The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Take a look at this. Yeah, one of the Forumwarz guys left a comment on my blog. That’s so neat! How did he ever know? Heh.

Anyway, that bit of bragging out of the way, I move on to ranting.
So I can’t figure out Neverwinter Nights 2. I’m trying to create a character to play the Mask of the Betrayer expansion I just picked up. It’s an epic-level expansion, so that means it starts at level 18, so when I make a new character, I have to level them up to level 18 immediately. And I have no clue what I’m doing. The interface tells me nothing. It says I need X to be this class… but it doesn’t tell me what X is or how I get it or anything I would NEED to know in order to actually make a character. Same with stuff like spells. I can take a specialization in a class of spells, sure. But what spells are in that class? I have no fucking idea, and there’s no way for me to know without making the character, having it fail, and then restarting. This process can take a long damn time. There is so much to deal with. And it doesn’t tell me anything I need to know.
I suppose I should just use one of their pre-made kits, but that doesn’t sound like fun to me. I want this to be MY character, dammit. I need to make it. There isn’t enough customization in the looks to make the character feel like mine on that alone. Also, most of the character models are completely ugly. Their faces are scary.
What I want, I guess, is to be able to click on any term and get a detailed explanation of what it means and what it affects. Base Attack Bonus? Click on it, and I know what it is, how I get it, what it’s used for, and what classes need it, in a nice little entry. Divination School? Click, and I know a long description of what it is and how its spells are normally used, and can dive deeper for a complete list of those spells to see if I want them or if they’re important enough to make my focus. It’s a computer program. They can present this information in a way that’s useful to a complete DnD n00b like myself. I know they can.
I also want a built-in planner. Look at this. Blizzard has a free one of these for every class on their site. You click and take a talent, right click to take a point away. You can build up and down, over and over, plan out what you want, and print it out. It’s awesome. Granted, I understand DnD is much more complex than this. But I should have a mode where I can say, take 13 levels of Bard and 6 levels of Fighter or something and then see what the result is, drag and drop the levels around in the timeline to see how that affects me, switch various feats off and on and drag them to different levels to see what that does, mark a Prestige class as my goal so it warns me if I’m not going to be able to take levels in it with my current build… something useful. Something much more useful than the current interface, where if I want to change a setting I have to back up to it and undo what I picked later, and I have to level 1 level at a time, and can’t plan ahead very well and see what’s in store until it’s too late.
Bleh, I guess I just need to ask Brer to help me. I don’t know. It’s just so frustrating, because it COULD work fine… but it’s completely obtuse unless you already know everything. Then it works fine as reminder text. But it doesn’t teach you anything. That’s what I want it to do.