Revisiting Neverwinter Nights

I’ve played a lot of computer games over the years. When I was a kid, I lived for the Eye of the Beholder-series and The Settlers (Serf City if you’re American) on the Amiga. As computers got more powerful, I played quite a lot of Unreal Tournament, Quake, and Civilization II - but in the end I’ve always returned to the RPG genre.

I’ve spent years in New Eden as I played EVE Online and I’ve spent even more time in Tyria, exploring everything Guild Wars 2 has to offer. I’ve come to realise that exploration is what keeps me going. When I start to run out of content - I lose interest and start looking for new shinies elsewhere. While some people are motivated by new Raids and other end-game content that pushes mechanics and requires you to play the game better - I prefer random caves and locations which I can poke around in and find.. stuff. It doesn’t even have to be good or useful stuff - just.. something that is interesting to find.

I recently decided to revisit Neverwinter Nights - which is an excellent game, released in 2002. It’s not beautiful. It doesn’t provide as much controls for characters as I’d like and a lot of things feel clunky. But.. I love it!

It’s just as broken as a real tabletop campaign - where you sometimes feel like a god - just to be killed by a monster critically hitting you a moment later. It’s also based on the D&D 3.0 ruleset, which had some interesting (and broken) feats. But the most important part is this: it’s filled with lots of small areas which you can explore. Most of the time, you only get a gem worth a gold coin or two - but you don’t know what you’ll find inside the building/cave until you decide to check for yourself. I think that a lot of modern games avoid this, as some players will get frustrated by not advancing the main story as quickly as possible. Maybe it’s an age-related thing, but I tend to play games for entertainment and not for optimising my metrics.

I’ve completed the game at least once before (about 20 years ago) and I think that I played a longbow Ranger that time. I remember searching for some of the bows and having a Dire Wolf animal companion.

This time, I decided to play as an elven Druid. With a longbow - and even more animal friends. Completely different, right? To be fair, there’s quite a lot of differences. A Ranger will do a lot of damage with their bow, and they’ll get a lot of feats making that bow the main damage part of the build. They’ll also have a high armor class (AC) due to their high dexterity, making them quite hard to hit - for being a ranged class.

While the Druid may look the same, it works differently. A Ranger gets their animal companion later (level 6), making it much less efficient in combat. In the early Druid levels, the animal companion is very powerful in itself. I decided to go for a Panther, as they are considered a Rouge class and therefore can perform sneak attacks on any opponent focused on someone else. Also, their high dexterity helps their AC and reflex saves quite a bit, making them better at surviving (in theory.. at least).

When combined with a Rouge henchman (your pesonal +1 NPC, which should complement your own character) and a summoned animal (Summon Creature X spell) you get two combatants with sneak attacks and one with varying abilities (depending on the spell level). Add to that a Druid with Zen Archery (using Wisdom modifier for ranged attack rolls instead of dexterity) firing 2 arrows per round and you get a very efficient combo for most opponents.

Until you meet an enemy with area of effect spells, that is. Fireball hurts. But that’s fine - it wouldn’t be fun if nothing provided a challenge.

Speaking of challenges - the biggest problems with this approach are terrible pathfinding and NPC AI. A door is sometimes a bigger problem than an enemy in the next room.

I haven’t really decided if I want to go for a prestige class yet, but if I do it’ll be the “Shifter” prestige class, which will enable the druid to shapeshift into more powerful forms. Shapeshifting provides some boons like fully healing on transform and there are also possible resistances to damage types to consider.

We’ll see what happens.