D&D Online
Made the New York Times, if you can believe it (enter with password found at http://www.bugmenot.com/view/www.nytimes.com if you don't want to register).
Nonetheless, D&D Online is meant in almost every way to mimic the classic pen-and-paper dungeon crawl. In both the online and traditional game, each player creates an avatar, with its own special abilities based on its race and profession, such as a dwarf warrior or an elf cleric. The players then form an adventuring band and strike off into a game world that is usually filled with innumerable monsters ripe for defeat and plunder.
While pen-and-paper role playing usually involves thick rule books and sacks of special dice, in D&D Online the computer handles the number-crunching and rules adjudication while the players can see a computerized representation of their actions rather than having to (or being enabled to) imagine them.
While players in most online games communicate by typing, Turbine has tried to enhance the in-person feel of D&D Online by building voice-chat software into the game so players can speak with one another using a microphone plugged into their computer. And while most video games try to adopt a cinematic mode of storytelling, D&D Online plainly reminds users that they are playing a computer approximation of a pen-and-paper game. During combat, an icon of a spinning 20-sided die appears in a corner of the screen, just as modern slot machines still show spinning reels even though a microchip has already decided if you've won the jackpot.
Experienced video gamers will scoff at such window dressing, but those little touches are meant to provide a comfort level for pen-and-paper traditionalists. In addition, the game's makers hope to recapture men who may have played D&D in their youth but then given it up amid the mundane responsibilities of adulthood. (Women are a clear minority in almost all serious gaming circles.)
I'm a bit skeptical, because as a veteran geek, half the fun was sitting around the table with your buddies enjoying the byplay and eyerolling: "Time for Kevin to get us all killed again, thanks to insisting on stopping the horde of orcs with his Wand of Magic Missiles. The clerics at Resurrection n' Go are going to be soooooo pissed."
Nonetheless, D&D Online is meant in almost every way to mimic the classic pen-and-paper dungeon crawl. In both the online and traditional game, each player creates an avatar, with its own special abilities based on its race and profession, such as a dwarf warrior or an elf cleric. The players then form an adventuring band and strike off into a game world that is usually filled with innumerable monsters ripe for defeat and plunder.
While pen-and-paper role playing usually involves thick rule books and sacks of special dice, in D&D Online the computer handles the number-crunching and rules adjudication while the players can see a computerized representation of their actions rather than having to (or being enabled to) imagine them.
While players in most online games communicate by typing, Turbine has tried to enhance the in-person feel of D&D Online by building voice-chat software into the game so players can speak with one another using a microphone plugged into their computer. And while most video games try to adopt a cinematic mode of storytelling, D&D Online plainly reminds users that they are playing a computer approximation of a pen-and-paper game. During combat, an icon of a spinning 20-sided die appears in a corner of the screen, just as modern slot machines still show spinning reels even though a microchip has already decided if you've won the jackpot.
Experienced video gamers will scoff at such window dressing, but those little touches are meant to provide a comfort level for pen-and-paper traditionalists. In addition, the game's makers hope to recapture men who may have played D&D in their youth but then given it up amid the mundane responsibilities of adulthood. (Women are a clear minority in almost all serious gaming circles.)
I'm a bit skeptical, because as a veteran geek, half the fun was sitting around the table with your buddies enjoying the byplay and eyerolling: "Time for Kevin to get us all killed again, thanks to insisting on stopping the horde of orcs with his Wand of Magic Missiles. The clerics at Resurrection n' Go are going to be soooooo pissed."