Hello!
A long, long time ago, I used to love the potential of NWN, and I even uploaded a few very small bits of custom content and graphics fixes for NWN 2 when it first came out. [ This was me: Search | The Neverwinter Vault ] But suddenly my more advanced GPU broke down and as a student I couldn’t afford to replace it, and then my internet got extremely unstable for the next decade, so I gave up on the idea of online games. And in any case, back then I hadn’t been confident enough in my English skills to try one of the international Persistent Worlds.
Now I find myself with a lot of time on my hands (Long Covid sucks) and at least NWN:EE seems to run well enough on my non-gamer laptop. And my renewed interest in D&D but lack of the consistent mental energy and reliable sleeping cycle necessary to actually get involved with even just a regular virtual tabletop game, my love for the worldbuilding and community spirit of Critical Role, and a few lengthy podcast analyses of the utterly appalling state of commercial MMORPGs that I’ve listened to recently, together sparked an idea:
I could create a module set in Critical Role’s world setting as a showcase for the NWN toolset’s potential, and so maybe lure over some of the show’s million-strong, often quite creative fanbase, many of whom want to try playing D&D, but have various issues that make in-person play difficult, and virtual tabletop play too technically challenging. (You need a decent camera and microphone.)
Most of these “Critters” were young children when the NWN games were first released, so at the very least they would benefit from being introduced to an older style of multiplayer-enabled CRPGs, before MMORPG companies decided to jetisoned all immersion and actual roleplay for the sake of microtransactions, lootbox gambling, and repetitive, grindy, automatically generated ‘quests’ that just serve to prevent the player from running out of ‘content’ too quickly and leaving the game. Also, I figure that the core of NWN Persistent World players and DMs who are still left after a couple of decades should be mature enough to be a safe and pleasant environment for the sort of people whose expectations of D&D were first shaped by Critical Role, and the community spirit fostered by CR and the NWN custom content community seems highly compatible to me. Besides, I think that an influx of even just a couple hundred players of a new generation could only be good for the NWN community and its longterm survival.
However, I know that a lot of older male tabletop D&D players absolutely hate Critical Role and the way the show has popularized the game with wider audiences over the last few years. Which has led to a large influx of young women and queer people into the hobby, who expect engaging character roleplay and basic empathy / use of psychological safety precautions (e.g. no mentioning of sexual assault or domestic abuse unless everyone has agreed in advance that they want to deal with topics like that), and who generally don’t care about tactical character optimization or memorizing all the details of the gaming system’s rules. (Also, Matt Mercer, Critical Role’s DM, does not have an adversial attitude towards his players and will try to avoid killing their characters if at all possible, while milking the resurrection scenes for all the drama he can get out of them. Many DMs used to older versions of D&D consider this “pulling his punches”, and they generally complain that D&D 5e is terribly “dumbed down” in any case and resent the fact that a lot of the newer player generation doesn’t care to learn other, more complex or “elegant” systems.)
I assume that since the rolls in NWN are largely done automatically by the game’s engine and the effects of spells are hardcoded, so it doesn’t matter if you don’t quite remember all the details, this disdain for players who want to focus on character roleplay instead of combat efficiency would not be so much of an issue with the NWN community, even if there would still be a bit of a re-learning curve for people who are used to how D&D 5e works vs. NWN’s 3e-based engine. And I think the sort of things the older tabletop players criticize about the newbies are exactly the sort of things that would make the newbies predisposed to disliking current raid-based commercial MMORPGs and to enjoying the RP-focused nature of the remaining NWN PWs - perhaps enough to overlook the rather limited class/race options and the antiquated graphics. (After all, the various virtual tabletop platforms that have sprung up during the pandemic are even more rudimentary in their graphic representations of the “map”. And there’s quite a bit of hullaballoo going on right now about fears that Wizards of the Coast might intend to monopolize this form of play and then monetize it like an MMORPG. So even the older tabletop players who have gotten used to the convenience of virtual tabletops during the pandemic would perhaps benefit from being informed that NWN and its toolset are still a thing that exists and is easily available.)
And personally, the idea of logging onto a PW and exploring the world on my own for a while, until I feel ready to strike up a conversation with someone else on the server who seems similarly lonesome - that seems much more natural and less daunting than the virtual tabletop platforms’ “looking for group” application process, which is reminicent of the team selection process for ball games back in highschool P.E. class. And the PW style of play instead of having a fixed gaming group would probably be much more compatible with people who, for whatever reason, cannot commit to a regular gaming schedule or who can only play for an hour or two at a time. After all, the point of online RPGs is that you can interact with real people if you want, but you don’t absolutely need a DM at all times just to roleplay social interactions or grind for crafting supplies or whatever, only for special events.
I also think that, aside from the tantalizing if very time-consuming possibibilties of the toolset, the number of DM-friendly NWN modules already in existence might considerably lower the barrier to entry for people who think they might enjoy DMing. After all, in those modules, the environment doesn’t absolutely need extra verbal description, the NPCs already have barebones dialogue, the module designer has taken care of combat balancing (hopefully), and most importantly, the game engine itself takes care of at least combat dice rolls and remembering what abilities the monsters have, so you don’t have to buy several sourcebooks. I mean, so I assume - I’ve never actually tried DMing a module, I just played solo modules and hosted a very basic sandbox shard back in the early 2000s, where a handful of my online friends could engage in purely social RP, since none of us were particularly interested in dungeon crawling.
But since I’m not an active player on any NWN PW and I haven’t been part of the creator community in almost 2 decades, I thought it would be polite and sensible to ask first, before I put a lot of my very limited energy into this project. I mean, I have no idea if this ‘enticement’ strategy would even work, and it would take me a long time to learn scripting, and in any case, it’s not like you could stop me. But if the consensus about a potential influx of Critters is “Oh, please no!”, then I will respect that and scrap this idea. I do have other things to occupy my bedrest time.