[PC Gamer] D&D's upcoming virtual tabletop radiates a big-budget misunderstanding of what matters in role-playing games
[PC Gamer] D&D's upcoming virtual tabletop radiates a big-budget misunderstanding of what matters in role-playing games
Wizards of the Coast's bizarre fascination with flashy 3D graphics is a swing and a critical miss.
It is a complete misunderstanding of what TTRPG players want and need. This is mostly because they are so focused on profits instead of their player and creator community.
If they really cared about their community they would have just created an API to access the rules and allowed third parties to pay for access. Then we would all have the ability to move to various 3rd party services and keep access to the rules and supplements that you purchased. They would have also created an open market place for 3rd party vendors to sell new content on the same system. Those things serve the community.
If they had done that first and then decided to provide a virtual table top that also competed in the same marketplace, I'd be more OK with it. But that doesn't seem like that is what they are trying to do. They are building a walled garden. I've seen every walled garden fail under its own stupidity or weight, or both.
As a DM, I tinker with 2d maps for hours to get them "just right." I can't imagine the amount of extra effort it'll require to get 3d maps perfect.
i’d you’re gonna do a 3d map, dungeon alchemist is the way to go. that’s what i’ve been using. it’s pretty versatile and gets frequent content updates. nice looking maps in 2 or 3 dimensions.
That's been my biggest struggle as well. I can spend way too much time finding the right map for an encounter, only to never actually use it.
The other option is building the encounters around the map, but a lot of the maps I find don't 'inspire' me a whole lot, or aren't thematically relevant to what I want to run (this dwarf king's tomb looks cool, but I'd want at least a few other rooms in this dungeon, with other encounters. And my players are on a quest to kill a dragon, not a dwarf king)
I almost prefer a minimalistic tool; just a basic map that I can draw up quickly, basic tokens for enemies, and just flesh out my descriptions more.
This is precisely why I love Owlbear Rodeo. Just what I need, no unnecessary fluff or mechanics, super easy importing, website with no installs. I'm interested in the new version, but I'm not DMing an online game right now so no subscription from me yet.
I get the feeling their system will just take all the worst parts of video gaming - micro transactions, walled content, and bugs - and make D&D worse. I'm betting it will be a corporate profit first, community second approach.
What would be awesome is something that makes the table top experience easier and blends the best elements of VTT with in-person gaming. I'd love to a hybrid system in which physical tokens can interact with a digital table top.
"Community second"? That's very optimistic. Personally, I can't recall the last time WotC considered their community anything more than a source of backlash (and rightfully so, with their history).
Yes, because all my players have PCs with 3d acceleration and are wiling to install a multi-gigabyte client /s
Roll20 has basically supplanted all other VTTs simply by the virtue of being accessible though the browser. All you need for a session is a way to illustrate the scene, roll some dice, maybe have a character sheet upload feature, and that's it. This seems like a way to shove microtransactions down the user's throat and a whale milking machine. No thanks.
I feel like VTTs surged during the pandemic (not that it’s over) and now a lot of people went back to playing in person
Like... we switched to meeting on discord and I scribbled out updates to the 'table' in paint. none of the VTT's were flexible enough for the homebrews I was cooking up, though.
The more featured the vtt the more pain in the ass it was. In the end I first used a PowerPoint and had "shapes" that were like tokens. Then found a vtt that was basically that. Just literally a background, very simple tokens (circle with space for 2 letters) and a freehand pen.
Our group uses Roll20 character sheets on tablets around the table, they're really handy for managing all the buffs and math (Pathfinder 1e). Still rolling dice and using minis. That's the right level of digital stuff for me.
I tried virtual tabletops in 2020 but I just didn't enjoy it the same way. Little things that don't matter while you're sitting round a physical table with your friends, like waiting while other players take their turns in combat encounters, suddenly play out very differently when you're sitting at home on your own and can easily get distracted by your phone or TV without appearing rude. The players all just felt a lot less connected to what was going on in the game.
My group meets infrequently anyway and will often fill a whole day with the equivalent of multiple sessions when we do meet up, but when we played online during Covid we found it hard-going just getting through a two hour session.
We're all spread out across our city and getting together for in-person games was always a pain. Pre-pandemic we played maybe once a month on average, though our games usually ended up being at least 4-8 hours at a time. Since the pandemic when we switched over to online, we're playing weekly in a consistently 2hr game. I actually prefer how it is now, I like the smaller chunks of time and I like not having to always drive over to others' houses. It does take a bit more prep work for whomever is GMing, since alot of us tend towards battlemaps, but we've also done a bit of theatre of the mind as well.
I honestly don't care to go back to live games, maybe it'd be fine for one-off substitutions of our normal weekly games, but with kids it's a huge hassle to organize for those long games and honestly, I just don't know that I have the patience to hang around that long for games anymore. The other people I game with tend to be horrible about timing and will setup ridiculously long combat encounters, such that we're spending a full 6 hours on a combat session because they thought us going up against like 30 guys would be a quick fight. And of course the enemies NEVER run away, they will always fight to the last man for the vaguest of reasons.
I just wish there were better ways to find players for your in person game.
If you want 3d go https://menyr.nogstudio.com/, game master engine or talespire.
I like foundry. I also liked astral. I didn't like r20 much. Owlbears is OK. Playing in just a Mural is also more than fine.
The dnd vtts purpose is to be a walled garden that only plays dnd, ever, and keeps you playing dnd and putting microtransaction in front of you so you pay and play only dnd EVER
It’s interesting to me that we could already see the signs of some of this just based on what they defined to break the VTT-specific rules of the OGL update, which was anything that had effects that made it too video-game-y. Showed they fundamentally misunderstood what VTTs are for and do six months ago, and it seems that hasn’t changed.
Meanwhile I'm still playing DDO.