5E: Last Gasp of Theater of Mind D&D? (aka D&D Killed by Windows 10!)

[Mercurius]

So I just watched this. While the implications are much much larger than RPGs, I thought it was worth talking about how this is going to impact tabletop RPGs. Imagine the DM being able to conjure up holograms of monsters and the encounter scene. Imagine the players being able to custom build a hologram of their PC. All cool stuff, but....there goes theater of mind, there goes the imagination.

We knew something like this was coming, but it seems so soon. I would guess that there are going to be hold-outs to the traditional form of D&D, but the big question is how many? I suppose the good thing about all of this is that HoloLens technology could be integrated at different levels. Maybe some games only use it during combat, while others use it for every situation. Either way, times they are a changin'.

What do you think? How widely will this sort of tech be adopted in the RPG world? Will you adopt it? Is it a good or bad thing, or just a thing? Etc. Discuss.

 

[Rune]

Too much prep-work for design for too little pay-off will always favor theater of the mind, as far as I'm concerned.

 

[Janx]

I think a key thing is the cost of a HoloLens.

Windows 10 is software. It doesn't ship with a HoloLens in every box.

So you have to buy it. To get you top buy it, it HAS to solve at least one problem for you.

For example, if you love MineCraft (and 18 million people do), if HoloLens supports it on launch day, you'll likely plunk down the money (if it's a reasonable cost obviously).

But if HoloLens (like Kinect), doesn't really have any killer apps out, nobody's going to buy it (well not literally nobody). Without enough volume, nobody's going to write killer apps for it.

Which in turn means nobody's gonna write RPGLens, the engine that uses HoloLens to play an RPG.

 

[DM Howard]

Meh. People were saying that the surface tables were going to revolutionize the way RPGs are played and that hasn't happened. It will all come down to price and accessibility, of course, but I don't see this going anywhere as far as RPGs are concerned.

 

[Jhaelen]

Ah, you're talking about _that_.

I think, this is actually rather lame. This is very likely to be a dead end. It's not remotely as interesting as VR goggles like the Oculus.

 

[Cristian Andreu]

I think it will still be too impractical and require far too much work. I wouldn't be surprised to see "image packs" for sale/open source in the near future, but I doubt we'll be seeing comprehensive, quick, and easy-to-implement holoimagery in the short or mid term to the point that the DM could just turn on his tablet and fill the room with fully detailed stuff of his game.

Now, if someone does develop that stuff soon, making it easy enough, I'd say it will help the Theatre of the Mind, rather than the other way around. It all depends on how you use it, after all; it doesn't have to be restricted to simulating combat, but also used to show landscapes, recreate the feeling of seeing a horrible monster, providing ambient changes that fit the scene, etc.

Just imagine being able to make a blizzard cover the room while adding snowstorm sounds in the back when carrying the story through a frozen peak, or filling it with holographic fire and brimstone while travelling through a volcanic cave.

That'd be absolutely fantastic and seriously help with immersion.

 

[TarionzCousin]

Regardless of how much it impacts gaming, if at all, it is a cool new technology.

 

[Janx]

Ah, you're talking about _that_.

I think, this is actually rather lame. This is very likely to be a dead end. It's not remotely as interesting as VR goggles like the Oculus.

Huh?

I don't have an Occulus or a HoloLens, but they have a pretty large overlap of features from what I can tell. I don't see how Occulus is heaploads "more interesting" than HoloLens when they both do the same basic thing.

Point of fact, HoloLens has a 1up on Occulus, it has a opaque/transparent effect that lets it take over your entire view, or integrate with the surrounding environment.

 

[Celebrim]

Sooner or latter, yes, I think how we game is going to transform.

But mere visual breakthroughs aren't going to be enough. The big problem in every traditional RPG is for the DM to be able to communicate what he sees in his head to the players. Right now, there just is no better way of doing that than words. Every DM can use words and while words can be time consuming to prep, they aren't nearly as time consuming as visual arts. Even a tool for displaying visual information as simple and crude as Minecraft requires hours to prepare what you could prepare in words in a relatively short time and with far less expertise. An engine like Neverwinter Nights while cool, just never could replace shared imagination as a gaming environment because it takes too much to prep and loses so much in the translation.

The real breakthroughs are going to be in semi-intelligent systems for helping people visualize stuff. It will probably start out in some other field of endeavor and be adapted to gaming.

 

[Janx]

True enough celebrim.

In a table top RPG, it is trivial for the GM to say, "you see a pub" and instantly the mental image of a pub loads up in each player's brain. The differences in each vision between players aren't usually important, and they'll resolve the differences when needed as the GM clarifies things when a player tries to do something.

I'd have to build for 20 minutes or so to make a nice looking Pub in Minecraft.

Or fumble around an image site, looking for a picture or floorplan to use on a virtual table top.

Words act as quite efficient placeholders for objects.

I think perhaps people spend too much thought on the idea of converting tabletop RPG to the next tech. That's not how it has happened thus far.

D&D inspired video games, which in turn inspired computer RPGs. But the Computer RPGs don't play like a tabletop RPG. They are of course more visually rich, but limited in player choices.

VR Goggles will lead to HoloDeck-like game play some day. It probably won't have an active GM (but it could). But the experience will be more like a really nice version of Skyrim than D&D at Celebrim's house.

And a likely reason for that is the time and effort it takes to assemble content. Even with the best tools, it won't be fast enough for the players ability to zoom around the map looking and touching everything. Just like they do in Skyrim, and unlike that they do at the table when then walk into that imaginary pub.