Exploring Dungeons & Dragons Online in 2026

The Adventures of Roghnach Dorje, Ninja Spy

The New Dungeons and Dragons Online

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So Much Has Changed

Having successfully created Roghnach Dorje and made it through the opening tutorial, we were beginning to realise that returning to Dungeons & Dragons Online after nearly twenty years was going to be rather more complicated than simply remembering which buttons to press.

The opening of Korthos Island was familiar enough. We had washed ashore, spoken to the locals, smashed boxes, fought Sahuagin and eventually killed the High Priestess.

But once we started looking around properly, the differences became increasingly obvious.

There was a choice of difficulty when entering an adventure. There were public wilderness areas containing exploration locations and rare encounters. There were Action Points and Enhancement trees. There were hirelings.

And, because we were playing solo, the hirelings were going to prove particularly important.

Going Solo

Our first instinct was simply to explore.

After all, Korthos Island is a relatively safe place to learn the game, and we wanted to see what was actually there rather than rushing through the quests.

We soon discovered, however, that solo does not necessarily mean alone.

DDO now has hirelings who can accompany you into adventures and provide useful class abilities. We bought several contracts and eventually settled on taking a Cleric with us.

There was a small catch that we had to discover for ourselves: hirelings cannot simply be summoned wherever you happen to be standing. They need to be called in an appropriate private adventure instance rather than in a public area.

Once we understood that, the whole concept began to make sense.

For someone playing alone, having a Cleric along provides healing and makes wandering around the wilderness considerably less hazardous.

Our First Death

And we needed the help.

At one point we wandered around the island and discovered that being a level one Monk did not make Roghnach remotely immortal.

We were simply overwhelmed.

Our first life in modern DDO therefore ended rather unglamorously.

It was actually quite useful.

One of the things you quickly discover after returning to a game after twenty years is that memories are unreliable. We remembered DDO as a game where we had eventually become powerful enough to deal with almost anything. What we had forgotten was the bit where you have to become powerful first.

So we recruited the Cleric and tried again.

With healing available, exploring the island became considerably more comfortable, and we could start looking beyond simply completing the quests.

There Is Rather More to Do Than We Remembered

Korthos isn't simply a collection of quests leading from one adventure to the next.

The wilderness itself has things to discover.

There are Explorer locations scattered around the island, as well as Rare encounters. We started hunting them down, discovering new parts of the map as we went.

We eventually killed all three of the island's rare encounters, including Xyl, and began working our way through the Explorer objectives.

This was another interesting change from the DDO we remembered. The wilderness itself had become something worth exploring rather than merely somewhere you passed through on the way to the next dungeon.

Learning the Modern Monk

While all this was happening, we were also learning something else for the first time: how to play a Monk.

This was not a case of relearning an old class. We had never played one before.

We discovered Ki, Monk stances, Stunning Fist, Evasion and Meditation. We experimented with the Wind Stance and the more defensive Mountain Stance, and gradually began to understand that the Monk was not simply another melee fighter.

Wisdom, Dexterity, Constitution and the different elemental paths all contributed to the character in different ways.

And then we discovered the Enhancement system.

Action Points

Action Points were one of the biggest differences from the game we remembered.

Instead of simply choosing a feat or gaining the occasional class ability, we could now spend points developing entire enhancement trees.

For Roghnach, the obvious choice was beginning to emerge.

We wanted her to become a Ninja Spy.

The Ninja Spy tree offered exactly the sort of abilities we were looking for: stealth, sneak attacks, shortswords and shuriken, together with abilities that rewarded us for remaining centred.

We invested our first points in Basic Ninja Training, Ninjutsu and Sneak Attack Training, eventually working our way into the second rank of Ninjutsu.

It was beginning to look as though our Monk was going to become something rather more interesting than a character who simply hit things with her fists.

The Shortsword Problem

There was, however, a problem.

We had found a Masterwork Shortsword and decided that this was precisely the sort of weapon our aspiring Ninja should be using.

Except that when we equipped it, the game told us that we were not proficient and, more importantly, that we were not centred.

This was rather puzzling.

We had Basic Ninja Training.

We had spent the Action Points.

We had apparently done everything correctly.

Yet the game was refusing to let Roghnach behave like the Ninja Spy we thought we had created.

We considered whether we needed to acquire Shortsword Proficiency separately. We considered whether something else about the character was preventing her from remaining centred.

Eventually, we found the answer.

We Had Forgotten to Lock It In

It turned out that the problem wasn't the Monk, the shortsword or the Ninja Spy tree.

We hadn't actually locked in the Action Point changes.

We had spent the points and were looking at the enhancements, but hadn't completed the process that actually applied them to the character.

Once we locked everything in, the mystery disappeared.

Roghnach became centred.

The Ninja Spy enhancements were actually working.

And suddenly the Masterwork Shortsword made sense.

It was a wonderfully appropriate lesson in returning to a complicated game after twenty years: sometimes the problem isn't some obscure game mechanic. Sometimes you've simply forgotten to press the button.

Becoming a Ninja

With that problem solved, we continued developing Roghnach along the Ninja Spy path.

We added Advanced Ninja Training, which improves our use of shuriken, alongside Basic Ninja Training, Ninjutsu and Sneak Attack Training.

We were now beginning to have a properly defined character.

In close combat, we could use shortswords.

At range, we had shuriken.

We had Hide and Move Silently for stealth, Search for finding things, and Spot and Listen for scouting.

We also continued developing Use Magic Device, because the ability to make use of magical devices normally associated with other classes seemed particularly valuable for a character who was going to spend much of her time adventuring alone.

Eventually we reached level three and had to make another set of choices.

We took Shortsword Proficiency, partly because of the earlier confusion, and chose the Path of Inevitable Dominion as our Monk philosophy.

Roghnach was now beginning to look rather like the character we had originally imagined.

A Very Different Game

By the time we reached level three, the most striking thing wasn't any individual feature.

It was how much more there was to think about.

The DDO we remembered was certainly a complicated game, but modern DDO has added layers of character development, wilderness exploration, hirelings, enhancement trees, selectable difficulty and a host of other systems.

And yet the fundamental experience remains recognisable.

You create an adventurer.

You enter a dungeon.

You fight monsters.

You find treasure.

You become more powerful.

Then you go looking for something more dangerous to fight.

That part, at least, hasn't changed.

What has changed is just how much there is to do between those fights.

And that was becoming increasingly apparent as we finished the quests on Korthos and began exploring the island itself.