so spells to memorize, spell selection became long and cumbersome. Spellcasting in combat was even worse, with the player not only choosing between 20 spells, but also needing to keep track of how many slots of each spell were prepared—or at least, for the sorcerer, how many slots were available for each spell level. It required multiple pages of hotkeys to manipulate in play, and literally pages of UI to manipulate when going through spell preparation.

Maybe you can see what was about to happen. When we increased the number of spells universally, interface and gameplay issues exploded. Players were being asked to prepare dozens and dozens of spells, and to track those choices both onscreen and mentally. The UI even broke for some characters, as they had to choose more spells than the UI was capable of handling. We tried a couple of other tweaks, but it was becoming more and more clear to us that spell memorization had some very serious issues in our game.

After much deliberation, we decided to look at an alternative-yet-familiar spellcasting system presented in Unearthed Arcana, a book of optional D&D rules published by Wizards last year: spell points. To be honest, spell points were always lurking in the collective subconscious of the design team, beckoning us with answers to our problems. Balancing a hierarchy of how much spells should cost by level and how many spell points a spellcaster should receive—these things are adjustable with relative ease. Spell selection becomes easier and more user-friendly. And just about every player of fantasy RPGs has some familiarity with spell points or mana systems.

Still, for a long time, we resisted this implementation -- we want DDO to be as loyal to D&D as possible, and we still weren’t absolutely convinced that memorization in some form couldn’t work. What really clinched it for us was when some of the Wizards of the Coast designers encouraged us to implement the spell point system. They believed, as we came to, that players would have an easier and more fun experience with spell points.

So that’s where we are now. In the last week, we’ve implemented a spell point system in DDO. Spells of different level have their point costs, and spellcasters gain spell points based on their caster level and their ability scores. Over the next several months, we’ll be working closely with Wizards and our beta testers to iron out some of the kinks and set up a good system of exactly what those numbers should be.

What does this mean for how the game is played? In some ways, quite a bit; in other ways, not much at all. Spell acquisition is largely unchanged. Sorcerers and bards acquire spells during character generation and advancement, and they have that limited allotment of spells to choose from during their play. Wizards, clerics, and other spell-preparing classes select their suite of spells for the day, and they can make changes to that allotment when they reach rest camps within dungeons.

All spellcasting classes must then deal with both tactical and strategic choices as they go into dungeons and combat. There’s usually a right spell for the right situation, whether that is to deal damage, heal damage, incapacitate foes, charm enemies, etc. Those decisions vary not only with the character you’ve built, but with the situation with which you must deal. Spell points remain a limited resource for all spellcasters, and no spellcaster wants to run out of spell points when they’re most needed.

I realize that many of our fans won’t like shifts to gameplay in DDO that take us away from our D&D roots. Believe me, as a long-time player and one of the developers of 3rd edition D&D, I understand. The bottom line is that we don’t take these types of changes lightly, but we are willing to make them if necessary. I can only ask for your trust as we do everything we can to make you the best game possible, and to make DDO the best user experience possible.

David Eckelberry