Lady Chance and I picked up the Temple of Elemental Evil game on a lark for $10 a week or so ago. And we’re enjoying the crap out of it. Woot!
Note: We’re both old school tabletop RPG players now in our late 30s with kids and little time for such.
So once ToEE is over we’re thinking we’d like to stay in the game, such as it were, of playing a D&D game in a PC setting. Neverwinter Nights comes to mind but I need more info.
So talk to me, Dopers. What’s the skinny on D&D as a game (not the D&D Online game that’s now out, though. There’s no means by which we’ll have enough time to devote to that.)
Baldur’s Gate
Baldur’s Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast
Baldur’s Gate II
Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn
BG II has a permanent slot on my hard drive. You need to be old school for these, as they’re with 2.5 edition rules. “Go for the eyes, Boo! Go for the eyes!”
I prefer Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark over Icewind Dale, but Icewind Dale I and II are still very good. I prefer ID over the base NWN and NWN: SoU.
I’m working through BG: II SoA for the first time. I’ve taken a little break because I’ve got a lot to do outside, and the weather has turned nice.
But I love it. I can take as long as I want to explore and do subquests, and I find the story arc propelling the action interesting (for the most part.) And these have all been out for so long now that you can pick up the whole series really cheap all over the place.
I haven’t picked up D&DOnline, but the NeverWinter Nights games rock. They can take a bunch of time to get through, so there’s lots of play value, and you’ll have a completely different experience playing different classes. I never played online, so I don’t know how well that works, but I played the single-player game for years and had a blast. NWN, Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark are all great modules, too.
Neverwinter Nights is very cool, get the platinum or diamond edition. Icewind Dale is a good story, but the pathing SUCKS on it. The storyline does make up for it to me, but be ready to compensate for IDIOT party members who grind their noses into walls instead of going around. (I’ve been wanting the rest of that series, but haven’t got ahold of them yet.) I second the Baldur’s Gate series. If you like the way ToEE is set up, then pick up Pool of Radiance, it’s got pretty much the same game engine, the others have different (better IMO) engines. Planescape Torment is an excellent one as well. We haven’t tried Dragonshard, it’s more like Warcraft from our understanding, it’s real time strategy. We are staying well away from D&D online, because Atari developed it, (Instead of sticking with producing it, I don’t know why they didn’t hire Black Isle to develop it but they didn’t.) and it goes WAY far away from the D&D game concepts. (Atari producing a D&D game is one thing, but developing it is quite another, they threw the books out the window and just did whatever with this most recent game.) For example, you don’t gain experience for kills in D&D online, ONLY COMPLETING QUESTS gets you exp. That is completely contrary to the tabletop rules. The reviews we read also said that gameplay was almost nil as well.
Yeah, but some of these other games run on 3rd edition rules. Pool of Radiance runs on 3rd edition rules for example. (They did away with THAC0, sort of turned it upside down and made it more easily grasped in short time. Now you want a high AC, not a low one.)
For the record, I find that the 2nd-edition games play better than the 3rd edition ones. In the 3 and 3.5 ones, I start sitting around figuring out ways to become more powerful. Cheezy class-matching and things like that. 2nd edition is focused on playing the game. PLus, the 2nd edition ones were all with the beautiful (who cares if its 2-d) backgrounds. They’re astoundingly pretty.
And while it isn’t a “normal” DnD game, **Planescape Torment ** is one of the best games ever made, period. Hands down. I still treasure my copy.
BTW, **Pools of Radiance ** sucks. In so many ways. And the rules are totally screwed up. And its fugly in the dungeons. And it’s no fun to play. And the game quite literally plays to cheat you. (I am not joking. Some poeple tinkered with it and discovered the stupid thing actually screws with the die rolls, weighting them heavily against you.)
Check the setup. I believe there’s a way to increase the number of nodes used on pathfinding. Raise it up high. Pathfinding becomes far, far better than normal.
I loved NWN…at least the OC. SoU isn’t all that riveting - I haven’t even finished the thing yet, and it’s been a year since I bought it. I mainly got it for the new classes. There are also a plethora of player-made modules at the Vault that are as good as - or better than - the OC, so even if the OC isn’t your cup of tea, it would be worth getting NWN just to play those mods.
I agree with everyone else in this thread - here’s my recommendations, with the best listed first:
Planescape Torment (we want more of this to all you game designers outthere)
Baldurs gate II - shadows of amn
Neverwinter nights (if you don’t mind a rather predictable plot - IMHO)
Icewind dale I
Fallout I & II
The rest of the Icewind dale, Baldurs gate and neverwinter nights series.
Funny thing is, I also just bought ToEE and am playing it now too It certainly got better after I got the loot-bug fixed (on some systems you can’t loot untill you patch:))
Temple of Elemental Evil. It’s the only modern D&D game I know of to have turn based combat. That said, I’m not a fan of 3rd edition rules, far more emphasis on stats and less on role playing, I found. Plus I just don’t get how you’d explain in game rules how a fighter who’se spent the last however long bashing things with a sword can all of a sudden learn how to cast spells in the field. . .
Big note about TOEE: It’s buggy as hell, even with the official patch. If you get it (or have it and haven’t yet) do a websearch for the Circle of Eight mod, which fixes an absolute plethora of bugs.
Fallout 1 & 2, while exceptional RPG’s are about as far removed from D&D as you can get, btw. Post apocalyptic and different ruleset entirely, as they use the SPECIAL system rather than any D&D ruleset.
Also, Planescape:Torment is my favouritest RPG of all time, but it’s very atypical. Nary a dragon to be found, only two chances to get new armor (and neither for the main character), and only one sword in the entire game. That being said I think it’s all the better for it, but it may not be your cup of tea.
I just realised I may have been a bit unclear about TOEE: if anyone else gets it download the Cirlce of Eight mod. For Jonathon Chance, if you don’t have it already, download and install it. You’ll have a much better experience, even if you haven’t run across any game-stopping bugs yet. My favourite so far (before I installed the mod) was where my mage could throw 61,250 magic missiles a turn. Sadly, if I actually attempted to fire off more than 5 it crashed to the desktop.
Pool of Radiance runs on 3rd edition rules for example. (They did away with THAC0, sort of turned it upside down and made it more easily grasped in short time. Now you want a high AC, not a low one.)
It certainly got better after I got the loot-bug fixed (on some systems you can’t loot untill you patch:))