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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.
So it's roll20 and MythWeavers - but only for 5e?
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providing a rules compendium, character builder, digital character sheets, and more
I'm hoping it will have a free tier, at least for players (I would be OK with only the DM having to pay, but only a very small fee.) If it's too expensive, we'll all just go back to the free options floating around. PCGen for charater sheets and overlays, d20 SRD for the rules, classes, monsters and items, and our imaginations for the rest.
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"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."
This has been possible for almost 2 decades, there are several programs and websites dedicated to running games over the internet. Wizards of the Coast already directly support Fantasy Grounds and Roll20.
Watched the introduction movie and think it looks nice, but... more and more I think phones and tablets don't belong at the D&D table. It simply distracts too much. With several friends, I play D&D 4th edition and some of them use tablets for the character sheet. But in many cases they use the tablet to do other stuff, show funny movies, etc. I know we all don't take D&D extremely serious, it's just part of an evening hanging out, but it's one of the main causes we don't achieve much in our campaign. Often we set rules like 'tablets only for the character sheet'. That works for several evenings and allows us to really move forward in our adventure, but after that, the browsing etc slowly comes back.
Because of the arrival of the 5th edition, I fear the 4th edition online character builder will soon be taken offline. A few months ago, I decided to go back to only use the books. The only thing I really missed was an easy way to deal with the power cards. I made myself an Excel template to solve that. Extra bonus: no more need to cut out all the individual power cards. I hated that after printing out a new version of my character sheet. And although it's less digital, reading and browsing through all the D&D books feels more nerdy. :D
It doesn't have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
if you bothered to read the article instead of just the headline you would have seen that they were talking about digital tools to play the pen and paper game, with a GM and Players, not an MMO or computer game that some programmer in Silicone Valley cooked up... yeah sure you have the forge in NWN to greate your own missions, but you're still limited to the assets available to you that the programmers give you.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
The social contact....
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.
I played d&d many years ago, more or less when it started, and since lurking on Twitch recently started watching some sessions to see how the old girl's been getting on. It rather bummed me out, tbh. It feels exactly like I remember, except for endlessly elaborate rule addendums. *Exactly*.
I realize the DM drives the experience but I've watched quite a few different sessions, many of which are clearly popular, and I can't imagine wanting to consume my already limited free time like that. The instant that combat starts, that's 30+ minutes of your life you've lost forever. One of the reasons I've enjoyed licensed rpg computer games is that the tedious rolling and chart lookups is managed automatically. Relying on wetware for this simply escapes me. Useful software for this would literally auto-manage the process apart from quick input from the player, but this seems more like a database reference, replacing a book. Basically, you get to do a search. Call of Cthulhu seems âless about stats and charts, more about story, and seems more appealing.
I mean, whatever turns your crank. Grognards still exist, too, and while not for me, that's cool. It just seems like what the game needs is to manage the tedious crap.
How is this news for nerds? What has D&D got to do with nerds? I'm angry! I want my Slashdot back.
/ sarcasm
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Worth every damn penny I paid for that product plus add-ons. It's by FAR the best character builder and resource tool that one can use. Their iPad app makes using those characters and playing them a breeze. It's stupidly simple, and it's a single price that gives you everything you need. If you can afford an IOS device you can afford the pittance that is HeroLab to 100% manage your character creation. I haven't used the rest of the tools that HeroLab offers so I can't speak to them.
WOTC's approach is going to trickle out after a year, no updates, and then vanish into the mists of time. Can you even imagine having WOTC keep a company around long enough with the upgrade cycles of Android and IOS? Never happen. Capcom has a better track record at updates than WOTC.
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