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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 5031774" data-attributes="member: 4720">Isn't that enough?  (Reference: Plasma TV)But actually, it can do all that stuff while acting as a point of social gathering.  A single computer is bad at that, which is why people gather through MMOs and other networks.A dining room table is already a gathering place.  Now that dining room table can play video, music, board games, act as an intuitive and ergonomic remote control for your media devices, and probably several dozen other things.Ye gods, I'm thinking about when my wife and a couple bridesmaids were picking out designs for the bridesmaid dresses... if they had a giant tabletop to move images around on instead of a computer monitor.... it would have been 10 times easier for everyone to see and comment and about 100 times more natural and ergonomic to do so.  And all you need for that is multiple browser windows and multitouch, which we already have.Not so.  The basic UI would be the hard part, and that wouldn't be much different for running OD&D, 3e, 4e, or any number of D&D cousins.Is attracting MMO players the point?  I think making the game easier and less fiddly to play is the point.Right now, fiddliness is a canalizing factor.  People who continue to play D&D, complicated board games, etc are people who like fiddling with lots of bits of plastic, metal, and wood.  They also like fiddling with numbers.  If only the DM has to do that, and everyone else just has to make decisions and maybe roll dice.... I could get at least a dozen people I know to play who currently won't go within 20 feet of D&D.Case in point, I know at least a half dozen people who love Settlers of Catan on Xbox who won't even contemplate pulling out the physical game.  We have a lot of selection bias here.  People who are here like board games and other tabletop games.  For a lot of people, that sort of thing is synonymous with playing Candyland with their nieces until they (blessedly) grow out of it or with awful marathon Monopoly games that never end.But you get them used to using a tabletop touch screen for all sorts of things and I bet you can suddenly get them playing all kinds of games on it.People who play because of the rules systems or the fiddly bits are not the target here.  People who like the genre but don't play because the experience is clunky to them are the target audience.There are a lot of those people.  80% of my friends are in that category.That's why they need to speed up their dice or enable rolling real ones.  That slow bouncing around the edge of the table will kill games from sheer clunkiness for both experienced gamers and new people. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /></blockquote>

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