D&D (2024) Review of 1D &D VTT

[UngainlyTitan]

Man if I can hover over a spell and immediately see valid targets in an area, that would be invaluable. Spell placement is always a drag in VTTs. Moving those templates around and then debating whether or not someone is hit or behind cover, it would be great to just have potential targets light up as you move the focus and select spell placement fast.

Assuming it worked as advertised and was able to adjudicate cover.

 

[tetrasodium]

Man if I can hover over a spell and immediately see valid targets in an area, that would be invaluable. Spell placement is always a drag in VTTs. Moving those templates around and then debating whether or not someone is hit or behind cover, it would be great to just have potential targets light up as you move the focus and select spell placement fast.

That's one of those nice in theory things where the overhead required from the gm running the game quickly becomes unreasonable to the point of making grapple flow charts seem downright reasonable and streamlined or you just have an ever growing list of common edge cases that break things. Sure you can avoid those pitfalls by funneling the gameplay into something like one of those choose your own adventure books aimed at kids, but you aren't playing d&d at that point because you've moved to Press F to pay respects but for combat.

The gm's role as referee can't be stripped away without damaging the gameplay. Having run d&d with a tabletop display hooked to a vtt I can even provide details on the experience that comes with players being able to do what you describe & the endless quantum "what if" "how about" "well if I had known" "no more like" action results are god awful for everyone. You might not see every player engage in it, but it makes things very difficult for the gm

 

[tetrasodium]

no idea whether they are, for a while they ‘embraced’ open source by attempting to squeeze out actual open source with their stuff that is at best open in name only.

I don’t trust MS one bit, they were absolutely shady then, I don’t think they actually have changed all that much


seems pretty premature, the VTT is still in alpha


see above, the thing is in alpha, so let’s see what it looks like in the end.

It supporting RAW is the minimum requirement, they did say you can ‘override’ the automation though, which should cover the DM needs part


you very much overrate the IT workers say in this, unless by high level IT you are talking about the CIO

I agree with the DM having more of a say in this though, certainly more than an IT worker has, at any level.

I’d assume that WotC knows this too.


yeah, too early to care. It’s an alpha and a highly curated test. Wake me when we have had a fully released version for 6 to 12 months. Until then it is much too early to care


should be relatively easy to fix


to me they speak more to this being an alpha


they are mostly a 3d VTT, I would not mind uvtt support, but that sounds like a minor quibble (in that most users would not use it) and something they can implement in a few weeks if they want to


they have time to do that, I don’t see why them releasing a video with that in a few months would not be sufficient

Most of your post has little to do with the fact that wotc needs to start making efforts in pitching their vtt to the needs of GMs or the fact that we keep seeing things that suggest there is a rather notable disregard for the GM in what we have see.

You can mod Skyrim till the end of time and will never turn it into a tbs or flightsim. It's not sufficient to "put out a video in a few months" because the gm has different needs from a vtt than players have and there seems to be a focus on only one of those sets of needs.

 

[mamba]

Most of your post has little to do with the fact that wotc needs to start making efforts in pitching their vtt to the needs of GMs or the fact that we keep seeing things that suggest there is a rather notable disregard for the GM in what we have see.

most of my post says that the vtt is in alpha and based on what they have said I am not seeing a disregard for DMs you so desperately want to be there

You can mod Skyrim till the end of time and will never turn it into a tbs or flightsim. It's not sufficient to "put out a video in a few months" because the gm has different needs from a vtt than players have and there seems to be a focus on only one of those sets of needs.

If the VTT becomes available in about a year, a video in say 3 months is certainly not too late for anything

I do not understand the urgency to declare anything at all yet, I'd rather wait and see what we actually get first.

 

[tetrasodium]

most of my post says that the vtt is in alpha and based on what they have said I am not seeing a disregard for DMs you so desperately want to be there


If the VTT becomes available in about a year, a video in say 3 months is certainly not too late for anything

I do not understand the urgency to declare anything at all yet, I'd rather wait and see what we actually get first.

There are two rather large ones in the blog post alone. There was no way for the gm to review a player's character sheet.. it doesn't take much actual play experience before a gm says "let me see your character sheet" or similar to one of their players yet the vtt failed that fairly low bar. A second major red flag was made more glaring because they were playing in a premade highly curated test map yet the fancy to players 3d camera movement was able to reveal hidden areas a player should not have been able to see, there's a reason video games tend to call doing that a wall hack.

They could be forgiven as mere alpha issues if there were not previous indications of exclusive player focus but those two mentioned in the blog post are pretty low level functionality things. You still have issues like 3d models being much more difficult for the gm to add to than 2d assets or the announce video having someone from the vtt team (presumably) talking about how it will have a really powerful tool for the gm while showing a clip of a swooping player facing animation of an encounter rather than literally anything at all about the really powerful tool.

Waiting for late stage development to begin thinking about the gm as someone with needs that are at least equal in priority to the desires of players is too late in the design process simply because some of those needs are almost certain to conflict and may not be possible to meet without extensive rework of previously created parts of the vtt at the owte stage you are suggesting is an ok point to begin. Wotc should be making efforts to entice GMs as early as possible with how their vtt will help GMs because the resulting feedback is more likely to avoid bone headed problems and things that would turn out to be glaring omissions In retrospect.

 

[mamba]

There are two rather large ones in the blog post alone. There was no way for the gm to review a player's character sheet.. it doesn't take much actual play experience before a gm says "let me see your character sheet" or similar to one of their players yet the vtt failed that fairly low bar. A second major red flag was made more glaring because they were playing in a premade highly curated test map yet the fancy to players 3d camera movement was able to reveal hidden areas a player should not have been able to see, there's a reason video games tend to call doing that a wall hack.

yeah, I am not concerned about either, not sure how often I have to repeat that it is in alpha

They could be forgiven as mere alpha issues if there were not previous indications of exclusive player focus but those two mentioned in the blog post are pretty low level functionality things.

they are also not that hard to fix / add, it is in alpha, that by definition means not feature complete

You still have issues like 3d models being much more difficult for the gm to add to than 2d assets

sure, but that is a fact of using 3d, I see no actual issue here. Either you use 3d, or you don't. It is more a matter of having enough assets (and maybe prefabs) available

or the announce video having someone from the vtt team (presumably) talking about how it will have a really powerful tool for the gm while showing a clip of a swooping player facing animation of an encounter rather than literally anything at all about the really powerful tool.

maybe there is a reason why that person said will have rather than does have... repeat after me, the vtt is in alpha

Waiting for late stage development to begin thinking about the gm

At no point did I say they should not be thinking about the DM yet, and from what WotC says, they are thinking about the DM too. The point is that they are not showing it yet, and that can be explained

Wotc should be making efforts to entice GMs as early as possible with how their vtt will help GMs because the resulting feedback is more likely to avoid bone headed problems and things that would turn out to be glaring omissions In retrospect.

WotC has internal testing, it sounds like there will be a (semi?) open beta at some point. As far as I can tell you are simply impatient and jumping to conclusions based on stuff they have talked about but not shown yet, which you then twist into 'will not be available' instead of taking it as the 'will become available later' it is at face value

 

[Clint_L]

I really, really wanna see how the map builder assets work. Will it be like modular terrain, where you have sets of pieces that you can combine to build sets? Or will it be something else?

My initial assumption was that it would work something like virtual Dwarven Forge pieces, and they would sell you various sets of pieces. But it might be nothing like that.

 

[CommodoreKong]

I wonder how many groups actually run a 100% RAW D&D game. I got a feeling a good number of DMs have at least a few homebrew rules which might turn a lot of people away.

 

[Clint_L]

I wonder how many groups actually run a 100% RAW D&D game. I got a feeling a good number of DMs have at least a few homebrew rules which might turn a lot of people away.

This really depends on how flexible the VTT is. For example, if they keep it super basic so that it functions like virtual terrain tiles, miniatures, and spell templates, then it won’t limit homebrew any more than the analog versions of those things do.

I suspect that whatever they come up with will have an override that lets you just put a miniature where you want, etc. On DnDBeyond, for example, you can override everything on a character sheet - if you want to give a character a tunnelling speed of 1,000,000, you can.

The trick will be incorporating more complicated overrides onto the VTT, so you will probably just have to go with approximations in some cases. But, again, that’s no different than using physical media. There’s nothing to prevent you supplementing the VTT with theatre of the mind - I do that all the time even when I have an elaborate set built.

 

[tetrasodium]

yeah, I am not concerned about either, not sure how often I have to repeat that it is in alpha


they are also not that hard to fix / add, it is in alpha, that by definition means not feature complete


sure, but that is a fact of using 3d, I see no actual issue here. Either you use 3d, or you don't. It is more a matter of having enough assets available


maybe there is a reason why that person said will have rather than does have... repeat after me, the vtt is in alpha


At no point did I say they should not be thinking about the DM yet, and from what WotC says, they are thinking about the DM too. The point is that they are not showing it yet, and that can be explained


WotC has internal testing, it sounds like there will be a (semi?) open beta at some point. As far as I can tell you are simply impatient and jumping to conclusions based on stuff they have talked about but not shown yet, which you then twist into 'will not be available' instead of taking it as the 'will become available later' it is at face value

You know what is required to build something like a powerful tool that will be built? A list made up of one or (probably) more items in a feature set that needs to be built. If they don't have such a list it's a serious problem. If they do have such a list of gm features it's something that should have been talked about or even partially relayed in text rather than showing a camera swoop of a feature for a totally different set of users (players).

Don't forget while accusing me of being impatient that wotc is not known for being a software developer and that we did previously get some leaks about long term plans with the vtt specifically and those leaks were not exactly gm friendly.

All of that combined makes it more difficult to pass off the low level gm support problems mentioned in the review as mere alpha problems because we aren't getting anything else at all.