Every Friday night, I get out from my Mom’s basement, um, my wife lets me get out for a night, err, I get together with my old High School gaming group for a fun night of D&D 4th Edition.

One of the things that was a bit of shocker in 4th edition is how much administration there was. Gone are the days of just whacking creatures and getting healed. Now I need to deal with healing surges, at-will powers, encounter powers, dailies, etc. It can get to be a bit much. To help with a lot of the back-end creation I subscribe to the excellent Wizards Insider (sadly, this is Windows-only). Among its core features is a very handy character builder that uses all of Wizard’s published source material — even if I don’t own that volume — and creates a very handy, easy to read character sheet.

However, by the end of a gaming session, that sheet of paper looks like the crib notes to a physics final exam. The hit points section is a blur of eraser marks. The encounter powers have been checked, unchecked, rechecked, and double-checked. I was originally hoping that viewing a PDF (and maybe even annotating it) on an iPad might be an ideal solution to outsource the administrative details, but then I stumbled upon i4e in the app store.

This handy program either lets you input your character by hand — not recommended since it stores none of the powers and items from the game, so you’ll be entering in a lot of stuff on a small keyboard — or you can simply import your character from the Character Builder. Naturally, this is the option I chose.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t 100 percent successful. Most of the abilities are missing some of the descriptive text and it wasn’t taking into account the bonus to hit from my +2 sword and the base damage to the full-blade. According to the developer’s web site, this is a limitation in what is stored in the file, so there’s not much that can be done about it. At this point, if I wanted to, I’d have to input a lot of this data by hand. For now, though, I’m simply shrugging and keeping a printout of my character in front of me. Also, to check something I created a weapon within i4e and it still didn’t use the proper values.

That may seem like a complete deal-breaker, but the areas I wanted it to shine — handling the administration — it does. For example, the below screenshot is what happens when I select the hit points field. From here, I can either take damage, get healed (and say if that heal uses a healing surge), or add temporary hit points. This is very handy if you completely suck at math like I do.

I’m also impressed with how it handles powers. In 4th Edition, there are three types of powers you have: at-will powers than can be used at any time; powers that can be used only once per encounter; and powers that can be used only one a day. In i4e, I can click a power, tap the “use power” button and that power will appear gray in the powers list. When we’re done with an encounter and take what’s called a “short rest” (which resets the encounter powers) I can press the “short rest” button and, you guessed it, it resets all my used encounter powers. Naturally, there’s an “extended rest” button that’ll reset my all used powers.

After a full night’s game session, I asked myself: can I run a nightly gaming session using only i4e and an imported Character Builder file? Right now, with not having all the powers descriptions there, that answer is no (the character builder file gets updated too much for me to keep re-entering all the missing data). But, it’s not by missing the mark by much. I make PDFs of my character each update to send to the other players. Using Dropbox and the new Quickoffice Connect, or the Dropbox App, I can store the PDFs on the iPhone without needing to sync to iTunes. Sure, it’s not ideal with the small screen, and I’ll at least need a PDF of my main sheet, but once I get an iPad, I predict a paperless D&D night is in my future.

The Story So Far…

You start off the game as a simple peasant ready to take part in the harvest festival. This backdrop serves as an effective training tool to help new players become adjusted to the intricacies of the user interface and some of the subtleties of the Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 rules which the game is based on. Unlike the original Neverwinter Nights where your companions were all AI-driven, you also learn how to control individual members of your party. If the thought of keeping track of every movement of three additional characters is a bit daunting for you, then you may let the game’s excellent AI do its best to keep everyone alive in the heat of battle, though you may find that the spells and potions you’ve collected along the way are gone since your companions will use every item at their disposal if you let them.

After working with the townsfolk to save West Harbor you venture out, ultimately visiting Neverwinter itself. This is where the adventure kicks into high gear. Thieves & thugs lurk in every corner, wizards launch surprise attacks and the city guards cannot all be trusted. Deciding whom to trust is no small task, especially with the secrets that you carry with you…

The Forgotten Realms Never Looked So Beautiful

Having played D&D as a lad with good ol’ pencil & paper, eventually moving to text-based adventure games and then classics such as Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale, the original Neverwinter Nights was a bit of disappointment. Prior to that title, your imagination was given fodder to wander and fill in details that the games left out. NWN 1 seemed to deliberately get in your way, literally begging you to basque in the 3D world they created. Thankfully, it did set the stage for add-on adventures and this successor.

The graphics are just amazing in NWN 2, even with the tweaked-down settings on my MacBook Pro (Fall 2007 edition). NPC creatures and characters are animated and engaging, fields are flowing and buildings are rendered with great detail inside and out. Spell effects – one of the hallmarks of modern fantasy RPG’s – come alive on the screen, and the cut-scenes have even caused family members to come over and watch.

Party Rules

As previously mentioned, you are able to control the individual actions of your party members during combat (if so desired) and tune their characters as they achieve higher skill levels during the game. You can get a great feel for what it’s like being a spell-caster, healer, fighter or rogue (or more) this way and come up with some unique character configurations.

You can share items you loot with any of the NPC’s in your party provided they have the skills to use them. Be careful how you distribute thing and don’t be too surprised if your magic-aware thief makes a last-ditch effort to survive by using wide-area damage wand you gave her. It is a good idea, though, to keep your party well-stocked with healing, disease-curing and restorations potions/spells; you never know when they may be necessary.

While they may be NPC’s, your traveling companions all have stories to tell. All you need to to is talk to them and you’ll be able to discover new information about their past or what their current plans/motives may be. While no game will ever come close to replacing Minsc & Boo, the party characters in NWN 2 do manage draw you in to their stories a bit, which gives the game a more solid feel.

Can I Play The Game?

To play Neverwinter Nights 2, you’ll need an 2.0+ GHz Intel Mac running Tiger (10.4.11 min) or Leopard (10.5.1 min) with at least 1 GBM RAM and 6.5 GB hard disk space & a DVD player. While you can run with a Radeon X1600 or NVIDIA GeForce 7600 graphics card, Aspyr suggests more robust ones for the best visual experience. Complete specs are available over at Aspyr’s site. The game also supports Internet/LAN play, though I have not tested that yet.

A Great Diversion

The Neverwinter Nights 2 storyline has plenty of activity to keep you engaged for 40-60 hours and there is definitely decent replay value since you can choose a different main character and make alternate decisions which will have a real impact on where the game takes you as you progress.

Manipulating the camera took a bit more fiddling than I had expected and I was a bit disappointed that I needed to disable so many graphics options to make gameplay less choppy. Even with these compromises, NWN 2 has been engaging enough to steal my attention away from EVE ever since I purchased it (thankfully I have a long skill training going!).

You can expect to pay between $40.00 & $50.00 USD for the title which is available online at the usual suspects and also in better gaming shops. I have yet to see it at either of the two Apple Store’s I frequent in Seattle, but that may just be temporary.

If you’re playing NWN 2 or pick up a copy and try it, let me and all the other TAB readers know what you think in the comments.

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