New Digital Games Studio announced by the president of Wizards of the Coast

Interesting. I look forward to seeing what comes of this - some thrilling ideas, no doubt, but I'm keeping myself reserved so as not to be let down should those thrilling ideas be brought into less-than-thrilling existence.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

I want them to make a Dynasty Warriors-style game where I can run around and slaughter goblins and orcs by the hundreds or thousands.

 

[ArchfiendBobbie]

I'm kinda snickering at the thought of them running a Faerun game similar to Minecraft. Imagine spending five weeks raising cows just to make leather armor.

 

[SunGold]

I'd be thrilled with something like Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance.

I still love this game and fire up my PS2 once a year or so to play it.

 

[LordEntrails]

Which is fine for me, just as long as it's PDF or a similar from. I don't need not want to pay for the vtt features.

And you will have to wait 8-10 years for a PDF or something as piratable and flat, at least. No matter how much whining is done. In the meantime, others of us will enjoy the game with all the VTT features and at the same price as the retail printed products.

You guys crack me up. You refuse to adapt because whatever it is isn't presented in the way you think you want or because you can buy a print through Amazon at a discount and complain about price of a digital product and don't want to wait for a sale.

 

[darjr]

And you will have to wait 8-10 years for a PDF or something as piratable and flat, at least. No matter how much whining is done. In the meantime, others of us will enjoy the game with all the VTT features and at the same price as the retail printed products.

You guys crack me up. You refuse to adapt because whatever it is isn't presented in the way you think you want or because you can buy a print through Amazon at a discount and complain about price of a digital product and don't want to wait for a sale.

No need to be hostile. I do think the vtt is wonderful, just not for me.

 

[LordEntrails]

No need to be hostile. I do think the vtt is wonderful, just not for me.

Don't mean to come across as hostile, then or now.

I just see posts like yours every few weeks. Seems like its the same things, the same complaints, the same unrealistic wants. Sure, everyone is entitled to their wishes, but most people who express the views you did don't also seem to accept they are not adding anything useful to the discussion.

 

[L R Ballard]

The license was fine. We used it for years without any issues.

The tough part was the online tools. If you couldn't look it up in the online tools or if it didn't work with the official character builder, it was near impossible to sell stuff to people. Player options, in particular, just wouldn't sell, because the character builder only supported official material. A culture developed whereby pretty much everybody used the online CB to make their characters. WotC didn't allow third party material on it.

If WotC creates a dependency on official online tools again, the DMsG publishers will have the same problem so we third party publishers had. So will those of us who produce third party stuff outside then DMsG, of course.

Third party content packs? That would be cool, but they didn't do that last time no matter how much we said we wanted it.

I recall when Wizards let Fluid, and then Code Monkey, develop its 3e character generation tools.

https://index.rpg.net/display-entry.phtml?mainid=11971&editionid=13427

In anticipation of the Digital Initiative/Gleemax, Wizards then let the Code Monkey license expire. I was looking for a tool to use not only to create characters for the sessions I DMed but also to track combats.

DM Genie proved useful for tracking spell effects and durations, conditions, and the initiative order whether I played or DMed at the table.

http://dmgenie.com/

However, in 2009, Janik stopped supporting it and shut down the forums.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?260343-Sad-Times-DM-Genie-Closed-Down

An app. that creates characters and tracks combat would be sweet, but it needs to allow for house rules and other advanced data entry in the same way tools like DM Genie did.

 

[daplunk]

I think that one thing I'd love for D&D would be an app that is expressly designed to be a companion to the APs. So you could buy a thing on it to activate, say, Storm King's Thunder, and it will not only have all the combats pre-built as combat encounters with initiative tracking and whatnot, but will also add all of the monsters and magic items to an internal database, and even have story notes and images ready to go for the campaign, so you could use it as a crib sheet and easily show the NPC images to the players. That, I think, would genuinely be a valuable addition to the D&D experience.

Mate what you just described is exactly what Realm Works is. They just released the ability to export and import content. What this means is right now I have a file that contains the entire Storm King's Thunder module. The story, maps (with pins on them for content connected to that location), all the NPCs and monsters with Hero Lab portfolios built in (you click a button in Realm Works and the monster loads into the Hero Lab combat manager). You can send any pictures in it (maps, npcs, items, monsters) to the player screen letting you players see what you are talking about all very easily.

The bets bit is you can change the module, use the content, connect it to other content. For example, here's a video showing the map of Faerun with pins for all the locations in Storm King's Thunder. Now i can click a location and find out about what's there! This is now super useful for any campaign i run in this area. I can export it and import it into a new Realm and use it over and over again.

Now while I have this file, i cant give it out obviously for licensing issues. So all that's basically required at this point in time is a license between Lone Wolf and WOTC and the tool you described becomes reality. I'm pretty damn positive those discussions have either occurred or will be occurring. It would be stupid for Lone Wolf not to seek a license.

Check out my YouTube Channel to see the application being used. Its a bloody useful piece of software.

 

[Charles Rampant]

The only official source of the AP in a digital form at Fantasy Grounds and Roll20 and they sell them for the same official price that WoTC does (FG runs regular sales).

So what was the price you wanted and why would WoTC sell at a discount?

I want a companion app to the books, not a replacement to the books. Why on earth would I want to pay the same price again in order to get the same content, but electronic? I want something that will improve the book, not make it redundant. How hard is that to understand?

 

[Ricochet]

Scary item from a former data-guy at MTGO here on Blues News in these comments. Comment #18
https://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&boardid=1&threadid=177664

It seems there are a lot of cracks in those walls.