Free Agent: Dungeons & Dragons Online

GameSpy's Free Agent is your advance recon into the world of free-to-play games. His mission: jump into a free game every week and put in some hours to see how much fun can be had without spending a cent, then try out some paid items to see if they're worth the asking price. This week, he travels down nostalgia lane with Dungeons & Dragons Online in hopes of recapturing the dice-rolling, pen-and-paper magic.


I can't bring myself to throw away my D&D 3rd Edition and 3.5 books. For several years in the 2000s, they spent every weekend being carted to friends' houses where we played-out elaborate heists, dabbled in political intrigue, raided haunted mines, and rescued player-characters from bad luck and worse judgment. I keep hanging onto these books because I like to think that I'm not done with my D&D 3.5 adventures, despite five years' worth of evidence to the contrary. That nostalgia recently drove me to spend a week with free-to-play MMO Dungeons & Dragons Online.

No Money Down

Dungeons & Dragons Online doesn't try to conceal the limits of what a free account will get you. DDO locks away a few races and classes (no Half-Elves for you, cheapskate!), but still leaves free players with an awful lot of character creation options. Since I wanted to see and do a lot with a single character, I selected a rogue so I could play around with combat and utility skills like trap-detection and lockpicking. If I want to run more than two concurrent characters, I'll need to buy extra character slots, but for now I'm content.



Playing for free, I discovered Dungeons & Dragons Online is a more faithful adaptation of the pen-and-paper experience than I would expect from an MMO, but I am not about to confuse the two. While the character builds are all fairly familiar, some of the skills have been MMO-ified in some inventive and borderline hilarious ways. Diplomacy, for instance, goes from being an all-important conversation skill to get more information and better details from NPCs and is transformed into a way to convince monsters to attack someone else: "Look, Giant Fish-Man, I'm not going to tell you how to do your job. I'm just saying if I were in your fins, I'd give some serious thought to going after that cleric over there instead of working me over with that spear."

There are a lot of nice touches in DDO, like the trap and puzzle-laden dungeons that make utility-characters like rogues play a role beyond backstabbing. But that's just a cherry on top of a bland "kill 200 kobolds" sundae. Leveling is a slow and arduous process of clubbing tiny squads of monsters to death in very simple dungeons. This is partly due to the fact that D&D is not, and never will be, an RPG about hitting a high level cap. DDO maxes out at level 20 (unless you pay $30 for the Menance of the Underdark expansion, which ups it to 25), but in order to create a stronger sense of progression, it divides each level into four "ranks." The XP bar shows progress to the next rank, and with each rank you can improve a couple skills or get an at-will power. After getting four ranks, the next step is a new level, where you get to improve a broader set of stats and skills. For me, however, the ranking system made progress feel slower. After a dozen or so hours of play, I'm only now approaching level 4, despite having "ranked up" over a dozen times.


Loot is generally pretty weak, so don't expect a sword or a wand to rescue you from hours of mindless slaughter. DDO requires little in the way of tactics or planning. My rogue could sneak up, get his first backstab, and then I could just hold down the left mouse button until everything was dead. The exception was the odd escort mission, which is made a bit more challenging by suicidal NPCs whose death will cause you to fail the quest. You can also do PvP tavern brawls, but since there are no real rewards or objectives, it's not a significant component to the game.

On the bright side, people in DDO seem surprisingly sociable and make for good groupmates. You'll come for the XP, but you'll stay for passionate and thoughtful (really!) discussion of D&D and MMO design. I never had any trouble finding a good group to fulfill some quests, and if nobody was doing one of my quests, a higher-level player usually volunteered to run me through it really quickly. That usually wasn't necessary, since very few level-appropriate quests actually require a group at the normal difficulty, but it was nice to know that help was only a chat message away.

Insert Coin

With so much hacking and slashing on the way to marginally improved stats, it's likely no surprise that most of the items for sale in the DDO store are buffs to help with power-leveling. At low-levels you can buy potions that give you an XP boost, which helps you level more quickly, but still not as quickly as you might expect. I spent about 6 hours ranking up to rank 7 for free, then I bought a 6-hour XP boost for the equivalent of about $6.50, and the next six hours of play time (XP boosts don't wear off while in public areas or offline) got me to rank 14. Because early stage ranking is much faster, the boost was definitely a time saver. Part of that was due to more efficient play on my part, but I can't deny the 30% XP boost helped me maintain an average of just over a rank per hour.


You can also get special hirelings, and buy special one-time, permanent stat boosts. Most of these are reserved for mid-level characters, and so most of the paid-items end up working with the progression system, rather than subverting it. Even if I wanted to wave my wallet at DDO, I couldn't get to max level or elite gear much faster than if I played it straight.

Perhaps most importantly, I never felt like I needed to spend money on DDO, and I probably wouldn't if I were just running a single character up to max level. Especially because DDO gives you a small but steady trickle of store points for doing quests, so even free players are not totally locked out of store items. But if I wanted to start putting together a stable of alts, my impatience with the grind would eventually demand that I spring for the store items.

Free or Flee?

To its credit, DDO really doesn't require any money to play. If I had stayed completely out of the store, or just used the store points I accumulated from doing quests, I would not have had a poorer experience or been kept from any content. I might have gone slightly mad from repetition and slow progression, however, and that's why I have trouble ever envisioning myself wanting to spend money on DDO. After a dozen or so hours, I'm not sure how much more of it I want to play. I'm tired of mashing the left-mouse button until my finger aches, with every quest and encounter looking much like the last. The thought of running three or four characters up to max level, or of buying more backpack storage so I can haul even more useless crap back to vendors, isn't appealing.


DDO is an old-game with dated visuals and it feels like one because of its time-worn MMO mechanics. The new Menace of the Underdark expansion might be the answer to a lot of these complaints, but I did not play it. At $30 for the basic expansion, it's not really the kind of free-to-play experience this column is about.

For me the problem comes down to this: I wanted to play DDO because I am passionate about the Dungeons & Dragons experience of my youth. I'm not a huge fan of the MMO grind, and DDO doesn't do enough to conceal the click-spamming and repetition that lies at the heart of the typical MMO experience.


Spy Guy says: Oh the 'memries! For me, dice-rolling D&D is all about the social experience. It's nice to know the MMO has managed to retain some of that feel. Have you made the transition from pen and paper to digital?