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GAME CONCEPT AND DESIGN
COSC 320.101_SU09
SUMMER 2009

Introduction to Neverwinter Nights

Dungeons & Dragons

If you don't know of D&D or any other style of "pen and paper" roleplaying, here's a description.

Typically a group of friends would get together. They'd gather around a table (or a few tables) with their chips, dips, sodas and other snacks. They'd have their rule books, their paper and pencils. Perhaps they'd have little miniature figures of warriors or monsters and such. They'd have pages of data about the character they were going to play during the game. And the dice....of course, the dice.

Consider when you were a kid and you played "Cowboys and Indians" or "Cops and Robbers." Remember that? Remember how annoying it was when you aimed at your foe and said, "Bang, bang! You're dead!" To which he'd reply "No I'm not. You missed me."

That's what the rules and the dice were for. I could say, "Bang, bang, I shoot at you. The rules say that I have a 2-in-6 chance of hitting you." I would then roll a die and if I rolled a 1 or a 2...then I did hit you and you couldn't get out of it.

Now every game session had a number of players. Each player had a character that he would be playing for the session. This character was make-believe (of course) and possessed many attributes that the player did not possess. The character had a race (such as dwarf, elf, halfling, human) and a class (such as fighter, cleric (healer), mage, or thief). These race and class combinations resulted in a variety of abilities. The mage, for example, could cast spells while the fighter could not. The thief could pick locks or hide in shadows.

On the sheet of paper, the players had all the information about their characters including their statistics such as:

• Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma. These stats were usually randomly generated by rolling 3 dice and adding up the total. So a stat could have a score of between 3 and 18. The higher the stat, the better the score. For example a fighter with a strength of 17 could lift more than a fighter with a strength of 9.
• Level. A character started off as a "level 1" meaning he'd just started. As the game progressed, if the character didn't die (or didn't die too horribly), he'd increase in level. Higher levels gave more abilities.
• Experience. When a player accomplished some feat, he would be awarded a number of experience points. When he had accumlated enough points, he advanced to the next "level."
• Hit Points. This is the character's "life." Let's suppose that a character has 12 hit points and gets struck by a sword that does 8 points of damage to him. He now only has 4 hit points! If his hit point total reaches 0...the character is dead. Many items give extra hitpoints when the item is used. Some players (such as the Cleric) can use magic to restore hitpoints to a wounded character. Typically when a character reaches a new experience level, he is granted additional permanent hit points. Monsters also have hit points, and if a player reduces a monster's hit point total to 0, the monster dies.
• Equipment. This was an accounting of the armor, weapons, and other sundry items the character had on his person.
• Spells. If a character was a spell caster, here was a list of the spells that was known by him. Even though there might be 30 "first level" spells in the rule book, the character might only know 5 of them.
• Notes. Miscellaneous data about the characters appearance, his likes and dislikes, past adventures, and so forth.

In addition to the players, one of the people at the table was the Dungeon Master. This person had in his possession and his head the adventure that the players were going to experience. He had maps, lists of NPC (non-playing characters) (the townsfolk, merchants, and so forth that weren't represented by the players), treasure, monsters, traps, surprises.

So, a typical session would really be one of telling a story, in which each person at the table tells a bit a time, usually making it up as they go along, but guided by their character information sheets, the rulebooks, and the dice.

The DM would describe the environment around the players. The players would then tell the DM what their character wanted to do in response. The DM would check his adventure plan and the rules, give consideration to as many variables as possible, then describe what happened as a result of the characters' actions. The players would then make new decisions and tell the DM, who would then describe the results of those actions....and so forth.

The real fun came when the players stopped saying, "I will have my character, Frobiz the 2nd level mage, cast a fireball at the orc." and started speaking as if the player himself were Frobiz.

"Your someone's breakfast tomorrow, pig-face!" I shout as I cast my fireball spell at the orc.

The DM, of course, has to be everyone else in the game. He adopts sleazy, shifty mannerisms when the players are talking to the filthy beggar, looks down his nose at the players while speaking in a falsetto when he's the haughty princess, and so forth. When all the players are pretending to be their characters (ie: roleplaying) and talking to each other, the game is lifted to entire new heights of enjoyment.

Although the DM had to also "play by the rules," it was widely acknowledged that he was in charge of the game. If he said your character fell down into the mud...then your character fell down into the mud. If your character had in his inventory The Wondrous Sword of Slaying Everything I See +8 and the DM decided the sword was too powerful for this adventure, he could:

1. ask you not to use it for this game (if he was a nice DM)
2. "manufacture" a way to prevent you from using it for this game..such as having it stolen while your character was asleep and working its recovery process into the fabric of his story.
3. take it away entirely. This is similar to #2, except your character never gets it back. (Not a nice DM)

The goal of a gaming session then was:

• For the DM to provide the players with an interesting, amusing, exciting story.
• For the players to take part in the story and try to work their way through to the conclusion. Along the way, their character would gain more experience points, different or better equipment, new spells, lots of treasure.
• And, of course, the stories afterward.

Sometimes a game ended at the end of the night. Sometimes, however, the players wouldn't get to the end of the adventure and so would "pause" and pick it up again "next week." Sometimes, they would get to the end but--due to a clever DM--would discover that because of some of the things they'd done tonight...even though they'd completed their quest...had caused "complications" in another part of their town / world.....and in true cliffhanger fashion, would show up next week to find out what occurs next.

The DM could create his own adventures...I often did...but some adventures came prepackaged with all the maps, fights, loot, and so forth already created. The DM merely had to read it...then run his characters through it. Hundreds of pre-built adventures existed, such as the notorious Temple of Elemental Evil.

Not only that but frequently whole "themes" would be created to be played under a particular set of rules. SpellJammer was a theme in which a group of Gnomes (?) had built a ship but through some sort of spellcasting mishap were now lost in space and visiting different worlds interacting with all sorts of races and species.

Along those lines came The Forgotten Realms which was a well-defined "world" with well-defined towns, political systems, factions and rivalries, monster sets, legends, and so forth. Many, many pre-built games were set in The Forgotten Realms. One such area was that of the city of Neverwinter....

Neverwinter was a city that...for some reason...never experience winter! Hence the name! In some adventures, the reason is discovered...