Exploring Dungeons & Dragons Online in 2026 - Part 1: Character Creation and Tutorial
The Adventures of Roghnach Dorje, Ninja Spy
After Nearly Twenty Years
It has been a very, very long time since I last played Dungeons & Dragons Online.
How long? I originally thought perhaps fifteen years, but the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it was probably closer to twenty. I remember playing it quite extensively, but I also remember reaching the point where there simply didn't seem to be much more to do. Eventually I moved on to other things, and DDO was left behind.
Until now.
Recently, I started watching Just Drive Plays, and his enthusiasm for DDO, alongside our continuing enjoyment of The Lord of the Rings Online, prompted the obvious question: why aren't we playing Dungeons & Dragons Online again?
After all, we like Dungeons & Dragons.
So we downloaded the current Standing Stone Games version of DDO, let it perform what turned out to be a rather substantial amount of updating, and prepared to see what had happened to the game in the intervening decades.
The Ghosts of DDO Past
When we eventually got into the game, we discovered that we still had three characters sitting on the Orien server.
There was Darius Pearce, a rather oddly constructed character consisting of one level of Paladin, two levels of Rogue and one level of Sorcerer.
There was Olivia Evans, with one level of Barbarian and one level of Rogue.
And then there was Kara Evans, who had made it all the way to level 5 as a Bard.
These were clearly survivors from another era of DDO.
The problem was that Orien was now a Ghost World. We couldn't create new characters there.
That was our first proper indication that this wasn't simply the DDO we remembered, waiting patiently for us to return. Twenty years had happened while we weren't looking.
So we went looking for another server and eventually settled on Moonsea, the European server.
Rather than trying to resurrect one of our ancient characters, we decided to start again.
From scratch.
Meet Roghnach Dorje
The next question was what to play.
We had played DDO before, but there was one class we had never played: the Monk.
So we decided that this was an ideal opportunity to try one.
We created a female Half-Elf Monk and began working through the character creation system.
The modern game gives considerably more choices than I remembered, and we spent quite some time working out what all the numbers actually meant. Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma all had their effects, while the Monk's different elemental paths added another layer of consideration.
Eventually we settled on a character with relatively high Wisdom and Constitution, reasonable Strength and Dexterity, and enough Intelligence and Charisma to avoid creating obvious weaknesses.
Then came the skills.
We decided that our Monk wasn't simply going to be someone who ran into a room and punched everything.
She would be a scout.
Hide. Move Silently. Spot. Listen. Search.
We also put some attention into Tumble, Balance and other useful skills, and eventually decided that Use Magic Device would be a useful skill to develop as well.
Then came the feats.
Stunning Fist seemed almost obligatory for a Monk, while the Half-Elf racial choices gave us some additional possibilities.
Finally came the name.
We wanted something Tibetan-inspired and eventually settled on:
Roghnach Dorje.
There was a slight problem with the spelling along the way, as speech recognition had a remarkable ability to turn the Irish name into almost anything except what we intended, but eventually Roghnach Dorje became the name actually used by the character.
And, for reasons known only to us, we gave her ginger hair, very pale skin and bright blue eyes.
So our new Monk was ready.
Lawful Good
There was one final choice.
The Monk could be Lawful Good or Lawful Neutral.
We would probably have preferred something more along the lines of Neutral Good or even Chaotic Good, but DDO wasn't interested in our philosophical preferences.
So Roghnach became Lawful Good.
And then, after all that preparation, we finally entered the game.
Washed Ashore
And suddenly, after all those years, something was reassuringly familiar.
We had washed up on a beach.
We spoke to a Halfling.
We acquired a weapon.
We smashed some boxes.
And we headed towards a cave.
Twenty years of technological and mechanical development had apparently not been enough to persuade DDO that the best way to introduce an adventurer to the game is to wash them up on a beach and send them into a cave.
There was something rather wonderful about it.
The game looked considerably better and offered vastly more systems than I remembered, but the basic D&D adventure was still there.
We entered the Sahuagin caves, fought our way through them and eventually killed the High Priestess.
Then we entered the village of Korthos.
And with that, our return to Dungeons & Dragons Online had properly begun.
Not Quite the DDO We Remembered
At this point, however, it became obvious that although the opening felt familiar, the game surrounding it had changed enormously.
There was an explicit choice of difficulty when entering an adventure.
There was a much clearer distinction between public areas and private quest instances.
There were wilderness areas with exploration objectives and rare encounters.
There were hirelings.
There were Action Points and elaborate Enhancement trees.
And there were a great many things that simply hadn't existed, or at least hadn't existed in anything like their present form, when we last played.
We also discovered something else.
We were going to be playing solo.
And that was going to make the new systems rather important.
Because Roghnach wasn't going to have a party of human adventurers accompanying her.
She was going to have to manage.
Fortunately, DDO had changed in precisely that respect.
It had something called hirelings.
And that was going to turn out to be one of the first major differences between the DDO we remembered and the DDO we were now playing.
But before we got too far ahead of ourselves, there was a more immediate problem.
We had made a Monk.
We had never played a Monk before.
And we were about to discover that modern DDO's Monk is considerably more complicated than simply punching things until they stop moving.
Exploring Dungeons & Dragons Online in 2026
Part 1: Character Creation and Tutorial
Part 2: The New DDO
Part 3: Korthos Island Twenty Years Later
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