Ten Reasons to Love Dungeons & Dragons Online

Massively Overpowered has cranked out a list of ten reasons why they continue to enjoy Turbine’s Dungeons & Dragons Online despite the MMORPG already being over a decade old. This is one of my personal favorite MMORPGs of all time as well, so I can definitely concur with some of their takeaways:

1. The dungeon master narration

Adapting tabletop D&D to the MMO format must have been a task of no small magnitude. For whatever reason and I’m guessing it was the chance to work with this popular geek IP Turbine tackled it and created a weird synthesis of PnP and MMO. There was obvious effort to retain the feel of the tabletop version, which is why DDO sports probably the only consistent narrator in MMORPGs.

I adored the DM narration. Instead of being immersion-breaking, the occasional booming descriptions, lines of dialogue, or notifications drew me in to each adventure. It was like getting rewarded with cutscenes without the action stopping. I even appreciated the effort to bring in guest dungeon masters, such as Gary Gygax, the creator of Magic: The Gathering.

(pause for full troll effect)

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6. Incredible build variety

Maybe there was too much build variety in this game to the point of players making broken builds, but I really appreciated having the chance to make the kind of character that I wanted, even if he or she or it wasn’t optimal. D&D’s class roster was out in force, with multi-classing and dragonmarks and all of the rest of the features that Turbine’s added over the years to customize and modify characters. And this is also one of the few MMOs that I know of that gives players incentive to rebirth their characters in exchange for a stronger build down the road.