Project Sigil Now You Can Watch WotC's 3D VTT 'Project Sigil' In Action!

You can now watch the unveiling and demo of the upcoming 'Project Sigil' -- WotC's new 3D virtual tabletop -- as it was used during the official Dungeons & Dragons live event at Gen Con.

The event featured Aabria Iyengar as the Dungeon Master, Anjali Bhimani as Miri Yannen, Samantha Bèart as Karlach, Brennan Lee Mulligan as Dorbin Kragstone, and Neil Newbon as Astarion.

This is the first time the public has gotten a look at the software outside of small demos at previous conventions. The VTT demo is in the second half of the show.

UPDATE: THE VTT IS USED FROM 1:16 IN THE VIDEO!

 

[Zaukrie]

I think the player was putting down a template we just couldn’t see it on our end. An effect was left on the ground were it hit as well.

I would hope we can all see the templates going forward ( I wonder, were we seeing a view that an observer would see, not player or DM?)

 

[Clint_L]

*Pricing:This is linked to ease of use. There may be some very cool things you can buy, including full adventures. But for how much? Will terrain and mini’s be for sale? In packs? If you get the MM on Beyond do you get minis for it? (When you buy a rule book in Roll 20 you get tokens for it).

Yeah, I'm also really interested to see the pricing.

Buying actual miniatures and terrain tiles is hideously expensive and, if you paint your own, hideously labour intensive (it's a labour I love, so not complaining, just reporting the facts). And then, as was pointed out earlier, there's the storage. My allocated garage space is already bursting at the seams, and when the latest Dwarven Forge KS arrives this fall my spouse might have a coronary.

So there are tons of advantages to going digital if you aren't a plastic addict like me. But what will people pay for a digital miniature as opposed to a physical one?

I'm assuming that another massive advantage will be replication. Do you know how many fricken kobolds I have, in case I want to run an encounter against a swarm of them?*** But if you have, say, the kobold digital miniature you can presumably put out 20 of them or whatever you need. So that raises the value of them substantially.

Edit: one more giant advantage: customization. Presumably players will be able to purchase a digital version of their character just as they want them to appear. You can have that done as a physical miniature by Hero Forge for $50-100 depending on options, and there's a market for that. So for how much for a digital mini that you can link to your DnDBeyond character sheet? (Also, will the VTT support digital miniatures created by 3PP like Hero Forge, the way Foundry does?)

Let's say they offer Vecna: Eve of Ruin as an adventure pack, including all the tiles and miniatures you need to build every encounter space in the book. What would you pay for that? $100? More? Less?

I can tell you right now that it would cost many thousands of dollars to build it all with physical miniatures and terrain. So what will people see as a reasonable price to have all that digitally?

And, crucially for me: will I love the digital tabletop and see all my current stuff as a giant waste of time, space, and money?

***around 50 or so.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

From this little preview, the VTT looks good and seems to have the kind of functionality that is handy to have without limiting DM or player control.

But success will depend on:

*System requirements: I made the joke about not crashing, but what kind of setup does this take?

*Ease of use: There is a clear tradeoff among VTTs between chromey features and looks on the one hand and ease of use, especially set up, on the other. Even more if you are DIYing it. Can this give you both??

*Pricing:This is linked to ease of use. There may be some very cool things you can buy, including full adventures. But for how much? Will terrain and mini’s be for sale? In packs? If you get the MM on Beyond do you get minis for it? (When you buy a rule book in Roll 20 you get tokens for it).

So we will see, but so far not bad.

From what they said they want it to run on Phones and Consoles and it’s going to be its own app. So it should not be too system intensive. It’s going to be mostly static so I can see it being fairly easy to run.

They said there will be a large number of prefabricated options that can be taken apart and freely edited. From the sound of things you could make an inn from scratch, put down a prefab inn, or put down a prefab inn and then edit it into something original.

They said the current plan is free to play with restrictions. Being a D&D Beyond Subscriber unlocking stuff, but they also have not decided on their final monetization plans yet. They want to check about that stuff over the beta.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

On Digital Minis I saw it pointed out on a different forum that there looks to be two Gold Dragon minis. As the image of one from the twitter threads during the panel looks different from the Pre Order Mini.


This one looks different from the pre order version that is also used in the live play video

 

[Burnside]

My first impression of this 3D VTT is that I don't really want it. I'm not seeing it do anything technically that Roll20 can't do; it's visually much prettier of course, but I feel like the juice isn't gonna be worth the squeeze if it has demanding system requirements and won't run in-browser. For the direction it's going in, I actually think it would be better if it was MORE like a video game, with fully animated tokens. For me it's landing in an uneasy middle distance between VTT and video game and it seems like it would be better, having gone as far as it's already going, to just go all the way. I also need to see how much of a hassle it is to set things up on the DM side.

In terms of the actual play game, I always find it a little off-putting how much of Aabria Iyengar's DM style involves belittling her players for no reason that I can see.

The reveal around 1:28 is admittedly pretty awesome.

 

[Zaukrie]

The ability to import minis would be massive, given how many you can get for a decent price.

 

[EthanSental]

The ability to import minis would be massive, given how many you can get for a decent price.

True….i like the ability to bring hero forge minis into Talespire so I hope this is allowed at some point as well.

 

[The Soloist]

If I was 15 again I would be all over this, it looks cool.

I spent the last 24 years building terrain and painting miniatures to play wargames and rpgs. I was sad to see all my work gather dust during Covid. That is when I started soloing intensively. Not using vtt or 3d anytime soon. But I’m sure many of my fellow solo enthusiasts will want to play in 3D.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

True….i like the ability to bring hero forge minis into Talespire so I hope this is allowed at some point as well.

I doubt it will have this (at least at launch), but there is going to be a character creator and depending on how robust that is, our options for minis could be very high.

 

[Clint_L]

My first impression of this 3D VTT is that I don't really want it. I'm not seeing it do anything technically that Roll20 can't do; it's visually much prettier of course, but I feel like the juice isn't gonna be worth the squeeze if it has demanding system requirements and won't run in-browser. For the direction it's going in, I actually think it would be better if it was MORE like a video game, with fully animated tokens. For me it's landing in an uneasy middle distance between VTT and video game and it seems like it would be better, having gone as far as it's already going, to just go all the way. I also need to see how much of a hassle it is to set things up on the DM side.

This is the key. A few years ago I spent the better part of a weekend trying to get Roll20 to do what I want and then gave up. On the other hand, the DnDBeyond 2d map feature took about 5 minutes to figure out and I use it all the time, but it's very basic.

So for me to go for this, it would have to be MUCH more intuitive than Roll20, and work well on my MacBook.