Dendum
04-22-2014, 09:29 PM
So,
Lets get this started shall we. I have taken the opportunity to explore DR with a free account thingamabob, I have spent two weeks delving into the other Elanthia purging myself of using certain gemstone habits and employing }person instead of @person to talk to people. I was inspired to do this for a couple of reasons, one being I have always wished there was a bit more flexibility in character development in GS, in a mechanical sense, Dragonrealm just had a major revamp in the mechanics of how things work called DR 3.0 and will soon have DR 3.1, and it has been over a decade since I tried that game, also some people kept saying Dragonrealm had more players and I just really wanted to see why that is...the third is a lie by the way as of April 2014 they have the same amount of players on average throughout the day with Gemstone actually having more players at times than Dragonrealm.
This is not going to be a which is better review, I have decided they both have pro's and convicts and it is going to boil down to personal choice. Here We Go.
Classes/Races
Both games have traditional fantasy classes,
Gemstone IV has very very traditional fantasy classes, you have healers, clerics, paladins, monks, fighters, rangers, mages (they call themselves wizards now), rogues, bards and sorcerers. They determine just about everything your character can do mechanically speaking in the game, only a warrior makes sheaths only a mage enchants armor, only bards can sing to items to determine what they do. The class you pick will also determine your hunting style options, at least until you reach the max level.
Dragonrealm has a bit more realm specific classes, but in general all the tropes are available, Barbarians are a magic nullifying warrior, thieves are those who fight from the shadows, moon mages manipulate lunar magic to see into the future open portals to other lands and sometimes melt faces, warrior mages are weapon wielding masters of melt your face magic, bards are a completely different experience than in GS they have many aoe buffs and debuffs and nothing like GS lore songs, clerics raise the dead and are overly powerful, empaths heal..and do NOT fight, an empath goes into a state of shock if it so much as swings a dagger at a living creature. Necromancers are evil and do evil things.
I think it should be pointed out to anyone going from one to the other that similar names do not mean similar skill sets between games. Empaths in Gemstone IV are capable hunters and rogues are just as good in town as outside town, Sorcerers are not reviled and some are ridiculously nice and no one cares. Rangers in Dragonrealm get a penalty inside constructed areas like towns and ruins, necromancers are evil and hunted by other characters and thieves are expected to at least learn to steal stuff...and most do steal stuff. The differences between classes in GS and guild in DR will be touched on again later as they are vast.
Gemstone IV has more lore and historical documents on the races than Dragonrealm does, though a lot of lore in Dragonrealm is buried in its in game book system and can be found on elanthipedia.com in the end Gemstone just has more. However the races in Dragonrealm (12 to GS's 13) are for the most part significantly different than each other, the Kaldar and Humans being the one exception to that rule. Where Gemstone has Sylvan, Dark Elves, and elves and forest gnomes and city gnomes Dragonrealm just combines them into elf and gnome, and gives options like the feline Prydaen the shape shifting Rakash the lizard like S'kra or the strong brute like Gor'tog. Since you can still be a sylvan or a forest gnome as such bloodline options exist in game I think Dragonrealm may actually have more race options even though it has one less race to choose from at character creation.
Leveling
Gemstone IV employs a system of character advancement that most people will be familiar with, you have one hundred levels to go through after which you no longer "level" but still gain training points to spend on skills. Skills are broken down into categories like two handed weapon or one handed edged weapons or pole arms. Since you have a limited number of training points per level you have to choose wisely to make a character than can hunt level appropriate enemies (they have levels too!). The system is pretty basic but gets complicated by the addition of skills that don't make a lot of sense when you first start like air lore and blessing lore and trading but you eventually figure out what does what, unfortunately you are stuck with your choices unless you wait for the once a year fixskill, acquire a fixskill potion, or are within your first 30 days. Experience is earned by killing things, this is how 99% of experience in GS is earned. The creature you are fighting dies and you get experience and loot for doing that.
Statistics in Gemstone are handled in an even more limited way, you set them at character creation and hope to god you set them ok because after the first 30 days they are stuck like glue on your character, all is not hopeless if you failed this important task...your statistics grow over time, at a fixed rate depending on race and class, and you can shell out a boat load of silvers in the game or about a hundred bucks in the simucoin store and fix your statistics.
Dragonrealms replaces levels with Circles, however a circle is not a level exactly. A circle is recognition from your guild leader (your class is your guild) that you are proficient enough to rise up and learn new guild specific things. However you could have some skills way above what your circle requires, you could be a crazy dagger master who never circles up (this would take forever) but still has a small edged skill equal to people many circles above you. So skills are not circle dependent and are not raised by "leveling up" the circle. They are raised by performing the action that employs the skill...you want to be a better locksmith you have to pick locks, you want to know how to swim...get to swimming or climbing as they use the same skill. The downside to this is you don't get to carry skills with you like in GS, you can go 10 levels in GS without picking a box but as long as you keep putting points into that skill it levels up with your level. If you try than in DR you will have to go back and find boxes you can actually open to go any higher. The upside to this is that you can choose to make your character fight exactly how you wish, want to be a thrown brawler rogue? Go right ahead and throw things and brawl, if you also wish to learn daggers swing a dagger...obviously the more skills you add the slower you are going to raise them but you will end up with more variety in your combat styles. Skills are raised by doing things and have no hard relation to circles you also don't have to kill things to raise skills, just swinging the blade raises the skill regardless if you run or finish off that blood thirsty enemy.
One large benefit of this system is that you can down hunt with someone without destroying everything before they get to hit it, want to help out a low level person? Grab a crossbow or some other weapon you don't know and you also learn something while you do it.
Statistics in Dragonsrealm are handled by the player not the system, as you get more skills you gather points to spends on statistics and you choose which ones to raise, or to raise them all equally. This I think is a better system as I see no real down side to it other than you don't get the joy of wasting money on fix stat potions like you do in GS. Some races have penalties to raise some skills and bonuses to others, but for the most part they tend to even out so if you are trying to keep your statistics raising equally it should be balanced.
Death and Taxes
Death, you try to avoid it but it is going to happen unless you play the entire game in a tavern and no one invades that tavern, both games have invasions so your chances of becoming dead are high in both. Both games have done away with permanent death. Both games have systems to help with death Dragonrealm has favors Gemstone IV has deeds.
In Dragonrealm death has more meaning than in Gemstone, but you will find yourself at deaths door less, at least sub circle 30. Dragonrealm did away with one hit kills, the damage roll is not the same as the to hit roll so you are far more likely to get stunned, loose a limb, maybe catch on fire but not just outright die from one hit. That being said if you die without any favors you can not be resurrected you will decay, all your gear will fall on the ground, you will have severe deaths sting. With favors and the help of empaths and clerics (you need both) you can come away from death with only minor issues. Combat is longer in DR than GS, this is good as it gives you more time to raise skills, you normally have more time to react...but death without favors is far far worse than death without deeds if you do die.
Gemstone IV has deeds and recent deaths, deeds are bought with gems or silvers and you do not loose any gear when you die except anything you may have dropped (arrows) or if you got disarmed. The death sting in GS can be a pain if you die multiple times as it gets worse every time, but with a cleric you normally do not have to worry about it. If you do have to worry about it go over to the SIMUCOIN store and buy a death sting salve and boom all worries are gone. You will die more in Gemstone IV though, some creatures will just bash your head in with one hit, some will do it in two and time spent dead is not fun in either game. Both games cause you to loose experience when you die, and for the most part both games let well trained raisers of the dead help offset that.
Favors are bought with experience in Dragonrealm and that makes for a world of difference, there have been times in GS I have stockpiled 40 or so deeds up, this would be mind numbingly stupid in Dragonrealm because you would never learn any skills while you stockpiled favors, you would basically be stuck in advancement until you got over your stockpiling phase, I am sure people do it but it is definitely more involved than the silver/gem to deeds in GS.
Speaking of silvers, that is what you use for money in Gemstone IV, in Dragonrealm they have silvers and copper and bronze and gold and platinum. They also have three different types of minted coins and depending on what city you are in you may need a different type of coin than what you have on you. Lucky you they are happy to exchange your coins and take a percentage out to do it. There is also no written notes to move large sums of coins from point a to point b, I guess to cities of Dragonrealm do not trust each other enough to take paper like that. This means moving large sums of money for non premium members is an exercise in either hiring a moon mage or running very very fast and hoping you don't die...because if you do and you don't have favors you lose it all. Beg or hire a moon mage, you may lose a bit but its less than losing it all.
Roles and Plays
So, the real questions is how does all this come out into the game world how does it effect your combat and RP and existence in the game.
In Dragonrealm you are going to see a lot more titles on people, some of which don't make sense to outsiders, and I don't mean nonsensical Dhe'nar words but things like Wage Slave and Shadow, you are also going to be somewhat curtailed by guild choices in your rp, you are not going to be a Barbarian master of magic, it just ain't gonna happen Barbarians actively shrug off magic of all sorts without even trying. You are not going to be able to play a (high circle) thief who doesn't know how to steal, they just are not gonna respect you enough at the guild hall to promote you. What you can however expect is a good level of consistency, Paladins will be good if not necessarily "righteous" and necromancers will be hated, thankfully they have the ability to semi-hide as another profession. I like this, I prefer this to the flip side where Sorcerers are ignored and no one bats an eye at a demon walking the streets (and everyone wants to be a special snow flake pink fuzzy sorcerer)
Dragonrealm has more mechanics such as horses and boats, and rivers that can normally be swam if you don't like waiting for the ferry, you also get more choice in what you do as a character (in direct contradiction to the above paragraph), if you want to make a Drizzt like dual scimitar wielding pro archer ...nothing in the mechanics stops you from doing that, as opposed to Gemstone IV where that amount of weapon training simply isn't possible till post cap. But does all that equal better RP?
Maybe, maybe not
Dragonrealm is hindered by the freedom to never stop training, you will max out a skill but there is nothing to stop you from going to learn another skill while the previous one absorbs and in this you find people running around like mad dogs constantly pushing the limits trying to keep as many skills "mind locked" as possible. In Gemstone you have a flat experience maximum you can reach before you are forced to rest. This sounds bad but in reality it forces people into common "nodes" and promotes social interaction and..dare I say it..sometimes even RP. Everyone knows people in GSIV run auto scripts, but nothing like the level of those scripts in Dragonrealms.
Dragonrealm has no nodes, just popular gathering spots and even in those spots you are going to see almost everyone training, or listening to classes as you can teach each other skills in DR. There is a lot more scripting in general in DR than Gemstone IV, and in my opinion more people afk scripting or semi afk scripting as well. Every room with more than 6 people looks worse then Gemstone's Town Square on an invasion night with the amount of screen scroll going on. Imagine if everyone around you in GSIV started to learn fletching at the same time and you can probably imagine Dragonrealm. Luckily DR has a window in stormfront just for conversation otherwise you wouldn't know if anyone said anything if you blinked twice in a row, this is a great feature and Gemstone IV should have it as well.
Does that mean there is no RP in Dragonrealm? No, I made it a point to go out and find it and what I found was great. I was in a spontaneous conversation among bards talking about bardic history, and song crafting. I went to a horse training event at learned about horses, how some don't like certain races, about the history of horses and about the market for horse trading all in character. I saw new people being helped by old timers and thieves protecting the secrecy of the thieves guild. I even saw a bit of RP'd PvP because that happens in DR far more than GSIV, and some gladiator type combat events. Just like in Gemstone you have to go looking for the RP it isn't necessarily going to come wander over to where you are hunting goblins.
But in the end Dragonrealm has no Kenstrom like storyteller (though it is hardly fair to judge a game on one person who may be gone tomorrow from Gemstone IV), and there is always always always a ton of people running around scripting. So you end up with mechanics that both promote RP, as in rangers who are better out of town and STAY out of the town, and makes it harder, with scripting and screen scroll. Dragonrealm has more development on the larger scale, they just recently got DR 3.0 and soon will get DR 3.1 both of which probably show more actual changes than the last four years of minor Gemstone IV buffs and they just got a new capped hunting ground. On the flip side Gemstone IV has more gear-centric stuff to play around with....even if that is reserved for the very top tier players.
Conclusion
So in the end I liked DR, it isn't without faults, in fact there were dozens of times I thought the best game was neither DR or GS but would have been a combination of the two. DR's ranged firing with GS's gather verb, DR's amazing player trading and crafting systems with some of GS's slightly more advanced fluffy items. GS needs DR's conversation window in stormfront and DR's open and engaged GM community. DR could probably benefit from some of the mechanics in GS that force people to slow down every now and again.
I am concluding this post a week after I started it and in that time I have seen some great RP out of DR. Last night was a good example as I attended an in game event, entirely player run, that was ran as smooth as butter and was interesting. I then jumped over to a GS GM ran event where everyone was insulting some nobles and yelling at each other. That is probably the big difference between the two, Death means nothing in GS it is like playing Mario Brothers where not only will you die but at times you are expected to die and it leads to a sort of semi-god complex among the too powerful player base, and since the only way to learn in GS is to kill something almost every event revolves around killing things or will lead to killing things.
Dragonrealm offers a different. but maybe not better or worse, view of things. They are similar but not the same. Dragonrealms gets way too much of the developmental time from Simutronics based on the fact it has the exact same player base as GSIV. In the end if you are playing one and thinking of the other I say go for and in either case reserve judgement till you have reached level 10 or circle 10 because while you may not have a full understanding of the game, at least you will have come to terms with the mechanics by that point.
Lets get this started shall we. I have taken the opportunity to explore DR with a free account thingamabob, I have spent two weeks delving into the other Elanthia purging myself of using certain gemstone habits and employing }person instead of @person to talk to people. I was inspired to do this for a couple of reasons, one being I have always wished there was a bit more flexibility in character development in GS, in a mechanical sense, Dragonrealm just had a major revamp in the mechanics of how things work called DR 3.0 and will soon have DR 3.1, and it has been over a decade since I tried that game, also some people kept saying Dragonrealm had more players and I just really wanted to see why that is...the third is a lie by the way as of April 2014 they have the same amount of players on average throughout the day with Gemstone actually having more players at times than Dragonrealm.
This is not going to be a which is better review, I have decided they both have pro's and convicts and it is going to boil down to personal choice. Here We Go.
Classes/Races
Both games have traditional fantasy classes,
Gemstone IV has very very traditional fantasy classes, you have healers, clerics, paladins, monks, fighters, rangers, mages (they call themselves wizards now), rogues, bards and sorcerers. They determine just about everything your character can do mechanically speaking in the game, only a warrior makes sheaths only a mage enchants armor, only bards can sing to items to determine what they do. The class you pick will also determine your hunting style options, at least until you reach the max level.
Dragonrealm has a bit more realm specific classes, but in general all the tropes are available, Barbarians are a magic nullifying warrior, thieves are those who fight from the shadows, moon mages manipulate lunar magic to see into the future open portals to other lands and sometimes melt faces, warrior mages are weapon wielding masters of melt your face magic, bards are a completely different experience than in GS they have many aoe buffs and debuffs and nothing like GS lore songs, clerics raise the dead and are overly powerful, empaths heal..and do NOT fight, an empath goes into a state of shock if it so much as swings a dagger at a living creature. Necromancers are evil and do evil things.
I think it should be pointed out to anyone going from one to the other that similar names do not mean similar skill sets between games. Empaths in Gemstone IV are capable hunters and rogues are just as good in town as outside town, Sorcerers are not reviled and some are ridiculously nice and no one cares. Rangers in Dragonrealm get a penalty inside constructed areas like towns and ruins, necromancers are evil and hunted by other characters and thieves are expected to at least learn to steal stuff...and most do steal stuff. The differences between classes in GS and guild in DR will be touched on again later as they are vast.
Gemstone IV has more lore and historical documents on the races than Dragonrealm does, though a lot of lore in Dragonrealm is buried in its in game book system and can be found on elanthipedia.com in the end Gemstone just has more. However the races in Dragonrealm (12 to GS's 13) are for the most part significantly different than each other, the Kaldar and Humans being the one exception to that rule. Where Gemstone has Sylvan, Dark Elves, and elves and forest gnomes and city gnomes Dragonrealm just combines them into elf and gnome, and gives options like the feline Prydaen the shape shifting Rakash the lizard like S'kra or the strong brute like Gor'tog. Since you can still be a sylvan or a forest gnome as such bloodline options exist in game I think Dragonrealm may actually have more race options even though it has one less race to choose from at character creation.
Leveling
Gemstone IV employs a system of character advancement that most people will be familiar with, you have one hundred levels to go through after which you no longer "level" but still gain training points to spend on skills. Skills are broken down into categories like two handed weapon or one handed edged weapons or pole arms. Since you have a limited number of training points per level you have to choose wisely to make a character than can hunt level appropriate enemies (they have levels too!). The system is pretty basic but gets complicated by the addition of skills that don't make a lot of sense when you first start like air lore and blessing lore and trading but you eventually figure out what does what, unfortunately you are stuck with your choices unless you wait for the once a year fixskill, acquire a fixskill potion, or are within your first 30 days. Experience is earned by killing things, this is how 99% of experience in GS is earned. The creature you are fighting dies and you get experience and loot for doing that.
Statistics in Gemstone are handled in an even more limited way, you set them at character creation and hope to god you set them ok because after the first 30 days they are stuck like glue on your character, all is not hopeless if you failed this important task...your statistics grow over time, at a fixed rate depending on race and class, and you can shell out a boat load of silvers in the game or about a hundred bucks in the simucoin store and fix your statistics.
Dragonrealms replaces levels with Circles, however a circle is not a level exactly. A circle is recognition from your guild leader (your class is your guild) that you are proficient enough to rise up and learn new guild specific things. However you could have some skills way above what your circle requires, you could be a crazy dagger master who never circles up (this would take forever) but still has a small edged skill equal to people many circles above you. So skills are not circle dependent and are not raised by "leveling up" the circle. They are raised by performing the action that employs the skill...you want to be a better locksmith you have to pick locks, you want to know how to swim...get to swimming or climbing as they use the same skill. The downside to this is you don't get to carry skills with you like in GS, you can go 10 levels in GS without picking a box but as long as you keep putting points into that skill it levels up with your level. If you try than in DR you will have to go back and find boxes you can actually open to go any higher. The upside to this is that you can choose to make your character fight exactly how you wish, want to be a thrown brawler rogue? Go right ahead and throw things and brawl, if you also wish to learn daggers swing a dagger...obviously the more skills you add the slower you are going to raise them but you will end up with more variety in your combat styles. Skills are raised by doing things and have no hard relation to circles you also don't have to kill things to raise skills, just swinging the blade raises the skill regardless if you run or finish off that blood thirsty enemy.
One large benefit of this system is that you can down hunt with someone without destroying everything before they get to hit it, want to help out a low level person? Grab a crossbow or some other weapon you don't know and you also learn something while you do it.
Statistics in Dragonsrealm are handled by the player not the system, as you get more skills you gather points to spends on statistics and you choose which ones to raise, or to raise them all equally. This I think is a better system as I see no real down side to it other than you don't get the joy of wasting money on fix stat potions like you do in GS. Some races have penalties to raise some skills and bonuses to others, but for the most part they tend to even out so if you are trying to keep your statistics raising equally it should be balanced.
Death and Taxes
Death, you try to avoid it but it is going to happen unless you play the entire game in a tavern and no one invades that tavern, both games have invasions so your chances of becoming dead are high in both. Both games have done away with permanent death. Both games have systems to help with death Dragonrealm has favors Gemstone IV has deeds.
In Dragonrealm death has more meaning than in Gemstone, but you will find yourself at deaths door less, at least sub circle 30. Dragonrealm did away with one hit kills, the damage roll is not the same as the to hit roll so you are far more likely to get stunned, loose a limb, maybe catch on fire but not just outright die from one hit. That being said if you die without any favors you can not be resurrected you will decay, all your gear will fall on the ground, you will have severe deaths sting. With favors and the help of empaths and clerics (you need both) you can come away from death with only minor issues. Combat is longer in DR than GS, this is good as it gives you more time to raise skills, you normally have more time to react...but death without favors is far far worse than death without deeds if you do die.
Gemstone IV has deeds and recent deaths, deeds are bought with gems or silvers and you do not loose any gear when you die except anything you may have dropped (arrows) or if you got disarmed. The death sting in GS can be a pain if you die multiple times as it gets worse every time, but with a cleric you normally do not have to worry about it. If you do have to worry about it go over to the SIMUCOIN store and buy a death sting salve and boom all worries are gone. You will die more in Gemstone IV though, some creatures will just bash your head in with one hit, some will do it in two and time spent dead is not fun in either game. Both games cause you to loose experience when you die, and for the most part both games let well trained raisers of the dead help offset that.
Favors are bought with experience in Dragonrealm and that makes for a world of difference, there have been times in GS I have stockpiled 40 or so deeds up, this would be mind numbingly stupid in Dragonrealm because you would never learn any skills while you stockpiled favors, you would basically be stuck in advancement until you got over your stockpiling phase, I am sure people do it but it is definitely more involved than the silver/gem to deeds in GS.
Speaking of silvers, that is what you use for money in Gemstone IV, in Dragonrealm they have silvers and copper and bronze and gold and platinum. They also have three different types of minted coins and depending on what city you are in you may need a different type of coin than what you have on you. Lucky you they are happy to exchange your coins and take a percentage out to do it. There is also no written notes to move large sums of coins from point a to point b, I guess to cities of Dragonrealm do not trust each other enough to take paper like that. This means moving large sums of money for non premium members is an exercise in either hiring a moon mage or running very very fast and hoping you don't die...because if you do and you don't have favors you lose it all. Beg or hire a moon mage, you may lose a bit but its less than losing it all.
Roles and Plays
So, the real questions is how does all this come out into the game world how does it effect your combat and RP and existence in the game.
In Dragonrealm you are going to see a lot more titles on people, some of which don't make sense to outsiders, and I don't mean nonsensical Dhe'nar words but things like Wage Slave and Shadow, you are also going to be somewhat curtailed by guild choices in your rp, you are not going to be a Barbarian master of magic, it just ain't gonna happen Barbarians actively shrug off magic of all sorts without even trying. You are not going to be able to play a (high circle) thief who doesn't know how to steal, they just are not gonna respect you enough at the guild hall to promote you. What you can however expect is a good level of consistency, Paladins will be good if not necessarily "righteous" and necromancers will be hated, thankfully they have the ability to semi-hide as another profession. I like this, I prefer this to the flip side where Sorcerers are ignored and no one bats an eye at a demon walking the streets (and everyone wants to be a special snow flake pink fuzzy sorcerer)
Dragonrealm has more mechanics such as horses and boats, and rivers that can normally be swam if you don't like waiting for the ferry, you also get more choice in what you do as a character (in direct contradiction to the above paragraph), if you want to make a Drizzt like dual scimitar wielding pro archer ...nothing in the mechanics stops you from doing that, as opposed to Gemstone IV where that amount of weapon training simply isn't possible till post cap. But does all that equal better RP?
Maybe, maybe not
Dragonrealm is hindered by the freedom to never stop training, you will max out a skill but there is nothing to stop you from going to learn another skill while the previous one absorbs and in this you find people running around like mad dogs constantly pushing the limits trying to keep as many skills "mind locked" as possible. In Gemstone you have a flat experience maximum you can reach before you are forced to rest. This sounds bad but in reality it forces people into common "nodes" and promotes social interaction and..dare I say it..sometimes even RP. Everyone knows people in GSIV run auto scripts, but nothing like the level of those scripts in Dragonrealms.
Dragonrealm has no nodes, just popular gathering spots and even in those spots you are going to see almost everyone training, or listening to classes as you can teach each other skills in DR. There is a lot more scripting in general in DR than Gemstone IV, and in my opinion more people afk scripting or semi afk scripting as well. Every room with more than 6 people looks worse then Gemstone's Town Square on an invasion night with the amount of screen scroll going on. Imagine if everyone around you in GSIV started to learn fletching at the same time and you can probably imagine Dragonrealm. Luckily DR has a window in stormfront just for conversation otherwise you wouldn't know if anyone said anything if you blinked twice in a row, this is a great feature and Gemstone IV should have it as well.
Does that mean there is no RP in Dragonrealm? No, I made it a point to go out and find it and what I found was great. I was in a spontaneous conversation among bards talking about bardic history, and song crafting. I went to a horse training event at learned about horses, how some don't like certain races, about the history of horses and about the market for horse trading all in character. I saw new people being helped by old timers and thieves protecting the secrecy of the thieves guild. I even saw a bit of RP'd PvP because that happens in DR far more than GSIV, and some gladiator type combat events. Just like in Gemstone you have to go looking for the RP it isn't necessarily going to come wander over to where you are hunting goblins.
But in the end Dragonrealm has no Kenstrom like storyteller (though it is hardly fair to judge a game on one person who may be gone tomorrow from Gemstone IV), and there is always always always a ton of people running around scripting. So you end up with mechanics that both promote RP, as in rangers who are better out of town and STAY out of the town, and makes it harder, with scripting and screen scroll. Dragonrealm has more development on the larger scale, they just recently got DR 3.0 and soon will get DR 3.1 both of which probably show more actual changes than the last four years of minor Gemstone IV buffs and they just got a new capped hunting ground. On the flip side Gemstone IV has more gear-centric stuff to play around with....even if that is reserved for the very top tier players.
Conclusion
So in the end I liked DR, it isn't without faults, in fact there were dozens of times I thought the best game was neither DR or GS but would have been a combination of the two. DR's ranged firing with GS's gather verb, DR's amazing player trading and crafting systems with some of GS's slightly more advanced fluffy items. GS needs DR's conversation window in stormfront and DR's open and engaged GM community. DR could probably benefit from some of the mechanics in GS that force people to slow down every now and again.
I am concluding this post a week after I started it and in that time I have seen some great RP out of DR. Last night was a good example as I attended an in game event, entirely player run, that was ran as smooth as butter and was interesting. I then jumped over to a GS GM ran event where everyone was insulting some nobles and yelling at each other. That is probably the big difference between the two, Death means nothing in GS it is like playing Mario Brothers where not only will you die but at times you are expected to die and it leads to a sort of semi-god complex among the too powerful player base, and since the only way to learn in GS is to kill something almost every event revolves around killing things or will lead to killing things.
Dragonrealm offers a different. but maybe not better or worse, view of things. They are similar but not the same. Dragonrealms gets way too much of the developmental time from Simutronics based on the fact it has the exact same player base as GSIV. In the end if you are playing one and thinking of the other I say go for and in either case reserve judgement till you have reached level 10 or circle 10 because while you may not have a full understanding of the game, at least you will have come to terms with the mechanics by that point.