The iPhone Will Kill D&D

[Malacoda]

Laptops might, if allowed at the table.

I have been running RPGs from my laptop for years now, and it's great. I would love some more well done apps that support running RPGs, though I am not inclined to go the route of the app making direct rolls and adjudications. Right now, though, PDFs and Excel help me out tremendously.

Most of my players have laptops as well, but in a lot of ways I am much less keen on that. Mostly, because players tend to get distracted by their laptop during their individual downtime.

I really do think that at some point, the reference-based nature of RPGs and the advancement of handheld computing are going to converge even more closely. I do think the current setup of RPGs being primarily played via physical books is going to go away in the future, in terms of typical usage. Then again, I see RPGs as a corporate product is going to die as well.

Screw iPhones. Overhyped boxes of crap.

Please use the doll to show the court where the bad iPhone touched you.

 

[Aeolius]

The minis and terrain. Still, as Microsoft continues to come out with big old toys that are table sized and touch screen... that too may change.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RljkmXP-JX4"]Giant Touch Screen[/ame]

I haven't DMed a face-to-face game of D&D since 1994. I have, however, run online games since 1995; both play-by-post and chat-based games. I might make the leap to a Virtual Tabletop with my next game, using MapTool and the OGL.

 

[Gorok]

Well there is a foldable screen eReader coming out this year, so screen size will slowly become less of a problem.

Is there a model number or link to this eReader? I have been looking at getting an eReader, and am not sure what this is.

Thanks!

 

[Silverblade The Ench]

Technology for "scroll-style" computer/phones is coming.
Ever seen the Val Kilmer "Mars" film? like that, for real. Be a few years though

So imagine 10+ years from now, you carry a tube, every one carries a tube, not a phone who's keys are too damn small to be any good (grr pet peeve of mine)...you unroll it for laptop with a keyboard and screen, nice BIG keys, not like phones now.
D-roll laptop concept rolls up into a scroll, wears like a purse | DVICE

It has USB...plug it into bigger video screens if wish.

Also with the advent of hyper-capacitors (think, super batteries), you have very long lived power for your portable items (including laser weapons when they get the capacity high enough, that'll please the Star Wars fans )
Electric double-layer capacitor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
EEStor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Also, OLED tchnology will allow super low power, super large screens, soft, flexible, rubber screens...instead of a battle mat, think VIDEO mat.
Dead serious.


In the FAR future, 50+ years, table top maybe defunct, it may be a sweet luxury like competition chess...we will go down the MMO route though, for D&D play.
let's face it, it sucks trying to get a gaming group together. I've ran groups online for years, because it's so hard getting to play around a real table.

People want MMO's because TV etc is moslty boring, it's much more fun to DO things than just watch.
However, it takes more chuzpah to pro-actively participate and espcially, to create and organize.

The DDI game table idea, eventually that kind of thing will morph into full 3D.
The D&D game 20+ years from now:
5 pals, in different countries, but nto too far seperated by time zones (trust me, time zone differences Do wreck games).
Each carries a "tube Laptop/phone". Doesn't matter where they are, break at work, out picknicking, at home, etc, they connect, checking via phone to see all is ok.

DM has a huge array of 3D sets items, and tools so he can show the party any scenario, ad not jsut dungeons: sandy wastes, frozen glaciers etc.
customizable UIs for each player. linked database of characters, DM can check PCs sheets on the fly. Similar ot what cna be done now, but better.
the Dm and/or players subsrcibe to DDI, downloading latest books as they are made, AND the art content tp play the game.


100+ years from now, truly immersive, DM's will be the "film directors" of their age. Most film and TV will have died. Who wants to watch TV when he cna BE in Icewind dale, not just as a isometric view, but in full, glorious, photoreal graphics.
Real time 3D rendering, photoreal, is coming already...

Photorealism isn't actually my thing, in 3D, this was just done as a test render when I was building an "Accelerator", took an hour or so. New render engines are coming out soon that give real time renders of this quality...photorelaism, video, not stills. (I did this with maxwell renderer, for those who're intereted, rather expensive, but I bought it in the alpha phase for 1/3rd the price, muhaha!)

Told folk this kind of stuff would come about 20 odd years ago, mayeb now they'll believe it

"*makes circle with thumb and index finger, holds it to his eye*
Be seeing you!

 

[kitsune9]

Thought I'd post this bit as something to "toss out there." On the old Necromancer boards, Clark was talking about how he'd like his daughter to play D&D as it is today (i.e. pen/paper).

But here's the thing... and I could be completely smoking the deep stuff.

D&D will not survive as a table top RPG.

It won't.

Now I'm not saying it'll go away or even become an online MMO.

But things like iPhone, Sony's eReader, Amazon's Kindle, and other phones will get to the point, along with software companies using the internet as the OS, where people will be using the DDI online from their phone, rolling their dice from their phone, and updating their characters in real time action, from their phone.

Not in the next five years or anything but ten? Twenty?

When you take the math away from the actual sitting of the rules and don't have to keep track of all the crazy stuff that players can do and how it impacts with everything around them, then yeah, the MMO experience of the rules being fully in the background will be realized.

And this was before the whole WoTC PDF thing happened.

Opinions?

I can see this point. A futurist article I read last year saw the cellphone as an integral device dedicated toward communications and eventually being the preferred choice for connecting to the Internet in addition to being your wallet (already been tested), along with a whole slew of other devices. I could conceive of a trend where software apps for the cellphone replaces tabletop gaming. Once battery technology gets to the point where they can double or triple battery life between charges, this will accelerate the trend.

Of course, I don't know if we'll see this in 5,10,20 years from now, if at all, but it's at least conceivable that it could happen.

 

[Umbran]

You could programatically do something like page 42 and have the software ask the DM for a DC and flavor text and any hard number benifits of success or detriments for failure. The software could still handle all the other stuff.

You are still locked into only the sorts of benefits and detriments the program's built to handle, and in the form it allows. If you house-rule anything, you're pretty much hosed.

Machines have a basic problem - the more flexible you make them, the more atrocious the UI becomes. Simple UI comes from a small number of simple, well-defined interactions. The closer you try to come to giving the user anything they could want, the more difficult it becomes to give it to them.

 

[Beginning of the End]

Someone above mentioned the ability to spread out 6 to 9 pieces of information in front of him and how a computer cant do that due to limited real estate on the screen. I''m not going to call call on that one because everyone's brain processes information differently. But I can tell you on OS X I can have multiple apps (with multiple pages open in each app) and jump to those pages relatively easily.

ALT-TAB isn't exactly super-science.

But it is literally impossible to display my 16" x 22" dungeon map, three different monster stat blocks, and a spell listing in the PHB simultaneously on my laptop. I can certainly flip between them very rapidly (although the 16" x 22" dungeon map simply cannot be displayed at that size), but I can absolutely guarantee you that no matter how quickly you can switch windows, my eyeballs move faster.

You can call on reality if you want to, but it's not going to change reality.

Some day display technology will supplant the display capability I can trivially achieve with paper today. But it hasn't happened yet.

Although I understand if you're not capable of multi-tasking and handling large fields of data.

DM has a huge array of 3D sets items, and tools so he can show the party any scenario, ad not jsut dungeons: sandy wastes, frozen glaciers etc.

Even if I grant you a toolset that makes it as easy to put together 3D terrains as it is to make a really simple map in Dundjinni, there are still some major drawbacks here:

(1) It's competing against a technology where I can think it, say it, and have it be playable.

(2) It's still limited to the elements somebody else created or that you're willing to invest considerable amounts of time developing.

(3) It still requires more prep time. (This is one of the biggest hurdles I find using digital tabletops today. Even if I'm using nothing more than black-and-white line maps, my prep time is still radically increased because I have to prep everything ahead of time.)

You're always running up against the novel-vs-film SFX conundrum. SFX technology today allows one guy sitting in his basement to effectively recreate effects that took hundreds of people and a budget of millions to create just a couple decades ago.

But a novelist can still churn out in five minutes a passage that would take a team of experts a year to duplicate on the big screen.

Technology will improve. The gap will continue to narrow. But the gap between what I can currently achieve with 5 minutes of narration and what you can achieve with 5 minutes of 2-D mapping and simplistic animation is vast. The gap between what I can achieve with 5 minutes of narration and what you can achieve with 5 minutes 3-D mapping and animation is even larger.

 

[Stormtalon]

See, to me, it's all a bit of a moot point. By the time we're able to functionally replace all the books, rules, etc we'll all be plugging directly into the 'net anyway, leading to the following situation:

Virtual people sitting around an exact virtual replica of someone's kitchen table, with a virtual vinyl battlemat unrolled, virtual physics-accurate dice being virtually thrown, virtual pizza and coke being consumed and with huge stacks of virtual rulebooks sitting in each person's virtual backpack for easy reference....

Until that day, well, ya can take my hardcopy books away from me when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.

And if you do that, I'll haunt you 'till you give 'em back!

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

See, to me, it's all a bit of a moot point. By the time we're able to functionally replace all the books, rules, etc we'll all be plugging directly into the 'net anyway

Betting against Moore's Law has been a losing proposition for virtual buggy whip manufacturers for a long time now.

People getting hung up on what the iPhone of 2008 can do aren't getting Joe's point and are getting wrapped up in his tongue in cheek title, I think.

Computer-aided RPGs are already here and it'll just get more pervasive. When I went to college, there were engineers who turned their noses up at CAD programs because they preferred to draw everything by hand and the intuitive understanding of a project imparted by drafting by hand. It's good to see those folks play RPGs and are on this thread. Sorry the resistance-to-CAD didn't work out for you guys, though.

 

[MadLordOfMilk]

I hear alot about getting younger players involved with RPG's and honestly most of the time i think it's just lip service for most. There are a few of you I think that honestly believe that it's a good thing and this is for you guys:

Do you really think the young people today who you pull into the fold are going to be limited by your standards of what gaming is? Most of them already understand that they can play a great game with their friends with out their friends actually being there. They'll be smart enough to understand that, Yes optimally having people in the room with you is best, but they definitely wont poo-poo the concept of using tech to facilitate their game as some of you here have done.

And with that and them, the game and how we play it will evolve.

From the perspective of a high school senior who just this year got all of his high school friends into D&D... technology is a useful tool, but still limited. Most uses of technology cause more headaches than their worth, though, particularly to a DM who just increased his prep time tenfold

My friend used to use his iPhone to roll dice, but eventually bought his own set. Why? It's more fun to roll actual dice than to hit a button and see a number. This guy doesn't buy anything if he can find a way to accomplish the same thing for free, but found it worthwhile to invest in dice. Technology really cannot even touch the experience of sitting at a table with your friends with everything physically there.

I will say, though, that laptops/computer screens can be a nice substitute for things you don't have with you (or can't afford to buy). Don't have a battlemat? Well, at least you can put something up on a screen for everyone to see. Even better if you have cables to connect it to the TV nearby! But it still takes more prep time than imagination. Forgot your dice? Load up the app on your iPhone. Missing a book? Open up the SRD/Compendium/PDF/whatever.