Those queries ranged from mechanical to lore-specific: Which prestige classes should be implemented? Should classes that gain no benefit from a given feat nonetheless be allowed to take it? Should utility skills such as Perform — which often lack explicit in‑game effects — be adapted, and if so, how? Can a player multiclass at creation with two level‑zero classes? If a monk scores a critical with shocking grasp, does the critical multiply the spell damage or the melee component?
Questions To WotC About ToEE – YouTube
Cain says those mechanical questions quickly bled into story and lore decisions tied to the Temple of Elemental Evil module. “They demonstrate how difficult it is to translate a pen‑and‑paper adventure into a digital experience,” he observes — every ambiguous line in the module becomes a design decision that must be encoded.
“You can’t leave questions unresolved,” Cain adds. “If the module says something is at the DM’s discretion, you still have to pick a specific interpretation for the game. The computer cannot improvise. You must implement rules, write dialogue, and script creature reactions. There’s no ‘winging it’ when code has to make the call.”
That’s the same constraint Larian’s founder Swen Vincke referenced when explaining why the studio opted to move away from the D&D license for future projects. “There were a lot of constraints in making D&D, and the 5th Edition is not an easy system to put into a video game,” Vincke said, noting that the team wanted to experiment with combat systems that didn’t map cleanly onto those tabletop rules.
Vincke isn’t alone in that assessment — while a shared ruleset comforts tabletop fans, it can become burdensome for developers. D&D’s complexity often depends on a human Dungeon Master to interpret and smooth edges; as Cain discovered in the early 2000s, a videogame simply can’t rely on that live adjudication.
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