Sword Coast Legends Makes the Nerdiest Game in the World Even Better

The editors at Playboy have taken some time out of their, er, interesting day to crank out a developer commentary-laden preview of Sword Coast Legends in which they seek to explain why N-Space’s RPG “makes the nerdiest game in the world even better”. Yeah:

(Dungeons and Dragons isn’t just about the players, it’s about the Dungeon Master working with the players to create a collaborative story,) Tudge told me. (That’s a complex thing, but when it’s done right, players and the DM work together to create something new sometimes in a silly way, but more often than not in a deep, meaningful way.)

No game, Tudge says, has ever managed to weave in the role of the Dungeon Master in a way that feels natural. That’s partly because being a DM isn’t an easy thing to do, he says.

(I’ve run games with everyone from adults to my own children, and to be a good DM, you have to be able to adapt to things that you could have never seen coming. Computers, and therefore video games,) he adds, (are awful at that kind of thing.)

And he’s dead right. Computers are terrible at understanding people. We speak in weird, unusual ways, and we don’t follow the strict tenets of grammar in everyday speech. We don’t even pronounce the same words consistently.

That’s why, even though we can collect the sum total of human knowledge and make it accessible almost anywhere on Earth, Siri still can’t always understand whatever drunk-ass question you’re trying to belch at her at 3am on a Saturday. And it’s why it’s currently impossible to program a virtual Dungeon Master that can react and improvise the way a human one can. Luckily, Tudge and the rest of the team have a solution: Sword Coast Legends gives an actual human all the tools they need to run a proper game.