As my financial situation was tumbling down, I managed to pick up an inexpensive copy of Sword Coast Legends for PC. I spent most of my Saturday playing with the DM module editor/creator and here's what I've determined from my first foray:
- These quests include collecting a user-specified number of items, killing a user-specified number of monsters, and killing a boss
- There are three basic kinds of quests you can assign to characters which are all self-completing (you don't return to anyone to turn them in)
- You can define "custom" sets of enemies, which are really just modified versions of the existing lists and not amalgamations thereof; you do not have free reign over the stat blocks of these monsters (so I could not, for example, convert a Troll into a true Green Hag - somewhat of a necessity given the lack of monsters available)
- You can only have two sets of monsters on a map
- Maps must have their monster types defined before you begin to fill them out; changing the monster sets for a map will reset an entire map
- Maps consist of largely prefabricated layouts, with a slight exception where dungeons are concerned
- Dungeons are obligated to descend (so no towers)
- Dungeons are made up of automatically-laid-out prefabs based upon seeds that you cannot alter except to request a simple, moderate, or complex layout
- Dungeons are automatically populated with encounters that are often more complex than any encounters you can set up under your own power
- You cannot define certain items as quest rewards (in fact you have 0 control over player-related items except to establish vendors)
- Just like monster sets, you must have established quest types plugged into your maps before you begin populating them; adding them later will force you to reset the map (changing your dungeon layout if it's a dungeon) and removing any changes you've made
- There is no apparent control for player dialogue trees (NPC talks, dialogue ends)
- There is no limit on the amount of stuff you can pack into a map in order to give it detail
- You must place things on the ground, there's no stacking objects (ie. putting fire on roofs or books or bottles on a table), and there are sometimes just awful collisions that prevent you from placing furniture against walls (sending my OCD into overdrive)
- You can't put boss-type enemies onto a map anywhere at any time voluntarily. I'm not actually sure where the boss-type monsters truly live, as I've added one into a dungeon and I haven't found the bastard anywhere (though there is a big door at the end of the dungeon that I cannot activate)
- You can create NPC monsters whose faction is variable (friendly, will fight for you; neutral, will watch you die; hostile, will openly attack you). You cannot use any triggered events to *change* these states automatically.
There's also no way to jump into your module to test out any of its actions or features - you do all your editing on the 3d map that the players will run around on, but you don't even get access to a larger map for yourself while you're editing (making travel around the larger maps slower and somewhat more tedious). If something doesn't work or looks weird, you won't know until you've gotten out of the editor, found a couple friends to playtest the game for you, and let it rip.
While that is usually okay for tabletop play, in my experience it's not so hot for virtual play.
I enjoy how beautiful the game is, and I'm even willing to work with the fact that it is by necessity all in the Forgotten Realms setting. The lack of monsters is a setback that I can work with largely because you can repaint and rearm monsters when you're creating a custom set of them. This means you can give your beasties spells and weapons they otherwise wouldn't have (as long as they can equip them). But you can't take away from the base model at all.
In my earlier example of turning a Troll into a Hag, my "Hag" can toss boulders as a default ability. I'm not thrilled about that.
There's also no scaling options for objects or monsters. This might seem like a small annoyance, but it's the difference between halfling skeletons and human ones, or twig blights and needle blights if you paint your skeletons green (that's about the closest I could figure to a blight with this engine). Your monsters are whatever size they are by default, and they will have whatever innate abilities belong to that archetype.
I'd be more forgiving if it were based upon species - for instance, all the Druegar having the same type of basic abilities. Instead, it's based upon specific monsters. A Druegar peon will have different inherent abilities than a Druegar berserker.
I get that there cannot be every monster in the Monster Manual available in the game, especially this early in its history. But what I cannot forgive is how limiting the monsters are, or how little narrative impact you are given the freedom to create with the world.
In my adventure module I was building, a digital remake of my Clouds over Stormbreak module (that has sadly been destroyed by a computer virus), a Gulthias Tree is causing blights to overrun a town. In the tabletop version, killing the tree will eliminate the blights. Sure, the tree is in the middle of town past a small army of blights, but it's still a satisfying and meaningful ending to that quest.
I can't allow players to attack inanimate objects - or even interact with them in such a way as to suggest the tree was cut down.
I believe the Forge in Neverwinter is more capable of handling my specific concerns than this program that was literally designed to let me DM a D&D game online.
The engine is capable of more, and I'd like to see what else I can get it to do. I spent a day delving into the program without documentation. Now it's time to read up and see what I missed, what I'm wrong about, and what workarounds might exist to let me game the way I want.
