The lion’s share of the work happened beforehand, though, framing the DM as more of a developer. BioWare provided Neverwinter Nights players with a robust set of tools for creating adventures and a limited capacity for controlling them live, assuming control of NPCs and enemies. This liveness is what separates Sword Coast Legends from previous attempts to capture Dungeon Mastering. One particularly nasty trick that the developers pointed out while I tormented a group of fellow journalists-turned-heroes was that you can manually override a creature that has been magically charmed, turning it hostile again. Is the party breezing through the gauntlet of traps and monsters you set up for them? Place a few more traps on the other side of the door they are about to open, or increase the difficulty of the creatures awaiting them.
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Up until the players actually see a room, the DM is free to continue changing it even as they play live. Like a DM in real life, the role sits somewhere between cooperative and adversarial. A degree of scripted dialogue is available, but for truly hands-on DMs that want to capture the freeform play of D&D, VoIP chat is enabled for live conversations. This can be as minimal as taking a pre-made or randomly generated dungeon and tweaking the encounters, or as complex as designing multi-part quests that span numerous regions. Non-player characters can be fully customized with a fine degree of detail for both their abilities and their appearance. On the outside of complexity, though, DMs can spend hours and hours crafting their own adventures, using the same tools that the developers created to design the pre-built campaign, building elaborate worlds for players to explore. At a minimum the DM can take the helm of pre-made adventures, modifying encounters as the game goes on and taking control over enemies during fights. Where Sword Coast Legends distinguishes itself is with Dungeon Master mode, allowing one player to assume control over the non-player characters and environment. Underneath the hood, numbers are being crunched by the newly-minted Fifth Edition ruleset, which is vastly more elegant than the clunky Second Edition rules used in most previous D&D video game adaptations. Using a fixed, isometric perspective, battles are fought in real time with the option to pause and queue up commands, directly comparable to classics like Baldur’s Gate and more recent revivals of the form like Pillars of Eternity.
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The player-side game mechanics will look immediately familiar to fans of PC RPGs. Running roughly between the free cities of Waterdeep in the north and Baldur’s Gate in the south, the Sword Coast is an otherwise lawless region at the confluence of multiple kingdoms and cultures, making it an ideal setting for adventures. Its eponymous location, part of the Forgotten Realms D&D setting, is one of the most popular regions for pen-and-paper modules, D&D-inspired video games (such as Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights), and books like R.A. Sword Coast Legends is built on a very familiar foundation. I was recently able to try out my dungeon-master chops in a demo, which was shared with the public for the first time at E3. Sword Coast Legends, an upcoming cooperative RPG based on the recent fifth edition of D&D, seeks to address this by allowing one player to assume the role of DM to both create original content and run it live for up to four player-controlled adventurers. While video games have wholeheartedly embraced the player-side mechanics of D&D, the more complicated role of dungeon master (or “DM” for short) has not translated as well. D&D gave birth to roleplaying games as we now know them, and its immense cultural footprint is especially apparent in video games, where RPG elements, such as character progression and choice-based narrative, can be found in genres that have nothing to do with the swords and sorcery of the game in which they were codified.Īnother major innovation of D&D was the expansion of the referee role from traditional war games into that of the dungeon master-an all-powerful facilitator of story, crafting and guiding the players’ narrative and controlling everyone and everything else in the world. What started as a fantasy addendum to a traditional, tabletop medieval war game was scaled down by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson to focus not on the movement of battalions, but of lone heroes. Modern video games owe an immense amount to Dungeons & Dragons. Sword Coast Legends for the first time captures the responsive and improvisatory nature of the Dungeon Master role from pen-and-paper play.
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