Some background: I've ran table top games since 1977 and occasionally still do. It has gotten much harder to find player this past 10 years however. In DnD, I ran the original rules for most of my years running. I feel I got suckered into buying 3.0 and the rules have never really gotten better since then imo. I think the "rules lawyers" have won and the rules are converging with the video games. This does NOT mean ANY video game, mulitplayer or NOT even approaches "pencil and paper". There is simply no comparison. Bioware has constantly advertised their games using that phrase as well as "non-linear." They have no clue what that means in terms of a game. I recall fully my disappointment with Pools of Radiance and Azure Bands: they were really CRAPPY games that tried to ride on the coat tails of the DnD phenomena. Then I played Baldur's Gate. I was stunned. I felt that finally, someone had created a simulation of DnD on a computer. I was totally drawn in by the characters and the storyline. I felt as though I was a part of the game, all feeling much like you get when you play a table top game with folks trying to save their characters, or being that hero that dies saving a group, or that evil dude that locks his group in a dungeon, killing their characters, but certainly role playing chaotic evil very well. Baldur's Gate enabled that type of emersion in a game for the first time for me. Since BG1, it has been a downhill ride with the games for me. NWN was/is the bottom of that ride for me. There is no group. There is you. You get plopped into a situation they call a plot. You get to pick from some generic NPC's, but you only get to take ONE with you. You get to play out the story line. Clean out the dungeons. Clean out all the places you can clean out and wow, you get a reward: go clean out all the other places in the plot line. Gosh. If this was a real live DM running this game, I would play once or twice and then leave that campaign. BIOware excels at making hack and slash, stay between the lines games, so if you like to be led along a thin plotline that is great for not letting you be creative, these games are for YOU, and at a very good price. I hate when they advertise their schlock as being "pencil and paper" and "non-linear" since they are neither. BG1 and Planescape are amazing games for pulling you INTO the game. NVN is boring. Each time I've reinstalled it to try it ONE more time, I am reminded why I took it off my computer to make room for more mp3s.
