DDO Mailbag

Warforged, Bragging, & Ask the DMs

By Ralsu

Greetings! 2006 is almost behind us, and I am looking forward to another great year of fun with Dungeons & Dragons Online. I want to share some of the mail I've received in December and advertise our newest service to DDO fans, our Ask the DMs forum.

The mail topics this month cover everything from comments about the looks of DDO characters to questions about the tabletop game to accusing me of being a braggart. I've got exciting stuff here, so I'll get right to it!

Letters

My first letter comes from mtmouse3, who read our DDO Poll, State of the Warforged. He writes:

I have an 8th level female WF ranger, with the Mithral Body feat (it affects their look as near as I can figure) and I have tried on 100+ docents literally, and none of them look good. They seem to be a version of the male WF armor, but minus a piece or two....it seems the female WF were forgotten, or put on the back burner for this, which I consider a great feature of the game, the LOOKS of your character.

Gamers are all about individuality, and Warforged have no individuality as far as character creation, but they should get some in the form of docents they wear....Maybe some feminine style docents, to balance all of the masculine styles already out there, would be nice. I have an art degree, I can even submit some sketches of styles I'd like to see, for both genders.

It's good to see a long-time reader like mtmouse3 take the time to send some email. I clipped out some of the letter. Nothing was rude or abrasive. The goal was to raise some awareness about this issue. I'm gonna go ahead and admit my ignorance here. I only created a female warforged character one time, and that was back in beta when I was capturing screens so that we could have a picture of each race for both genders. Once I read this letter from mtmouse3, I remembered what he was talking about: the male and female warforged looked almost exactly alike.

Now, while the physical appearance of a female warforged may not amount to whole lot in the functionality of a warforged character in DDO since Module 3 (the topic of the DDO Poll), I don't want to dismiss this issue as shallow. We gamers all know how much time we spend looking out our digital avatars and how much they mean to us. So, to help out mtmouse3, I'm making this issue known on the Ten Ton Hammer network. And as we get to that Ask the DMs feature, we might be able to do more for him!
 
The next missive comes from TomServo (love the email handle!) and discusses Dungeons & Dragons (D&D):

Dear Ralsu,

You never talk about D&D anymore. Why not? A lot of us DDO players still play D&D.

My honest opinion, TomServo, is that DDO deviates from D&D so much that it is only destructive to mention the two in the same sentence. In other words, I think it is dangerous to link to two all the time because the inconsistencies between them can lead to disappointment for new DDO players. DDO is an awesome game that is pretty close to D&D, but it's very easy to come in with expectations based on the D&D license only to be let down. I'm speaking form experience here. I know that I liked DDO much better when I let go of the D&D part and just looked at the game as a stand alone product.

Does that mean D&D is a taboo subject? Absolutely not, You're right in that many DDO players also play D&D. I know all of the DDO @ Ten Ton Hammer writers still have great D&D stories to tell. As with the letter above, our new Ask the DMs section should provide a little something for you.

My final letter comes from yellolikwid and is pretty rough:

Ralsu:
I can't believe you expect anyone to respect you as a writer when you feed us editorials that spend over 700 words telling us how great you and your site are. I wish I could get paid to brag about my skills at my job.

Without the benefit of a link to my 700+ words of bragging, I can only assume that yellolikwid is referring my Final Exams DDO Editorial from earlier this month. I said then, but I will repeat it now; I did not write that piece so that I could pat myself on the back. I was honestly interested in assessing the scope of DDO @ Ten Ton Hammer, and I thought readers might enjoy seeing the results. The most telling statistics that I uncovered in my research for that piece is that DDO @ Ten Ton Hammer accounts for 41% of the top 10 hits for each of over 40 DDO keyword searches in Google. To put that in perspective, many congressional races here in the US involve a winner who did not get 41% of the votes.

All I can say to you, yellolikwid, is that I appreciate that you were reading that article. If you don't like me anymore because you think I am too arrogant, then please continue to come to our site and read the great DDO Guides being produced by Darkgolem and Nuitaran. Darkgolem has really been diving into the Module 3 and Evil Resurgent quests to get you going on DDO's newest quests. Meanwhile, Nuitaran has done little more than crank out complete guides to all Feats for each of the melee classes, and he is working his way through the Enhancements.

Ask the DMs

As I pointed out in that editorial mentioned by yellolikwid, Ten Ton Hammer wants to be your number one source for all things DDO. Over the 11 months since DDO's launch (at the time of this writing), we've answered our fair share of questions in our lovely flame-free forums. Darkgolem is an avid researcher on spell casting and frequently answers questions dealing with spells and spell effects.. Nuitaran is a "collector" of melee toons and often has good advice on how to get the most from a melee situation in DDO. I have a strong line of communication with Turbine Director of Communication Adam Mersky. Mersky graciously brings my requests to the geniuses behind DDO and delivers content back to me. Every DDO writer has some experience with the tabletop game, and we all love to debate over the viability of  DDO Builds. And I've been writing DDO Mailbags off and on for 6 months.

Now we want to have even more interaction with you, our DDO community. We have created a new forum just for questions: Ask the DMs. We invite you to bring your questions about DDO and D&D here. We'll try to answer based on our research and experience. We'll also use this forum as a spring board for discussion topics I can take to Turbine. We might just be able to get some of your questions for developers answered, and we might be able to find out if mtmouse3 will get any new looks for female warforged.

So come ask us anything related to DDO and D&D. Far too long has our communication been one-sided. It's time we hear form you!  Keep sending your letters and visit our forums! I hope to see you in Stormreach.

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