I don't think Cardell expected me to be well versed in the game, as I started catching him off-guard with questions like "So, is every player going to have to carry around a 10 foot pole, so they can map out everything?"

"Yea, I don't think that would be the best option," he said, eyeing me closer, expecting more of the same.

"Seriously, though, one of the things that our fan base has revealed to us is that we probably need to pursue some sort of auto-mapping feature. It's interesting to note that our level designer does, in fact, map out all of his dungeons on graph paper."

"One of our focuses," he continued, "is to identify the key roles of each of our D&D monsters. On top of that, we want to make sure that the actual environments play a role in combat. Above and beyond that, we want to make sure that we move away from the "I hit you, you hit me back" type of combat. There's a time and a place for that sort of thing, but we didn't want D&D, which is primarily an action based game system, to fall back into that role, as it has been done so many times before. So, no "get a sandwich" combat."