| Oh, it's mouthwatering. It really is. You can pour over it for hours, planning every detail of your character, from it's race and class, down to the individual skills he or she will have. Weighing up the advantages and disadvantages of giving him an extra Strength point as opposed to Dexterity, and deciding whether he'd benefit more from one of those or from extra Intelligence, therefore allowing him to learn more skills as he grows in level. Learning about the possibilities of multiclassing, starting him off maybe as a Bard, and then giving him a level of Rogue to allow him to learn lock-picking, pick-pocketing, and setting and disabling traps in half the time it would take him to learn them as a Bard. Or plan for a Wizard, forsaking armour, and relying on his magic to protect him from attacks. All this lovely goodness even before |
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| playing the game. For Neverwinter Nights is a Character Role-Playing Game (CRPG), and much of the enjoyment derives from building your character and developing it as you play through the game. The ultimate is to create your own portraits and soundsets for your character, but these possibilities are tantalisingly omitted from the manual, leaving you to discover them yourself, and free to imagine any other possible customisation options you could design for your beloved character. | |
But I digress. I'm slipping away from the manual, and into the game itself. But that is where we are heading interminably. The manual leaves you gasping for the game, yearning to try out what is written in it, desperate to discover where you will be leading your character, how his magic works in practice, who you will meet along the way, and all this before you have tried creating your own whole module. A complete adventure you can design from the bottom, up; complete with background sounds you have recorded yourself, characters you've scripted (or could even act out when multiplaying with friends) yourself, exactly as you've dreamt in your nights of solitude. Again, I've digressed from the manual, and again am talking about the game. It's inescapable. To read the manual is to yearn for the game. When your not playing, it almost is playing the game. Of course, a game is not a matter of life and death in reality, but a game manual that provides this need to play is something worth noting.
Maybe not a conventional piece of literature in the traditional sense, the Neverwinter Nights Manual has nevertheless made it into this chapter of mine devoted to Literature. Perhaps the next entry will be a little more serious. Keep playing to find out.
Word of the Week
Manual
manual adj. & n. —adj. 1 of or done with the hands (manual labour). 2 (of a machine etc.) worked by hand, not automatically. —n. 1 a a book of instructions, esp. for operating a machine or learning a subject; a handbook (a computer manual). b any small book. 2 an organ keyboard played with the hands not the feet. 3 Mil. an exercise in a handling a rifle etc. 4 hist. a book of the forms to be used by priests in the administration of the Sacraments.
Definition courtesy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary
A barely relevant WoW, and the reference to pr**sts is highly undesirable. However, that's what it says in the book, so that's what I write in the blog. More next week!
