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Dungeons and Dragons Goes Digital (theregister.co.uk)
An anonymous reader writes: Seems like a new digital Dungeons and Dragons will soon be offered. It's not a game in the Baldur's Gate style but rather seems to be about using apps to complement the experience. I wonder if it includes some kind of VOIP facility so the D&D session can be established without everyone being in the same room. From The Register: "The game's publisher, Wizards of the Coast, calls its new effort 'D&D Beyond,' describes it as 'a digital toolset for use with the Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition rules' and has given the service the tagline 'Play with advantage.' Wizards' canned statement says the service will 'take D&D players beyond pen and paper, providing a rules compendium, character builder, digital character sheets, and more -- all populated with official D&D content.' We're also told the service 'aims to make game management easier for both players and Dungeon Masters by providing high-quality tools available on any device.' That repetition of the 'any device' point point suggests this will be a web-based effort, rather than an app. The service will debut in 'summer,' presumably northern hemisphere summer so that folks who play D&D will spend up big on their breaks from school or university." You can watch the promo video here.
Likely in principle, but given their earlier digital efforts it will likely be:
-Locked in
-Full of bugs
-Stopped after a while.
What do you call Neverwinter? How about DDO? Or hey, let's take a blast from the past, what do you call Hillfar or Poolrad?
D&D Goes Digital? Who writes these fucking things?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
For so many reasons.
First and foremost, how long do you play your characters? If the answer is "maybe a year or two, tops", it may be ok. If you have characters that date back ten and more years, you might want to consider that your phone or iPod most likely won't last that long. Can you transfer that character sheet at all? What if your phone gets stolen or breaks? Are you prepared to lose a character you've been playing for years and grew attached to because technology croaks?
And then there's that other aspect. The character sheets that are so old that the sheet itself is already at +2 for the thousands of times you erased HPs and rewrote them, the different pencils used that tell the story and tell even more of the time it took to gain your treasures and equipment and yes, even the various stains the sheet accumulates over the years, where the level of a character can already be deduced by the state the char sheet is in.
I don't really think I'd want to replace that with a phone app. Not to mention that people fiddling with their phone during RPG night are already annoying as fuck anyway.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.