Choose My Adventure: Dungeons and Dragons Online immediately brings that tabletop goodness

It’s still early days for this month’s run of Choose My Adventure, but even so I can pretty much immediately confirm my earlier suspicions: Dungeons and Dragons Online absolutely knocks the feeling of being in the TTRPG out of the park.

That feeling starts with one very minuscule but stupendously important detail: the dungeon master. Or more specifically, the narrator’s voice that remarks what’s happening along the way, giving voice to enemies and contextualizing the surroundings of what I’m experiencing.

Trust me, I know how silly it is for me to glom on to such a generally trivial feature, but that little touch adds so much to the experience of being in a D&D game. It immediately draws me in to what one could argue is an otherwise mediocre and very “SSG-like” MMORPG when first playing through.

Obviously, most of this means I spent my time primarily on Korthos Island, the game’s tutorial segment. This also obviously means that a lot of what I was doing was very guided and on-rails, but it was still really nice to be awash in TTRPG feelings from the very jump. Somehow, the way this opening segment is delivered made me far more invested and attentive to what was going on and the story being told. It certainly was a more interesting starting experience than Neverwinter’s, to be sure.

Of course, the other major portion of DDO’s gameplay is the combat, and once again I was reminded of the signature SSG jankiness that I referenced when I was playing LOTRO a couple of years back. I don’t know how I can describe how that feels; at the brass tacks level, it’s your basic hotbar of abilities, but there’s something about how fighting in SSG titles has this odd mixture of comfort and discomfort – the blending of classic tab-target MMORPG gaming with some truly uninspired animation and sound design.

Of course, being a fan of LOTRO kind of made this pill much easier to swallow. Your mileage may vary.

There was another signature of SSG MMORPGs that I further ran in to, and that was the convoluted progression system. I’m not sure when this happened or whether I had just completely forgotten this was a thing, but character creation made me specifically select my stats, passives, and feats, which further continued as I hit certain level milestones. On top of that, there’s that old chestnut of multiple trees for my chosen class to chase. It all arrived a bit overwhelming, but I think some careful reading of tooltips and descriptions is going to see me move forward without too much issue. This game seriously wants you to read the tooltips, and I get the impression I’ll be burned if I don’t.

Speaking of classes, I decided to run with a new Dark Apostate Cleric. I was tempted to roll a Bard in this game as I did with last month’s title, but I elected to go with some tried-and-true sword-and-board gaming. Somehow it just felt like the right decision.

As I moved through Korthos, that presumption appears to have been the right one to make so far, as my stocky Dwarf lady was able to cut through sahuagin without too much hassle and easily Turn Undead when zombies decided to foolishly show up. I don’t know whether the Dark Apostate is a stronger version of the Cleric or if the Cleric itself just is a beast, but right now I feel delightfully unbothered by combat, letting me gleefully marinate in all of these D&D TTRPG juices.

As for Korthos itself, I started to recall a lot of what was happening, so there was an instinct to kind of plow through the story and get on with it, but somehow I wasn’t really feeling encouraged to do so. Again, the narration and the scene setting that happened as I went through the tutorial motions felt so right and so welcoming that I didn’t want to blithely click through quest text. I slowed down to read and absorb things, which only made the whole immersive experience that much better for me.

I think the only portion of this early adventure was the part where it took me to an open map area to run around and explore. I can kind of appreciate the line of thinking here – this sort of seems like DDO’s interpretation of a hex crawl – but I kind of like the little insular one shot-ish feelings of prior quests. Still, there were some objectives to chase, dungeons to discover and delve, and little side quests to take up, so it wasn’t all too bad.

Even as I was enjoying myself and taking my time in the tutorial segment, Korthos wasn’t going to be around forever, and eventually I was on a ship to Eberron and to further adventure. And as much as I really, really, really wanted to keep playing, I found myself at a perfect place for a poll.

Unlike other themepark MMORPGs, DDO seems to be willing to let you choose your own adventure (heh heh heh) in terms of quest lines, areas, and other activities. I’m only just level two right now (which sounds very low but each level has five XP bars’ worth of advancement), so my choices in this regard are still a bit limited. Even so, as low a level character as I am, there are several options on offer. So help me choose one, won’t you?

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As usual, polling will wrap up at 1:00 p.m. EDT this Friday, May 5th. I’m going to be honest, it is going to be extremely challenging for me to not continue playing this one before polling wraps up, but I’ll do my best to sit on my hands and watch the polls. Please understand, though, it is so good to feel like I’m playing D&D in an MMO again, especially after experiencing Neverwinter for several weeks. It’s still early days, but the breath of fresh air can best be described as immediate.

Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.