Heya gang. Got some news today about how I plan to run and maintain the Neverwinter Nights campaigns I’m going to host. Interested? Read on…

Alright here’s the deal. A fair amount of people have expressed interest in playing on my NWN campaigns once I finally get around to writing them and going live on the ‘net with ’em. That catch is, NWN wasn’t developed as being a persistent world where hundreds of your friends all got together and hunt monsters and what not. Now while it has *potential* to be that, I certainly don’t have the hardware nor the bandwidth to cater to everyone at once. You also have to take into consideration everyone’s real life schedule and when they can play and when they can’t, and then you run into some players constantly in a state of playing ‘catch-up’ with their other friends who have time to play every waking moment, and so on and so forth… bleh. Just ain’t gonna work that way. Besides… acting as DM for say sixteen people at once is really crazy :-) So here’s what we’re gonna do…

Solution – I’m going to set aside two nights a week to be available to act as DM for whoever wants to play. If you want to play, you’ll have to *schedule* your guild/group with me on this server ahead of time on when you can play and how many of your crew can participate. This is good for everyone concerned because 1) I can set aside a couple nights a week (and I’ll set aside more as this takes off) to be there as your DM to make sure things go smoothly, 2) you can plan ahead with your friends which will greatly increase your chances of everyone being able to show and have a good time together and 3) you’ll all get to level together at the same pace… no one should have to play catch up or get left behind in levels at all. Hardfought used to use a kick-ASS reservation system for the Quake3 and CounterStrike servers I used to host, and I’ve been waiting for the day I could bring that back for use :-) I’ll have it setup soon so you can see what it looks like and how versatile it is.

The campaigns you’ll play on will be custom jobs, made by myself starting out, but I have plans to run other custom modules as well. I also plan to create a small staff of DM’s to help out with my campaigns and also run their own. Timmy has accepted the position as Hardfought’s first official Dungeon Master… he’s an old-time regular here and he should do well as a Dungeon Master, he gets into games like this a lot. Some other tidbits… all characters will be stored on the server vault *only*, that means that you’ll have to create your character here from scratch… everyone will start at level one and progress with their friends together. The campaign I have planned will span several modules over an extended period of time, and I’ll track each groups progress as they go. If I do this the way I have envisioned and do it correctly, one group could take weeks or even a few months before their party reaches 20th level and are ready to even attempt to tackle the main bad guy (guys? ;-) ) from the story line. Think of what I have planned as reading a whole series of books covering a central theme, except with this story the experiences for one group could differ slightly or even be completely different from one group that plays to the next. YOU will get to help write the chapters for each ‘book’, and my reactions and responses to your actions can and probably will vary from week to week. Guess you better pray I don’t have a bad day that day eh? :-P I believe this is what Bioware had in mind from the start with Neverwinter Nights, and it’s about as good as a true ‘pencil n’ paper’ campaign can get…. maybe even better. We’ll see.

And this brings me to a couple other points. I wont have a campaign ready for awhile yet. The first one I plan to make will be relatively small and will probably have some flaws, as this will be my first attempt at doing this with NWN, and my first time to actively DM a game since the early 80’s ;-) Hopefully by the time I get my first campaign fleshed out is when Bioware will have fixed most of the serious bugs with the dedicated server executable. I still have my test port up, and I’ve learned a lot about what it’s capable of and how it acts and performs. Right now it’s *almost* as stable as a CS port. If ya know anything about CS, that means it still needs a lot of work :-) Also, I still do have plans to run a 24/7 PvP arena… I think I can do a much better job at it than what was released by Bioware (Contest of Champions), and script it so a DM doesn’t have to be present. That’s my side project :-P I ordered the official ‘NWN world builder’ book today and it should be here sometime this week, and that’ll be a HUGE help. Anyways… stick around folks, I’ll post more details about this like the theme of the campaign, progress reports on it, rules and regulations, etc as time goes by… I’ll try and keep you all interested ;-)

Hardfought LAN – it’s kickin’ off in just under 3 weeks! Go signup dammit if ya haven’t already and you plan to attend!! :-P We got well over 20 people now, spudboy is bringing out a giant grill… it’s gonna be FUN. I’ll do a dedicated LAN post here soon to make more details public to ya’ll.

Ok I am tired of typing. I’ll see ya online folks…

K2