I'm wondering about trying Dungeons and Dragons Online.
 
From what I can tell DDO is FREE! and it looks D&Dish. It even has Gygax and Arneson doing GM narration in some of the quests.
 
On the downside, it's not really free if you buy more quests, pay to uber-ize your characters or if your time has value. Since I've got toddlers that ruthelessly interrupt my me time with drawings of ponies and shark v.s. Gandalf themed ticklefights I wanna make sure I use my video game time wisely.
 
How fun is DDO? What's the ettiquite on being AFK? Does it have any huge fun-killers? Suggestions for being a DDO tourist without much time to kill?

Computer games are not my cup of tea, but DDO got some good reviews from members of my Sunday game group who do enjoy them.

You can get a lot of value out of only playing free, especially in the earlier stages.  If you want to just experience the core game go and play solo for awhile.  You can get through most of the earlier stages soloing very easily.   Soloing will give you a much better appreciation for the controls and the layouts of the dungeons and allowing you to experience them on your own terms.  Most of the time if you are in a group you'll just be playing follow the leader and rushing madly through the dungeons.  While this is certainly more efficient and can be fun it's not where the game really shines.

Where the game really can shine is if you get in a good group of people that are all there going through the game for the first time and playing through it with all the caution and curiosity you would in an RPG.  Using roles as intended and actually 'playing' the game.  This however situation is harder and harder to find and has become the exception rather then the norm.

So my advice, solo for awhile to get the feel, try different character combinations to get a sense of the game.  Then try and find a play style you enjoy and stick with it.

Fun killers for me tend to be around the mid level game (lvl 5+) where the quests start to take far longer then the time I usually have to put into them so I'm forced to grind through past quests repetitively just at harder difficulties.  This is the reason I stopped playing long ago, lack of time.  Now that it's free though it's not a problem at all if I can only get in one or two good play sessions a month.

Mechanically this is my favorite MMO.  It's the first and only MMO I've played where it actually feels like you are controlling the character.  This is not a game of point+click+kill.  It's an action adventure game at heart and it's really good at simulating the D&D experience.  I'd love to see this style of mechanics used in games like Never Winter Nights or any of the other Bioware games.  It'd lend so much more to the experience.

will it run on a p4 a.5ghtz with 128mb ram video card and a gig of RAM? How much diskspace does it require? Thanks.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;333038will it run on a p4 a.5ghtz with 128mb ram video card and a gig of RAM? How much diskspace does it require? Thanks.

No it won't run on that, not by a long shot.  I think the min specs call for a 2ghz processor.  It also takes up between 3 and 6gb of disc space depending on if you use the hi-rez graphics or not.  Seriously you need a new computer.

No argument from me, just can't affords it

Here are the official system requirements for DDO:

Minimum System Requirements

Processor: P4 1.6 GHz or AMD equivalent with SSE
Memory: 512 MB RAM
GraphicsCard: 64 MB Hardware T&L -compatible video card
NetworkConnection: 56.6 K modem
Software: Windows XP, DIrectX 9
Disc Space: 3GB for standard, 5GB for high resolution

Recommended System Requirements

Processor: P4 3.0GHz or AMD equivalent with SSE
Memory: 1GB RAM
Graphics Card: GeForce FX or better with 128MB of memory
Network Connection: Cable Modem or DSL connection
Software: Windows XP, DirectX 9
Disc Space: 3GB for standard, 5GB for high resolution

It's a fun game, for a while.  Mechanically it becomes obvious after a time that the action element is a complete illusion, but more problematic is the complete mangling of D&D's rules.

If they hadn't botched the rules so much trying to shoehorn them into doing 20 different things, I'd have more fun with it, but I inevitably wind up quitting after going through half a dozen alts and rebuilt characters all because I expected this or that rule to work a certain way, the way it did in tabletop, only to find it actually does something completely different.  

It's a mess, rules-wise, and it is largely for that reason that I don't think I'll bother to ever play it again, free or no.

Ok so I finished Fallout 3 and started up DDO.
 
Instalation was flawless and very quick. I got to putz around with the character generator and by the time I was done picking out my eyebrows the game was ready to go.
 
I made up a Human Cleric with good Strength, Constitution and Wisdom. The FAQs say that a Cleric with a wisdom of 16 will fail at very high levels but I take my chances. The FAQs also say to have high STR so you can bend bars and open gates when you solo at low levels.
 
Clicked start, and saw my well armed cleric suddenly appear empty handed and dressed in tatters near a shipwreck. Lemme guess: time to fight rats?
 
The beginner stuff was very easy which is good because it took a while to get used to the controls. Failure to use the camera correctly was swiftly punished by a screen full of palm trees or the interior of my kilt.
 
Visualy the game reminds me of Gauntlet. There's alot of 2d sprites sprinkled around the 3d stuff and a kinda psudo-tribal angularity to everything. Over all it's a relaxing easy-to read format.
 
Woah. Smashed a crate and got some arrows but the arrows are 'stuck' under the ground. I can't see or click the item but I can see the text lable floating there. Very bad first impression of item drops.
 
My 3 year old daughter wakes up early and hops on my lap to watch. She's annoyed that the pop-up diologue windows block the view. The writing isn't punchy enough to get either of our attention so I just click past it all and look for the highlighted words. Running around town, she's excited and picks out all sorts of details. Boats, birds, lanterns. I like how exagerated the elevation of the town is -- it's very Gauntlet.
 
Back into combat and slaying spiders. Melee is very fun but not particularly exciting. Anything that fits within the arc of the Cleric's mace swing gets hit so there's a visceral incentive for all the tactics and flanking stuff. I don't know if theres any hidden mechanical advantage to being surrounded because I never lose hit points either way.
 
I finish my first "dungeon" there's keys and secret passages and a puzzle at the end. The puzzle is quite literaly a puzzle. You twist the pieces until they line up. Not fun. It's just kinda dull. Presumably the later puzzles are more interesting since implicit in the design is the ability to have a puzzle span an entire dungeon floor. The reward is... a suit of Half Plate. Now my guy looks just like in the character designer screen, except that his mace is on fire.
 
Interestingly a rogue PC in the tavern seems to have a jabbing attack instead of the sweeping arc. I fail to swap out my spells so I'm stuck with heal, shield and bless. None of them are pretty to look at and I don't even know when they're on or not. I just cast them every once in a while since I never run out of mana.
 
In an unexpected twist, I'm supposed to kill rather than talk to the highlighted name in the text box. My daughter has never seen people killed in video games before. Since we've only killed spiders and fishmen so far, she decides that they must be fishmen and I go along with the rouse. I couldn't make up a story to explain why I'm killing dozens of people to get some enchanted armbands for a guy at a bar I met 15 miniutes ago. But on the other hand "+1 good" popped out of my head so I must be doing it right.
 
The combat doesn't have any sense of connection to it. People wave weapons and color coded numbers pop out of heads. There's no blood people just fall down.
 
A couple of very lame 1-room dungeons later, I escape Newbyville! This is what I consider the first real attempt on the part of the developers to make an interesting dungeon. There's ice and levers and a floor that breaks open to reveal more dungeon below it. There's water to swim through and an underground stream to walk along. The motion of the water is outstanding. The physical interaction between man and water not so much.
 
The narrator is great. Stuff about murky water, chills in the air, ancient rusty stuff and other D&D isms really work for me.
 
I know that this dungeon isn't very deep so I keep moving quickly as to not break the illusion. At the end is an ice spider. SLAY! There's yet another puzzle here and yeah it's actualy a puzzle. Messing with it makes mist shoot out of the corners of the puzzle. And that nearly kills me. I didn't know that I was taking 1 point of white damage (ice? steam?) until the narrator announced my peril.
 
I don't know what I'm supposed to do with the puzzle, like where should I aim the white damage? Blasting the spider corpse doesn't do anything. Spraying the locked door with one doesn't do anything. Do I need all four going at once? Three at a time seems like the absolute limit. Actualy, two is the limit since splitting the energy into three immediately wastes one of the energy beams.
 
My wife and son show up. He hops on my lap and my wife starts making plans about our day. No problem. I can play a game and talk shop. Kids are borred of the puzzle so they start talking too. Not a problem. Happens all the time when I drive the car. Three borred people and me, doing stuff. But now I reach my computational limit. DDO is tired of waiting. It sends in some monsters and the narrator starts talking again. I log out of DDO, even though I'll get punished with XP loss.
 
So that's my first hour of play.
 
If this was the extent of the game I'd walk away and never come back but I can tell that they're trying to bribe the newbies with easy loot and simple chalenges and I expect it will pick up soon. I kinda wish I had rolled a dwarf. I generaly like having shorter characters for the camera and the Human Feat that came by default (extend spell duration) is only acting as a force multiplier on my seemingly worthless spells. Although I guess the reason that I never took damage was because of Holy Shield, Bless and the synergistic power of accidentaly pressing <6> to heal myself.
 
As an update, the help boxes say that FREE means no money ever. Everything can be bought with Turbine points and Turbine points are a free reward for playing.
 
I'm looking forward to getting deeper into the game and partnering up with someone. The people in newbyville are multiplayer athiests or something.

Sounds pretty cool, but apparently my *new* processor is a tad too slow for the minimums (1.3 vs 1.6), so I won't be checking it out after all.

I just started it the other day, but thus far I'm really enjoying it.  I guess it helps that I don't really think of it as DnD so much as a way for a couple friends and I to go raid some dungeons, and I feel like it does that pretty well.