We always have our own Pawn. We can also travel with two other Pawns. Rook is one already in our group, although I immediately want to ditch him.
This is another unique aspect of DD. My Pawn goes onto the server and becomes available to other real-life gamers to take out adventuring. I can enter a Riftstone and jump on the server to find other gamers’ Pawns and take them out, too.
Rook is an NPC. When I have no internet connection (and DD can be fussy at times) I always have access to a level-appropriate Pawn. I hate that, though. I prefer toons that other humans have crafted and built and dressed. So much personality can be conveyed!
Now I must confess something so nerdy it’s embarrassing.
Not only have I gamed DD into the upper levels, I’ve done it more than once. I have two alt-accounts that I’ve built up from the beginning just so I can travel with my own Pawns. I love playing with other people’s creations, but ultimately I want certain skills available. The only way to get that for sure is to play with my own creations. When I go into a Riftstone I find two friend Pawns, and those friends are alt versions of me. I’ve cross-gamed so that each Pawn is leveled and geared up, ready and updated for new adventuring.
I know. It’s so obsessively geeky.
On this playthrough, with a fresh new toon, I’m going into the Rift and renting my other Pawns. It’s a bit cheaty. Okay, it’s really cheaty. They’re upper levels with many skills. I don’t really care about that part. I’m content to take Pawns at my skill level. I just want my comfortable peeps with me.
If we wanted to fully participate in the Pawn rental system, we would need to sleep at an inn. That’s the action that accesses the server and puts our Pawn out on the internet. If we rent a Pawn and send it home in the Rift, we then need to sleep in order to register its travels. Something like Rook, an NPC, doesn’t follow these restrictions. It’s only for real life creations that we need to follow the sleep rules to complete the cycle. It’s also the way we would know if someone took our Pawn out for a spin.
in case you were curious about that. I guess this is mostly a game mechanics post.
Even now, over a decade after the release of this game, it’s still so beloved that you can find people gaming and updating their Pawns on the server. The pixels may be rickety at this point, but the gameplay is evergreen.