This lessens the verisimilitude of the world. One would think that on this wild continent, any manner of creature might cross your path, and not just monsters that you could handle.

Of course, one can see why developers would do just this sort of thing. A game is most satisfying when it’s just at the right point in the difficulty curve: challenging, but not impossible.

And, of course, the very word “hero” implies something, doesn’t it? A hero has no call to cower in the darkness, unable to face the next monster. And, a hero has more important things to do than to rid basements of rats. At least after the opening scene, he does.

I’m attempting to do something just a bit different. The mod opens with the “hero” hiding behind a tree. A group of Slaad–much too difficult for the level five hero (a hero alone, at that)–have it trapped in a cliff-enclosed glade.

I don’t really intend the player to fight these monsters. I’m using them as a game device. They are intended to be a barrier, something to leave our hero looking for another way out of the situation he or she is in. I could just build a cliff wall there: a pretty solid way of telling the character “No, you can’t go here.” I’d rather leave the character wondering.

Of course, if you present a character with this sort of choice (face these impossible monsters, or look elsewhere for a way out) plenty will try, at least a time or two, to face the monsters. It’s a given that somebody out there will figure out a way to kill them or get past them, even though I steer the player away from them with a journal entry.

I don’t know right now if this is an intriguingly different way to begin, or if it’s just bad level design.

I am, however, coming up with a few ways to keep the player on track. I’ve barred the path through the forest, and put the key on a character deep within the cave where I want the character to go. So, even if they manage the impossible and kill those beasts (as someone out there surely will), they won’t miss the plot developments that come with taking the “official” path through the game.

It’s kinda cool, actually, how making one simple decision like this–to use monsters as a barrier–has affected lots of different aspects of the game world. It’s changed the area design, of course, but it’s also nudged me toward some plot choices. It makes the game world a little more nuanced, a little more mysterious.

Some of it is amazingly intuitive. I sat down with no documentation at all, and within the space of a few minutes had created a largish forest. It had a road and a stream and some old ruins created by some ancient race. You know, a typical forest. I saved that forest, closed the toolset, then started up the game itself. I selected my barbarian character, and was set down in that very forest. The forest music played, a few leaves fell silently to the forest floor, shafts of sunlight shone down. I walked along the stream for a while–the stream I had set down a few minutes before–then clomped over the bridge I had made, then ran north up the road to the end of the world. The road I had laid down with a few mouse clicks. At the end of the road, I came to a sort of darkened reflection of the world I inhabited. I could see that the forest might continue on forever, but I couldn’t access it. It wasn’t really there, because I hadn’t yet created it. There was only the illusion of forest, evidently placed there by the developers so that it wasn’t so jarring when a player arrived at the end of creation. Had I taken one more step, I would have left the world entirely. But, of course, the game wouldn’t let me. Hmmm…how much like real life does that sound?

It’s an amazingly godlike feeling, actually, taking the role of an electronic humanoid and seeing firsthand the world you’ve just made. I’m sure that feeling will wear off in time, but right at that moment I couldn’t have wanted more.

A player, of course, having downloaded my creation, will want lots more.

So, back in the toolset, I started playing with buttons. I discovered a way to create a hidden entrance to a cave. Cool enough. I placed that in a corner of the forest, then went to create another area, this one a cave. I set my character down in that as well, and walked around with my torch. Caves, of course, are kind of creepy. Cave music is creepy too.

I even managed, after a bit of fiddling and a couple of false starts, to connect the respective doorways from the cavern to the forest. In game, one steps through the doorway and seamlessly arrives in the new location. In a well-made game, a player never sees the seams between the worlds.

Then, I went back to the toolset and put a rat in the cave. Then I went back into the game, and killed the rat with my hatchet.

Eventually, I got a little more serious and downloaded quite a good little tutorial from the folks at Bioware. One can, using that tutorial, create a complete (though quite short) module, involving a little village, an inn, and a mine. There are goblins and miners and of course a villain who originally seems to be on your side. I didn’t work through the mod completely, but I learned more about creating areas, area transitions, and encounters. There is a lot more to learn. The further one goes, the more complicated it gets. Paging through the last half of the tutorial is a little intimidating, actually, as it begins to deal with conversations with non-player characters, the in-game journal, and the scripting that one must do to pull off the more complicated effects.

I’m sure that it will come in time. One foot in front of the other. Little steps.

Along the way, I’m building “In Search of… the Wendigo.” I created about seven forest areas, and finally settled on one (tentatively) to go with as a starting area. Right now, there is a huge contingent of Slaan wandering around outside of an enclosed area within that forest. They are, for the moment, keeping our level one hero from getting where he needs to go.

Also, I’ve built a two-level cave. Our hero is going to have to enter that cave, it looks like, though he’s doubtful if what he finds there will be any friendlier than the Slaan.

I’m settling on a hook to get players into the story, and considering a couple of plot devices, and slowly making decisions about how the whole thing will unfold. There are lots of ideas in my head right now. It’s as if I’ve written them down on individual note cards and tossed them into the air. They will settle into some sort of coherence as they fall, but right now it seems pretty chaotic. How it all turns out will be as surprising to me as it will be to anyone else.

I am a longtime player of video games. Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. I’m a 44 year old man, and I’ve been playing regularly since perhaps 2003. The first game I picked up (after some amount of research, but it was still an amazingly fortuitous purchase) was Morrowind. A beautiful game. So let’s say I’ve been playing regularly for the past 5 years or so.

I play RPGs almost exclusively. For those not in the know, RPG is “role playing game.” RPGs tend to be immersive, deep, complex. In an RPG, you create a character, and that character is set in the middle of a huge, fictional world. Oftentimes, that world has some parallel with what we think of as Western Europe or Great Britain in the middle ages, though of course RPG worlds aren’t limited to that…they’re limited only to one’s imagination. Some take place on other planets, or in a post-apocolyptic America, or in a distant future. A few are based on other media, such as Tolkein’s books or the Star Wars movies.

The games I most often play are based on the pencil-and-paper game Dungeons and Dragons. Icewind Dale, Baldur’s Gate, and Neverwinter Nights are perhaps the best well known of those games. They take place in The Forgotten Realms, one of the campaign settings developed for D&D. The Forgotten Realms, in many ways, really is like the middle ages: it is populated by peasants, knights, and kings. It’s a low-tech world, with horses instead of automobiles, plows instead of tractors, bows and arrows instead of rifles. The skies are clear and the water is clean. There are no atomic bombs, no labs full of superflu viruses, no clones of Dick Cheney walking around pretending to be vice president.

Faerun differs from our middle ages, of course, in that it contains the occasional dragon, along with a host of other creatures that one wouldn’t want to run into.

And elves, from a variety of cultures, and dwarves. And gnomes.

Magic is common. Gods are numerous.

Exactly as in our world, dark forces are at work. Unlike our world, however, there is usually a pretty clear delineation between those of the dark and the rest of us. Once in a while, a hero comes along who tips the precarious balance of the world back toward the good. It’s satisfying that way.

In any case, the D&D universe is one in which adventures abound. In some ways, the computer rendition of the game is even more satisfying than the old P&P version: it creates a world not just in your imagination, but right there on your computer screen. It populates that world with others that you can interact with, and creatures that will best you if you’re not quick on your feet. It provides stunning vistas and epic spaces, forests and crypts and dungeons and cities and ice-packed wastelands. And it even provides a stirring sound track.

From time to time, I wonder what it must be like to work on the teams that create these games. These people are computer programmers, of course, but they’re also artists and poets and storytellers.

Neverwinter Nights is a D&D game that opened up the creation of these stories to the rest of us, in providing a toolset along with the game. The toolset–the same thing that the developers used to create the game–can be used to make modules that anyone can download and play themselves. These modules might be little mini-adventures that can be completed in half an hour, or they might be as big as the original game itself. I’ve played no small number of these modules, and some are of a quality that rival what the original developers were able to create.

I don’t know how many hours I have invested in the game…surely a few hundred. For some reason, though, in all of those hours I never clicked on the button that opens up the toolset. I guess it seemed beyond me. An interesting thing that other people used.

This last week, though, I decided to have a go with the toolset myself. I don’t have the slightest clue how to go about creating a module. But, in a long life, I’ve done all sorts of things I didn’t know how to do when I first set out. We’ll see what happens, eh? Sink or swim, they say. Perhaps in a month or two, I’ll quietly remove this blog from its home on the net, and then you’ll know that I’ve sunk.

I don’t intend to create anything earth-shattering. I’ll never be one of those “hall of fame” developers that exist within the Neverwinter Nights community. But I hope I’ll be able to come up with something that is playable and interesting.

As I go along, I’ll try to provide the occasional update on how things are progressing. I’ll report on what I’m learning and what I’m thinking about. Perhaps I’ll provide the occasional download of my work so far, if anyone wants to see it.

We’ll have fun!