<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\nLet me tell you about this door… Now, if you were a DM and you provided this scenario to your players, they would have a multitude of legitimate objections. Where are those people getting food if nothing gets in or out? How is the king running the city – much less the kingdom – if he can’t communicate with the outside world? Since when are interior parts of a city walled off from one another with impenetrable fortifications? Since when do you quarantine an entire section<\/u> of a city instead of just one house? Why quarantine at all, since Demons can most likely teleport about and would be unaffected by such measures? How is this quarantine supposed to aid in the ongoing investigation? No messages in or out? What’s the rationale for that one?<\/em> <\/p>\n And so on. <\/p>\n So, to talk to the guy and ask him about our artifact, we need to open this door. Here is how:<\/p>\n Go to the city watch and let them know you need in. They will insist that you earn their trust by joining their ranks and working for them, after which you may gain access to the Blacklake District. <\/p>\n Whew! We cleaned up the city watch and broke the back of the local crime syndicate. Did that “earn their trust” enough to let you in to Blacklake so you can have a conversation<\/em>? Predictably, no. They feel no shame at all in asking you to do some more:<\/p>\n That seems like an awful lot of work just to open a door so we can have a conversation with someone who might<\/em> be able to help us. After single-handedly saving the city watch, defeating the crime boss, and genociding two orc tribes, the Watch Captain feels no shame whatsoever in squeezing some more work out of you:<\/p>\n After this, the captain grudginly lets you into Blacklake, although with the additional insult that you must be escorted around by a chaperone. I’m not sure what they are worried you’re going to do. Once you get inside you find a bunch of bad guys snuck into<\/em> Blacklake just before you<\/em>, and you are obliged to fight them in order to get what you need. Hey! I thought this place was impenetrable?<\/i> Then as a parting shot, a final middle finger to the beleagured player, a message that their efforts were naught more than busy-work: The next time you visit town the quarantine is lifted, and everyone is free to move in and out of Blacklake once again.<\/p>\n Now, from a plot perspective I can see why we would want the player to do all of that before learning about the artifact. The problem is that this quest to open the door is so senseless it’s insulting. You can’t “roleplay” this, unless your goal is to roleplay the world’s most eager doormat. I want to be clear that I have no objections whatsoever to making the player jump through hoops, as long as the rationale is sound. Barring that, the game should at least allow the player to act in a sensible way, even if the gameworld and the NPCs do not.<\/p>\n Let’s look at the door again, as players might view it in a tabletop game:<\/p>\n For crying out loud, we’re talking about circumventing walls and doors. That’s half of D&D, right there. There is an entire character class dedicated to this sort of activity. <\/p>\n This is the key to good writing in a game. KOTOR had many roadblocks and a couple of plot doors, but they were portrayed in a way that made sense at first glance, they didn’t insult the player’s intelligence, and the sidequests kept the player engaged along the way. Yes, the player must be on rails to some extent in a computer game, but a good writer can camoflage those rails. A bad writer draws attention to the rails and quickly makes the player resent them.<\/p>\n I apologize if you’re sick of me banging on about this game. It’s been said that good writing comes from bad experiences. Inasmuch as this is true: NWN2 is a writer’s goldmine<\/em>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Some readers have noted my obsessive, even Kahn-like vendetta against Neverwinter Nights 2. During my brief moments of lucidity I have come to realize that the game has driven me quite mad, and that I am likely to go on ranting about it for some time. I’m comfortable in this madness, although out of affection […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[523,59],"class_list":["post-945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-game-design","tag-game-design","tag-neverwinter-nights"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/945\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nThe door is locked, and the lock is un-pickable. This door is the only gate between the Docks area of Neverwinter city and the Blacklake District. Blacklake is where the nobility live, as well as the knights, the generals, and the king himself. You need to reach the Blacklake District because a man lives there who might<\/em> be able to answer questions you have about an artifact. But recently a man was murdered in his home in this district. The city watch believe that demons were involved, so they sealed off and quarantined the entire district<\/em>. Nobody gets in or out. No messages in or out.<\/p>\n\n
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