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!

 

[UngainlyTitan]

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.

Personally, I think, one of the key things will be "how easy is it to setup maps?" and/or how cheap and flexible are the prefabs.

 

[Osgood]

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.

I'm more or less in the same boat. I have a ton of minis and terrain--easily tens of thousands of dollars of investment over the years--even so, it's never quite enough and it's getting tiresome. I still find myself saying "these kobolds are actually veggepygmies" or "pretend this cavern is actually ice." Even if I had enough money to buy a bunch of extra minis and terrain, I don't know where I would put it--at least in a way I can easily access it when I need it.

So I can really see the advantages of something like this. I didn't love playing online during the pandemic, but I can see using this in person (plus we still go online when someone gets sick or we get a snow storm). Plus, some in my group will be moving out of state for retirement in ten or so years, and transitioning to a VTT would make sense.

I'm really interested in hearing about:
Pricing: How much will it all cost? I'm not as fearful of microtransactions as some are, but personally I'd rather pay for a whole adventure or monster manual's worth of assets at a time--I just want to know how much we are talking about. At a guess, I'll bet it's cheaper than what I spend now on physical minis and terrain.

System Requirements: I use a mid-range laptop at the table, and most of my players are just using tablets. There's a TV in the game room that I can hook up to my laptop, but we'd need to do a little rearranging to make it work. If everyone needs top of the line hardware, I'd say it's a pretty big roadblock.

Ease of Use: This is probably the most important factor. Laying out the terrain for a game can be pretty time consuming, but once it's done it's done. But if we need a change in mid game, forget it! There's a definite advantage to being able to switch scenes between a bunch of setups I'd prepped ahead of time (and if I'm running and adventure and everything's already prepped, even better). But if it takes hours to put together a dungeon or village or whatever, I just don't see it. Granted, there will probably be a bunch of ready made environments for sale, but if every village looks identical, it will get old fast.

 

[Oofta]

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.

I think the tool can be successful if they do two things well. First, a lot of people are visual and generations have grown up with video games. WotC already has the 2D market with the Maps program, this is for people who want something a little more visually evocative.

Second is how easy it is to put together decent maps. I got decent at Roll20 during COVID days, but it could take hours to make even a relatively simple map. I would personally never use something like this to map out something as extensive as entire video game levels, but that's not really the goal. I couldn't imagine how long that would take in Roll20, if it could even handle it. At most you're going to be doing a simple outdoor scene, a city street, a handful of rooms. Also depends on how easy it is to import an existing map and tweak it for your particular needs.

I would never play a game on Maps (or Roll20) if I were playing in person. Even on games I play with mixed local and remote players I have a camera pointed at our table. But this? I could see using it once in a while for special battles. Whether I actually do or not is a whole other story.

EDIT: P.S. some of the stuttering on the screen may just be caused by them taking videos of a monitor which has issues with refresh rate.

 

[Malmuria]

The vibe shift when everyone starts just looking at their laptops and struggling with managing the VTT didn't make me want to use it at my table. Maybe for online play though? Live play, it seems like it just adds more complexity than you need.

I noticed that too. The fact that these are all excellent actors, and we see them do TotM play really well in their other games, just made the shift all the more jarring. To constantly shift to what was going on their screen made them inhabit their characters less, I felt. It might have been less a issue if they were using tablets rather than full on laptops.

 

[Burnside]

I noticed that too. The fact that these are all excellent actors, and we see them do TotM play really well in their other games, just made the shift all the more jarring. To constantly shift to what was going on their screen made them inhabit their characters less, I felt. It might have been less a issue if they were using tablets rather than full on laptops.

I understand that for demo purposes it's more dynamic to show people using the new VTT while playing together at the table in the same physical space, but I think WotC knows that realistically almost nobody will actually do that - the target audience here has to be online players who are in distant physical locations from each other.

 

[Oofta]

I understand that for demo purposes it's more dynamic to show people using the new VTT while playing together at the table in the same physical space, but I think WotC knows that realistically almost nobody will actually do that - the target audience here has to be online players who are in distant physical locations from each other.

I wouldn't necessarily limit it to remote only. I recently got done with a Ravenloft game played in person using Maps. I wouldn't have done it that way because I generally do exploration using TotM, but it was a decent alternative for our DM who wanted that experience of going through Castle Ravenloft, which is huge. The map came with the mod.

As far as switching back and forth, that was mostly an issue with a streamed game, in our Ravenloft game moving minis around wasn't really much different than looking at the map on the table.

 

[OB1]

Just as a point of comparison, here are the minimum system requirements for BG3, I'd be shocked if Sigil was heavier than this at the recommended level and I'd imagine will likely be quite a bit lighter at the mimimum, since Sigil won't have nearly as much going on in the background as BG3 and doesn't have full character animations, etc.

• Windows Minimum:
  • Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
  • OS: Windows 10 64-bit
  • Processor: Intel I5 4690 / AMD FX 8350
  • Memory: 8 GB RAM
  • Graphics: Nvidia GTX 970 / RX 480 (4GB+ of VRAM)
  • DirectX: Version 11
  • Storage: 150 GB available space
  • Additional Notes: SSD required
• Mac Minimum:
  • OS: macOS 12 or newer
  • Processor: Apple M1
  • Memory: 8 GB RAM
  • Graphics: Apple M1
  • Storage: 150 GB available space

 

[EthanSental]

I wouldn't necessarily limit it to remote only. I recently got done with a Ravenloft game played in person using Maps. I wouldn't have done it that way because I generally do exploration using TotM, but it was a decent alternative for our DM who wanted that experience of going through Castle Ravenloft, which is huge. The map came with the mod.

As far as switching back and forth, that was mostly an issue with a streamed game, in our Ravenloft game moving minis around wasn't really much different than looking at the map on the table.

Agreed, I’ve got a 42” tv laying on my gaming table that I can either do a virtual map on the tv and drop physical minis on the tv we move around or lay my chessex map or other mats down on top of the tv so it does have its uses for face to face games, some table more than other will find it appealing. I’m sure we will work it in for adventures but not be our only set piece encounter type program.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

One thing WotC said they would have is a community area to share Sigil creations. So you can download prefabs of other people’s creations they shared.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

I understand that for demo purposes it's more dynamic to show people using the new VTT while playing together at the table in the same physical space, but I think WotC knows that realistically almost nobody will actually do that - the target audience here has to be online players who are in distant physical locations from each other.

There are a fair number who do that, honestly if Sigil is really good for playing and works on light hardware, I could see myself getting some cheap laptops for some of my players just for it’s usage.