Dr. Mrs. The Nerd: DnD - Heroes of Neverwinter

Hi! I'm Emily, but you can call me Dr. Mrs. The Nerd. I'm here to talk to you about the new Dungeons and Dragons game on facebook despite my serious lack of DnD knowledge and/or experience with RPGs and blogging! I guess you could say I'm a "new gamer," and maybe I can provide a different point of view on nerdy things that I - and others - enjoy.

Let me preface this blog post by saying I have only played Dungeons and Dragons ONCE. Please don't take that to mean that you should disregard this blog post entirely; I simply want to warn readers who are more experienced than me that I'll probably seem a bit undereducated in this subject matter. I hope my sparkling personality more than makes up for it, but some people don't like sparkles, so who can say for sure?

Now, having warned you of my lack of DnD experience, let me introduce to you the reason I really, really want to play at a table with my friends again: Heroes of Neverwinter. Currently in beta testing, the game's facebook page tells us that "Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of Neverwinter brings the beloved lore, ruleset and legacy of Dungeons & Dragons to the Facebook platform. This engaging mix of bite-sized play sessions, top notch RPG gameplay, viral dynamics, and extended features promises to deliver the deepest RPG experience ever seen on the platform."


If you haven't yet played HoN (can I make up my own abbreviations? Oh well, just did), let me describe it to you in less press release-y wording. Starting the game for the first time, you create your character from the classic classes - fighter, wizard, cleric, and of course the most wonderful and awesome of all, rogue - and if you're too lazy or too anxious to take the time to customize your character, your race is prechosen for you. If you want to mix and match, you can customize your own character, with four choices in race - dragonborn, eladrin, halfing, and human - and gender. If you choose to customize your character, you also get to choose your own stats (totally randomly, if you're me and you're just guestimating what stats a rogue needs, whoops, though I did impressively well), as well as your skin tone, "face type," hairstyle, and hair color. There wasn't very much variety in the looks department which was depressing for all of thirty seconds - you're never going to see your adorable character larger than about an inch high ever again, so it doesn't really matter.


See how wee they are! No one cares if your cleric
is a brunette or a redhead, anyway.
Once you give your character a name (my twee halfling rogue is named Peregrin - yay for a lack of originiality!) and an optional catchphrase ("I heard there was pie!"), you get a quick and easy tutorial, showing you around the main game screen and then helping you through your first adventure. It's pretty simple, and there's no point in me explaining it to you step by step. Instead, I'm going to skip to the mechanics of this game being on facebook instead of a different platform.


If you're lucky enough to have nerdy friends who spend way too much time on facebook (you wish your friends were as awkwardly awesome as mine), and who happen to already be playing HoN, you can recruit their characters to help you on adventures instead of hiring random characters at the local watering hole. I have yet to determine if the character you can hire are randomly generated NPCs or randomly chosen characters of the people of facebook, but they're not going to be as helpful as your friends' characters, and they will take your hard earned gp. Fail, random people, fail. If you haven't played HoN yet, I probably should have explained that you'll be controlling your entire team's moves, so your friends can help you out with their characters in two ways - by leveling them up, or by spectating. If your friends play the game as much as you do and level their characters up, they'll get fun new abilities and better stats, and you'll reap the benefits of having a stronger team of adventurers.

As for spectating, it's a pretty cool feature. Say I'm playing HoN, and I've recruited Channing's fighter to be a part of my team. If Channing happens to be derping around the main screen of HoN, he'll get a little icon in his notification bar in game. Clicking on the icon gives him the option to ask me if he can watch me kick some kobold ass with our band of misfit toys adventurers. If I say yes, he gets to follow our character through the adventure. Once he catches up to where I am in real time, he has four different powers he can use to assist my characters in beating up the bad guys. It's obviously easier to coordinate this if you're on your computers three feet apart from each other, but the in game chat box that shows up could work too, or even facebook chat for that matter. It's a unique feature that makes having your friends playing the game with you a great benefit.

In comparison to my scant tabletop DnD experience, I would definitely say Heroes of Neverwinter is easier, and I think it could be a great way to get someone used to the basic information and rules of DnD in a less stressful environment and with less information overload. It's also a great way to get your DnD fix when it's hard to get all of your friends together at one time to play the traditional game. I think anyone who likes Dungeons and Dragons, facebook games, or just fantasy video games in general should definitely give Heroes of Neverwinter a try.