August 16, 2005
Hey everyone. I'm Ken Troop, lead designer on Dungeons & DragonsŪ Online: Stormreach". This development diary delves into the background behind a very important issue: advancement in DDO.
In pen and paper D&D, most campaigns have a level cap of 20. Of course, many campaigns will never have their characters get to 20, either because it takes too long, or because a group decides that it's more fun to reroll once their characters get into their "level teens". D&D also has the option of "epic levels" -- advancement past level 20. Some groups take advantage of this, others stay away, preferring the experience of 1-20 advancement.
This system works quite well when players play once every 1-2 weeks for a session of a few hours. Going weeks (or even months) between advancement can be fine in pen and paper D&D, and 20 levels is more than enough moments of advancement.
However, from the very beginning of development on DDO, we realized that this was one of those areas of the game that would not port easily to the online medium. In a persistent-world RPG, players might spend ten hours in a day playing the game. Even an "average" player, playing 10-15 hours a week, would quickly traverse the whole of the D&D leveling experience. Quite awhile ago we concluded that, regardless of how many D&D levels we had, we weren't going to have enough for a persistent advancement game. At 20 levels, with 19 moments of advancement, either each moment of advancement was going to take so long that it felt very boring to advance -- too long between new things and your character getting better. Or, if the time between moments was pegged at a better rate, the overall time of advancement was going to feel too short.
We talked about it with WOTC, and they felt the same way -- we needed to come up with many more "moments of advancement" outside of the pen and paper system, but have it be such that level 8 in DDO felt roughly analogous to a level 8 character in D&D pen and paper. And that's where ranks come in. We'll spill some more dirt about ranks later on, but the basic core of the system is that each time you earn a rank you get an opportunity to customize and advance your character. Every time you go up a rank, you earn Action Points, which you can spend to purchase Enhancements. Think of Enhancements as mini-feats -- some of them are purely stat-based, some improve existing abilities/feats/skills, most are based off of what class and race you are.
But, and this is where the equivalence to a D&D pen and paper character comes in, you can only have 4 at one time. So each time you get to earn a rank, you can purchase an Enhancement, and if you have 4 Enhancements already, you choose to replace one existing Enhancement with a new one (or if you really want, you can choose to keep your old Enhancement but most Enhancements have higher-level versions of themselves so eventually you will want to upgrade). It's a system that WOTC and Turbine designed together, and we're all quite happy with it.
And that all brings us to the overall level curve. Once we realized we needed ranks and Enhancements, and that such a system gave us many more levels to play with, we took a look at the level cap we wanted to start with.
There were two primary factors in our decision to launch with "40 levels," or "advancement moments," that were the equivalent of a level 10 character in pen and paper D&D.
1) Standard and density of content. We really wanted to make sure that each level in DDO felt packed. Full and fun. All the adventures in DDO are handcrafted modules -- some of them are short, some epic, but one of the central tenets of DDO was -- "no purely random content" -- we wanted the players to feel that the adventure was intentionally (and intelligently) designed. While the temptation to put in the random fluff is always there, we realized that with Ranks, we no longer needed to have the 1-20 curve just for the sake of having it. Instead, we could focus on the first half of that, and make sure each level felt great -- full of abilities, quests and dungeons. We wanted to set the bar high for what a level felt like in DDO.
2) Epic levels, or more accurately -- our desire not to play with epic levels right off the bat. The 20+ level game in pen and paper D&D can be very different from the 1-20 game. WOTC and Turbine both were reluctant to enter too quickly the realm of epic play in DDO. Yes, we will eventually extend the level cap above into epic territory, but we want more time and consideration as to exactly what the nature of that advancement will be. This way, we have more levels of regular advancement to play with during the early period of DDO Live.
One of the things that Turbine has been really good at for the last seven years is episodic content. In AC1, for example, we did some 60+ consecutive episodes -- each one filled with content, minor features, and improvements. Our Live teams are really good and we want to play to that strength. By setting a high standard for what each level in DDO feels like, and by making sure that there was a definable leveling axis for the Live team to grow, we ensure that players will enjoy a great launch experience, while getting continuous updates that extend where a character can go and what they can do.
Overall, this system gives characters at launch 40+ moments of advancement while still keeping true to the spirit of D&D.
Ken Troop
Below is some supplemental information in response to questions that have come up in response to this article:
1) Skill points do not equal Action Points. Every character still gets skill points and uses those to increase Skills. Action Points are what you use to purchase Enhancements.
2) Enhancements do not equal Feats. In some cases they do similar things, in other cases Enhancements enhance certain Feats, but the only way you get Enhancements is through acquiring and spending Action Points.
3) Another way of putting the level equation -- DDO's 40 ranks+levels = pen and paper D&D's first 10 levels. And yes, as we expand the level cap to D&D pen and paper 20, there will be 4 ranks per level - so 80 total.
4) We'll be doing a more official writeup later on, but here's an example --
Level 1 Character (Start)
Level 1, Rank 1 (purchase 1 Enhancement from a pool that you have access to because of your level, race, and class)
Level 1, Rank 2 (same as above)
Level 1, Rank 3 (same as above)
Level 1, Rank 4 (same as above)
Level 2 (pen and paper D&D benefits -- hit points, spell points, saving throws, +base attack bonus, etc.)
Level 2, Rank 1 (purchase 1 Enhancement from a pool that you have access to because of your level, race, and class -- replacing one of your previously acquired Enhancements)
etc.
5) Sorry for any confusion about multi-classing.
-- Multiclassing exists.
-- You can multi-class up to three classes, no more.
-- There is *no* xp penalty for multi-classing.
6) Overall leveling time -- This isn't pinned down exactly right now. It's something we'll continue to tweak during Alpha and Beta with our players' feedback. Suffice it to say we're going for something longer than pen and paper, and something more equivalent to persistent-world roleplaying. Just because we're not a grind doesn't mean that we want to minimize the fun of building and adventuring with your character.
Hope this helps. I'll continue to monitor the thread for a little bit longer before I have to go for awhile...but I and others on dev and OCR will continue to monitor and respond.
Stratics Central
