D&D 5E Dungeonscape no more?


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lkj

Hero
From following the dungeonscape twitter, it looked like they felt like they were about to release the iOS version for weeks. In fact, my recollection is that they thought they just had to get to an agreement on the pricing structure with WotC. More than once they thought they'd be announcing the pricing for in app purchases and they never did.

It strikes me that WotC may have decided they weren't happy with how trapdoor wanted to price things. Or perhaps they worried about how they wanted to break up the material. Or maybe they got jumpy about potential piracy. Hard to say. But disagreement about how to charge would have been enough to cause a critical impasse. Trapdoor was funding the development themselves. They were going to offer the app for free. I presume they were going to make their money by taking a cut of in-app purchases.

In that scenario, if you can't agree on price or on the cut, that's pretty much the end of the line.

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Dausuul

Legend
Because, in my opinion, it was awful. I'd get annoyed about every 30 seconds while trying to use it. Good riddance to Silverlight and the slow, bloated platform it created.
A-freakin-men.

It's not just Silverlight, though. IMO, the approach taken by both WotC and Trapdoor on D&D technologies is fundamentally wrongheaded. Both of them tried to program in all the rules of the game; to have the computer not just keep track of your character/campaign data, but also apply the rules to that data. For example, the character generator walks you through the process of creating a character, making sure you only take skills you're entitled to, feats you're allowed, et cetera, et cetera. And then it crunches all the numbers for you as well.

Why is this wrongheaded? Three reasons:

  • The software is much more complex, because it has to have the entire rulebook programmed into it.
  • Any time new rules come out, or old rules are revised, you have to overhaul the software to accommodate the changes.
  • And the real killer: D&D is played differently at every table. People make house rules. People make homebrewed stuff. The more your application "knows" about the rules, the less useful it is to anyone who doesn't play the game strictly by RAW. (And in 5E with its focus on rulings over rules, even playing strictly by RAW doesn't guarantee that a group will interpret the rules the same way the app designers do.)
For my money, electronic D&D tools should take a giant step away from trying to apply the rules. Instead, they should focus on providing easy access to the data (spells, skills, feats, class abilities, and so forth), and letting you quickly pull that data together in a useful way. I'm envisioning a tool where you start with a blank character sheet. You enter "Elf" in the Race section, and a little window pops up: "Import Race Abilities?" with options "High Elf," "Wild Elf," "Drow Elf," and "Do Not Import." If you click on one of the race options, it pulls in all the special abilities for your selected race, and puts them in the appropriate box on your sheet. Then you can go in and modify them however you like. If you click "Do Not Import," it just leaves everything like it is.

A tool like this would be vastly easier to build and maintain, and it would also do a far better job of supporting house rules and homebrewed options. There would still be a few areas where you'd do automatic calculation (e.g., skill bonuses); but even there, the option should exist to turn off autocalc and enter the numbers by hand.
 
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Astrosicebear

First Post
Is this news -- From the Fantasy Grounds website ultimate licence product description page.

* Included Rulesets: D&D 3.5E, D&D 4E, D&D 5E and the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game

https://www.fantasygrounds.com/store/product.xcp?id=SWK03


This is from their features page:

A 3.5E fantasy ruleset accompanies the product but the appearance and function can be fully customized to accommodate almost every RPG system. A Full license is needed to create customizations; the host computer automatically distributes the custom ruleset to the player clients. Community created rulesets are available for 4E and many other commonly used rules systems.
 

Mirtek

Hero
just when I thought WOTC was moving into a new age. Can't wait to read the reasoning behind this move.
Given the timing it seems to me as if certain milestones were not met. Being burned by being to generous and extending deadlines during the company failing with the 4e tools, it seems they learned their lesson and ended the partnership instead of letting history repeat itself
 


Well, an app that just uses the Basic rules isn't going to cut it for most folks, now will it?

Consider engineering an app that handles the entire ruleset, including all updates and supplements in the future, Do so without making your data too easy to pirate (so, say, plain-text files of the rules is right out). Do so on multiple platforms. Do so that it can be used by a few tens of thousands of people without falling over....

There is a bit of a difference, architecturally, between what a couple folks can do, for a small population of app buyers, and what a corporation can do for a flagship product. The support expectations of the customers will be entirely different.

Two programmers can make an app. If WotC does it, it has to be more like a piece of enterprise-software.

It seems as though the app uses the Basic rules as to try and avoid any sort of legal notice. From what I've seen and used, it's very expandable, and I've already added, modified, and indexed several of my own monsters as well as the basic rules.

My point is this: this app is very functional and looks good. It was (apparently) made by one person in his free time. So it strikes me as very odd that a team of 2-5 professional programmers working on this for 20ish hours or more a week wouldn't be able to make a similar but much more expansive product.
 

DMZ2112

Chaotic Looseleaf
No, not really. A search doesn't show you every time the author thinks the word was used. It shows you all of them.

This genuinely made me chuckle, but most indices are generated using a search function these days. While this was absolutely a concern at one time there's no reason it should still be so.

EDIT: In fairness, where human error still screws up indices is in determining which terms are important enough to include. That is a decision that is still very poorly made in many circles.
 
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Wolfskin

Explorer
Whatever your feelings on Dungeonscape and its usefulness to you personally, I think this cancellation is another black eye for our hobby and its most recognizable game.
Maybe I'm too optimistic, but to me this looks like a setback. I risk to say we'll definitely get an official online character generator and compendium at some time. I doubt the line will crash and burn for a temporary lack of digital tools- most gamers I know IRL play strictly without them.
 

delericho

Legend
It's not just Silverlight, though. IMO, the approach taken by both WotC and Trapdoor on D&D technologies is fundamentally wrongheaded. Both of them tried to program in all the rules of the game; to have the computer not just keep track of your character/campaign data, but also apply the rules to that data.

I obviously can't speak for anyone else, but if I'm using a Character Builder app, I expect it to do all that heavy lifting for me. I don't want to have to reference the generation method in order to know how many feats to choose, which prerequisites apply, and so forth.

Now, it's certainly the case that it would be better if the tool could be configured to apply house rules, but the nature of software necessarily limits what can be done here (and didn't the 4e app provide some limited functionality of this sort?). In any case, if I have to choose between a tool that does the heavy lifting for me but 'locks' me to RAW versus one that doesn't have the lock but doesn't do the work, then I'll take the 'lock' thanks.

YMMV, of course.
 

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