Dungeons & Dragons Online

If The hardcore crowd of pen and paper role-players that makes up the world's Dungeons & Dragons fanbase need to be reassured of anything, it's that the people tasked with the mighty quest of bringing their precious world of hit points, saving throws, THACO stats and magic missiles to the MMO genre are as passionate about D&D as they are. They've no need to worry.

According to the regular developer diaries at the game's official website, the team at Turbine Games regularly take time out from busy coding and designing duties to pick up their character sheets, roll their dice and earn their XP. Lead designer, Ken Troop, knows that staying faithful to the source is vital if he wants to avoid alienating some of gaming's most rabid fans.

"We've known from day one that we're not doing a straight conversion of the PnP rules," he said when we spoke to him, "but our main goal is to capture the soul of Dungeons & Dragons. In a nutshell, we interpret this as getting together with a group of your friends and sharing thrilling, memorable adventures. "Almost all MMORPGs derive their character systems from a Dungeons & Dragons model, but only D&D Online is going to offer you the opportunity to create a character that plays and feels like your original D&D character. Why play an imitation when you can play the real thing?"

Do As You Please

Although news from the Turbine camp has been very quiet since the project was announced back in May 2003, work has been progressing nicely, to the point that internally the game has been running in a playable state for some time now. Staff apparently gather every Friday to go questing (mostly to test recent additions to the code, but no doubt to have a ball at the same time).

One of the most interestingsounding aspects of the game is the old chestnut of experience, notably the way it's earned. Turbine has made it clear that XP is only gained through completion of quests, and that most dungeons are tightly scripted and instanced to you and your group only. Many quests contain non-combat objectives such as scouting or recovering artefacts. You can handle the monsters in these missions however you like - via combat, stealth,

diplomacy, or whatever. There are even quests which call for a total lack of killing whatsoever. All of which helps the online game retain the story-driven nature of the pen and paper version. Along with D&D, Turbine is also busily developing Middle-Earth Online. With two of the fantasy world's most genre-defining and influential sources of material at its disposal, the big-hitters of EverQuest II and World Of Warcraft might finally have some competition on their hands.