Morning Coffee Blog: NWN Chronicles 1

It’s podcast recording day! So of course my brain went to a different subject. I’ve picked up and started tinkering with my Neverwinter Nights sever again.

Neverwinter Nights (hereafter short formed to NWN) is a venerable and somewhat legendary game in the D&D world. Originally developed by Bioware and released in 2002. It was an extremely ambitious effort to create not just a great D&D game, but to give players the tools to craft their own. The robust toolset and server let players build not just D&D adventures, but entire virtual worlds. The game has since been acquired by Beamdog (ex-Bioware folks) and released in an enhanced edition that is still being updated and has a thriving community playing and building.

I was deeply into the game for many years, and of course being me, I wasn’t satisfied to just play. Being a lover of MMOs I was interested in making my own virtual world and it was my first experience with object-oriented scripting. It was one of those brain-changing things, understanding, even at a low level, how game design works, how to solve systemic problems, and how to craft experiences that are not only fun, but balanced and mechanically functional. Through working on my NWN sever(s) I learned skills and modes of thinking that are still valuable to me today, in ways totally unrelated to the game itself.

Now that Hasbro has pulled off the rubber mask to reveal a genuine monster underneath, many people are looking to move away from D&D or return to earlier versions of it that Hasbro no longer cares about. NWN is (very loosely) based on 3rd Edition and unlikely to be affected by the nonsense of the Money Vacuum of Hasbro.

With my renewed enthusiasm for self-hosting things and user made projects, it feels like the right time to dust off my old friend again. The old module files for my NWN server are long gone, lost to many hard drive failures ago before I ever thought of backing things up. However it’s not all bad, a fresh start is always nice and there was so much cruft and poor scripting in the old server that I’m sure I can do better. Beamdog has introduced a bunch of new scripting functions that allow for things unheard of in the original games, like instanced areas (i.e.: Dungeons), so I’m keen to see what awaits.

The ultimate plan is to make a persistent world server that folks in the O:P community can just pop on and play, hang out, socialize etc. Don’t expect the polish of a modern MMO of course – in its bones it’s still a 21 year old game – but it should be good, silly fun. I mean, wouldn’t it be nice to see the actual video game world The Oracle came from?

This of course will take time and be constantly growing. I already have proof-of-concept routines for basic things like monster spawning, loot tables, persistent data storage, instanced dungeons etc, but of course actually building these out into a playable game will take a lot of time. Not to mention the creative writing needed to write quests and storylines etc. It may never even get past the conceptual stage but I’m looking at it much like my version of a model railroad. It’s a thing I can constantly build on and tinker and maybe, just occasionally, play with.

And now there’s puppets to build and a podcast to prep. After coffee.

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