Player Review of Cormanthor Hi, I figured I'd do a review of this server, as I've played here for a little while. I've played NWN since it was originally released, and have played & enjoyed many different persistent worlds. I'll do my best to give my
purely opinionated review of Cormanthor.
Gameplay - 7Death is quite lenient - you only lose 50 XP per level and 100 gold - and this does not effect you if you are level 3.Â
There are a bunch of dungeons to go to, and most are fairly doable if you do a little roleplay and find yourself a party.Â
The magic-level  for itemization is most certainly low - as far as I can tell, the highest bonus you fill find on an item is +3 or +4. This does not, however, mean that said items are
rare - indeed, I found myself swimming in +gear quite quickly. It just means that the maximum strength of such equipment is lowered.
They have introduced a few new prestige classes, but I scratch my head at the balancing of them. For example, they have brought in the Eldritch Knight and Mystic Theurge from Pen &Â Paper. The Eldritch. Knight is an arcane caster with
full BAB progression, and the Mystic Theurge is a caster who gets
both cleric and wizard spells. How they plan to balance these classes - or why they would choose to include them at all - is beyond me.
Roleplay - 5Obviously, player-quality of roleplay is not something that a PW can necessarily control. However, I will discuss a few things that significantly increase immersion.
Cormanthor features a plethora of new emotes, as well as a social-stance animation set. They also have a robust language system that is quite fun to play around with.Â
The server seems to heavily support player-caused world-changing events, which is a breath of fresh air after having played on so many servers where they absolutely refuse to acknowledge the actions of their player base, in the idiotic cause of sticking to 'canon.' Cormanthor breaks away from this norm, and claims to allow players to shape the server's history.
An immediate downside that I see is no real rule surrounding "permanent death," or at the very least, "character consequences." Without such, it is often difficult to have any form of player conflict be meaningful outside of spurts of PVP now and again. If they plan to have players shape the server around them, they should also be planning on figuring out HOW to handle character conflicts, especially if they reach a larger scale. Â Otherwise, the server will just become another level 20 stagnation fest.
Module Quality - 8
At the moment the module feels rather small. There are a few nicely designed areas, but once you get out of the immediate starting zone, Cormanthor has a very 'unfinished' feel to it. There were even a large swathe of areas that still had developer tags - fds_06 rather than "Featherdale - blah blah"
THAT said, the areas that are completed are very well made. There are some amateurish building mistakes now and again - areas that are left wide-open on the borders (and leading to no transition,) and other small things, and I do think they could push their use of placeables further - but overall, the build team seems to know what they are doing.
Custom Content - 10
Cormanthor hosts a variety of custom content which IÂ was quite impressed by. There are a plethora of new spells and feats taken over from Pen &Â Paper 3.5. They also offer a few new prestige classes, as well as balancing changes to some of the base classes.
They also use a lot of the newer tilesets available on the Vault, meaning that the server overall has quite a gorgeous look to it.
Dungeon Masters - 3This is where things get a little messy.Cormanthor uses an experience points system that bars you from progressing once you have reached a certain amount. After this point, you have to get XP granted directly from a Dungeon Master to progress.
"Level and XP advancement: Characters will start off at third level. The maximum level attainable will be 20. There is no "correct" amount of time that it should take you to achieve each level: Some people level faster than others, due to countless variables. However, starting at level 5, you will not be able to advance in levels solely by hack & slash: You will require a certain amount of XP granted by DMs to advance to the next level, per the following table:
Level 5 (to 6): 50
Level 6: 100
Level 7: 250..."
et cetera
While they have a number of dungeon masters listed, it is usually difficult to find one actively doing something. What throws me off about their dungeon masters is that they openly play on the server as their player-characters as well, and often spend far more time on these characetrs than they spend on the DM client! For a server that DEPENDS on Dungeon Masters for progression, this seems like a huuuuge behavioral oversight.
 It is also worth noting that the Dungeon Master player characters and characters of the Builder staff make up the highest level bracket currently on the server. The problem here is simply that if you are not able to find a DM or somehow draw attention to your character, you will not be able to progress at all. I found very quickly that not being the center of attention all the time meant I fell behind quite quickly.
Further, it seems like the majority of Dungeon Master time is spent hanging out with
other dungeon masters' player-characters, or their friends. I noticed that one of the highest level non-staff characters on the server is best friends with the PC of a Dungeon master's own PC. This doesn't immediately mean favoritism, but my eight years of jaded PW experience usually ends up at the same conclusion. You can make your own decision about that.
OVERALL, I give Cormanthor a 6.5 / 10. The score would be much higher, but the main negative points are that it feels unfinished, there is no set 'character consequences' and the Dungeon Masters seem to pander to each-other and their immediate friends rather than to the playerbase at large. This server has a LOT of potential. A DMÂ team can make or break a server, and if they can get more professional dungeon masters, the server can only benefit from it. If they can balance this with their fairly good module, then Cormanthor could become that 'special' module many of us have been hungry for.
-Svneati
Modifié par Svneati, 07 novembre 2010 - 12:35 .
