Status of D&D Game Table?

[Stoat]

You'd take a 2D image and place it on a token. The token looked like a 3D miniature base with the image on top of it. The token was "flat", IIRC.

Huh. I'd like to see what that looked like. IMO, because playing over a VTT requires sacrificing facial expression and body language (and to a some degree vocal tone and timbre), a good map and tokens are vital. My instinct is that putting a flat token into a 3D environment would take me too much out of the game.

Yes the talk about charging for miniatures was discussion of things that they were considering, among many other ideas. They never settled on any definitive type of "pricing." At that time even the pricing for DDI was up in the air. The talk of micro-transactions kept coming up, but there were issues like how many miniatures, could you share miniatures, could you trade miniatures, could you duplicate miniatures, etc. A lot of this was WotC spitballing ideas, and some took them as OMGWTFBBQ they are charging for virtual miniatures!!!

Frankly, I'd expect to pay for virtual minis, and I'd be surprised if WotC didn't charge for them. It takes time and talent to produce something like that, and time and talent cost money. The big questions for me would be price point and whether the DM could dupe one token to represent multiple opponents.

I think some of this is because they took the stance of not telling us anything. They probably should come out and tell us what they are doing and what they aren't. At the moment, everyone thinks they aren't doing anything because they are so quiet. We assume that they don't know what they are doing and don't want to say something that isn't true to us. Its a cursed if they do , cursed if they don't kind of thing. I wonder if they would lose any customers if they came out and said they aren't going to do a virtual game table? I doubt it. They probably lost those people already.

I'm almost positive that somebody from WotC flat out stated that the company wasn't currently working on a VTT about a year ago. Given how spectacularly they crashed and burned the first time, I'd be very, very surprised if they announced anything before it was ready to roll out.

 

[mudbunny]

I'm almost positive that somebody from WotC flat out stated that the company wasn't currently working on a VTT about a year ago. Given how spectacularly they crashed and burned the first time, I'd be very, very surprised if they announced anything before it was ready to roll out.

WotC has been pretty consistent over the past couple of years (since the release of the Character Builder) in saying that they would be working on one tool at a time, and would be announcing the tool that they were working on a couple of weeks before it would go "live".

 

[Festivus]

So I hadn't looked at Maptool in a while, and any frameworks, so I decided to take a look at what was out there last night. Turns out there is a framework where you can copy and paste from the CB and Compendium entries (although it's not perfect, it's pretty much what has been suggested above).

RPTools.net Forums • View topic - [D&D 4E] Rumble's D&D Combat Framework

I played with it for a little bit, while it has room for improvement it's a huge timesaver just to be able to copy and paste stat blocks.

 

[IronWolf]

So I hadn't looked at Maptool in a while, and any frameworks, so I decided to take a look at what was out there last night. Turns out there is a framework where you can copy and paste from the CB and Compendium entries (although it's not perfect, it's pretty much what has been suggested above).

RPTools.net Forums • View topic - [D&D 4E] Rumble's D&D Combat Framework

I played with it for a little bit, while it has room for improvement it's a huge timesaver just to be able to copy and paste stat blocks.

Yeah - there is something similar in the popular pathfinder framework as well.

 

[Festivus]

Yeah - there is something similar in the popular pathfinder framework as well.

Just curious, but what does that import from? Heroforge? Herolab?

 

[IronWolf]

Just curious, but what does that import from? Heroforge? Herolab?

I know of two stat block importers for the pathfinder stuff, it just works off a statblock as opposed to a saved character/monster file.

statblock2token

or

StatBlockImporter

which claims to be able to import from Pathfinder_OGC. I have not tested.

 

[Mark]

On a similar note, here's a new report on what's up with the Microsoft Surface -

  Hands on with Microsoft Surface & Catan by Purple Pawn