Tonguez
A suffusion of yellow
Stephen Radney-McFarland has been attached as the lead designer since the company started NFTs Are Here to Ruin Dungeons & Dragons
D&D 5E The Glimmering - NFT Heroes in a Blockchain Campaign?
- Thread starter Retreater
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mamba
Hero
From that article:
“Gripnr will build a system for recording game progress on the Polygon blockchain. Players will log into the system and will play an adventure under the supervision of a Gripnr-certified Game Master. After each game session is over, the outcome will be logged on-chain, putting data back onto each NFT”
“To sum up: Players will buy a pre-generated D&D character, play with it in pre-generated adventures, level it up on the blockchain, and then sell it. It sounds like easy money, right? You’ll get paid to play your favorite game.”
“As PCs gain levels in-game, Gripnr asserts that their associated NFTs will become more valuable, and when they are re-sold, the owner and any creatives who contributed to the associated portrait will receive a cut of the sale price.”
This is even stupider than I initially thought… certified DM, selling char (I expected items), even thinking anyone wants to buy your char…
Open to fraud as well, because the items apparently ultimately are under DM control, leading to
“there’s incentive for players and game masters to abuse gameplay—or even just fake a game, inputting values onto the NFT without actually playing—in order to artificially inflate the value of their NFT-PCs.
Comer is aware of the issue, and apologetic. He doesn’t quite know how to prevent fraud yet,”
I thought their game would be in charge of that, because if anyone can just assign themselves whatever items they want this is all completely pointless (and worthless). Maybe solve that one before you even start building anything
And then there also is still this, the article rightfully points out that the OGL covers rules and monsters well, but classes very little
“the OGL only allows certain elements and mechanics of the D&D system, not the whole game, and Gripnr has stated that it will “provide better options for 5e play” which players have been “clamoring” for.”
“Gripnr will build a system for recording game progress on the Polygon blockchain. Players will log into the system and will play an adventure under the supervision of a Gripnr-certified Game Master. After each game session is over, the outcome will be logged on-chain, putting data back onto each NFT”
“To sum up: Players will buy a pre-generated D&D character, play with it in pre-generated adventures, level it up on the blockchain, and then sell it. It sounds like easy money, right? You’ll get paid to play your favorite game.”
“As PCs gain levels in-game, Gripnr asserts that their associated NFTs will become more valuable, and when they are re-sold, the owner and any creatives who contributed to the associated portrait will receive a cut of the sale price.”
This is even stupider than I initially thought… certified DM, selling char (I expected items), even thinking anyone wants to buy your char…
Open to fraud as well, because the items apparently ultimately are under DM control, leading to
“there’s incentive for players and game masters to abuse gameplay—or even just fake a game, inputting values onto the NFT without actually playing—in order to artificially inflate the value of their NFT-PCs.
Comer is aware of the issue, and apologetic. He doesn’t quite know how to prevent fraud yet,”
I thought their game would be in charge of that, because if anyone can just assign themselves whatever items they want this is all completely pointless (and worthless). Maybe solve that one before you even start building anything
And then there also is still this, the article rightfully points out that the OGL covers rules and monsters well, but classes very little
“the OGL only allows certain elements and mechanics of the D&D system, not the whole game, and Gripnr has stated that it will “provide better options for 5e play” which players have been “clamoring” for.”
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Sorcerers Apprentice
Hero
The blockchain does nothing to deal with the main way to cheat in this kind of shared game: there's no good way to verify that what gets entered into the ledger actually reflects what happened during the game. If a group and DM colludes to run a sham session just to report that character X got the special item his build depends on, there's no real way to stop that.
humble minion
Legend
At one stage they were literally talking about paying people to watch recordings of other peoples games to police this sort of thing, which is one of the dumbest ideas imaginable, and exposes the nakedness of the Gripnr emperor pretty comprehensively.
EzekielRaiden
Legend
A character sheet on D&D Beyond contains actual data. At present, the vast majority of NFTs, whatever they may be, do not contain data, but rather, URLs or other things which point to data. There are exceptions, but they are just that, exceptions.
Every PDF you have purchased from DrivethruRPG is, like the previous, actual data. If DrivethruRPG were to go under, you might not be able to get that data back, but you do, in fact, actually have that data. With NFTs, the one (and only) thing you "own" is, effectively, an ID number which contains a very, very small data file. That very small data file generally contains a set of text, such as a URL, which points to something else.
NFTs are scammy as hell because, in general, they sell themselves as actual ownership of something--an artwork, a data file, a piece of music, what-have-you--but in truth the NFT you buy isn't even a certificate by itself. It's just a chunk of code, which has a URL inside it. If that URL expires, or gets changed, you're screwed. If someone else finds that URL and shares it, you most certainly don't have the ability to stop them from doing so. And if someone takes the data, such as a piece of art, and uses it in ways you don't like, you absolutely do not have any kind of rights regarding the work, even if the work is something like commissioned art.
Like the vast majority of artificial scarcity technology, it's a quirky and idiosyncratic idea in search of a use-case, not a revolutionary change in human existence that the normies are too stupid to adopt. That doesn't mean that artificial scarcity cannot ever have a use case. But you should be as suspicious of any proposed use as you would of snake oil, especially if someone is making grand, society-transforming or fortune-making promises.
It is likely that some kind of real, practical, meaningful application for blockchains will exist someday. It may even be the case that in certain niche ways, NFTs could be useful (perhaps as a credentialing system, or a way to cut down on paperwork by automating certain kinds of bookkeeping.) But in the vast majority of cases, artificial scarcity tech is a solution desperately hunting for a problem.
EzekielRaiden
Legend
Even better, when I tried to look up information on this, my bad-link blocking tools prevented me from actually looking at the Gripnr site directly, because it was identified as a suspicious data-harvesting thing.
Really inspires confidence when reference links from journalist websites about the product are marked as suspicious.
EzekielRaiden
Legend
The problem is, this would require each NFT to actually contain all relevant data inside it, which at present almost all NFTs do not.
Blockchain stuff could theoretically do it, but you still end up with a question of cheating, as said above. As with almost all questions of security, it's only as strong as its weakest link, and it's only effective as a deterrent, not as an unassailable defense. Blockchain would prevent manipulation of the data on the character sheet itself--you would know exactly how the sheet changed over time. So you take the manipulation away from the sheet and onto the people who modify the sheet.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
A lot of cryptobros have been learning, the hard way, that a consensus-backed "trust-free" distributed ledger doesn't actually mean you don't have to worry about trust anymore. The algorithm can't protect you from fraud.
Twiggly the Gnome
Legend
Yeah, that's both worse and better than I expected. I figured that the stuff that got added to to the character would have to be "mined".
mamba
Hero
that is not that different to overcome. Usually this is not done because storing large amounts of data on the chain is costly, so you store a link instead of a 20 MB picture.
The D&D data is not that large that storing the actual data should be a problem
mamba
Hero
Thinking about this a bit more… according to the article it should be minted, I assume what this boils down to is that the game does not control whether you legitimately got the item or cheated your way to it, because that is under the control of the certified DM.
The game placed it in the adventure, the boss got killed and your char received the item based on the DM’s input, outside the game’s control
Still, that the game has ultimately no control over whether your char is legitimate destroys the whole value proposition of the blockchain (whether you personally consider this a value in the first place is a separate issue…)
EzekielRaiden
Legend
I mean...most character sheets include a picture. Even if they don't, you usually want a PDF so you can print it easily, and that's gonna eat a lot of the space that you would normally need for other things. An entirely blank official WotC form-fillable PDF is already 348 KB.
Indeed, the consensus-basis instead enables different modes of fraud - if a sufficiently sized group of those doing the computation really wants a thing to be different, it will become different. The question is whether this game would be worth the monetary backing to make that happen.
There is actually a way, but it requires references to other bits of chain.
So, you have a character. Presumably this character is used in a digital context for play, on a VTT or the like. If, on the blockchain, you have not just the character, but a checksum verifying the VTT code used for play, and some validation code on the adventure used, you can get some confidence that the character was altered in something like normal play.
If, for some reason, the source of the play becomes untrustworthy, you can find the character untrustworthy by association.
But, honestly, that's all a pain in the butt. TTRPG play should not take itself that seriously.
Sounds like they’re trying to apply the economic model from some online games where people play long enough to buy massive spaceships and then sell them to folks who want to have big powerful ships right off the bat.
I don’t believe that model will apply.
However… just spitballing, but this could be a really fun way to create legendary items from a campaign. For example say you had a sword that became imbued with powers over the course of your long campaign and then you could list it at the end on some legendary artifact database for others to get and learn its story. (of course there’s no money in it - that‘s the stupid part) but I could see something like that as a community sourced asset database.
But probably way more work than it’s worth
but I’m sure there’s some dumb VC I could convince to invest with that elevator pitch (leaving out the no money part of course!…)
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And all of this, since it is centrally organised could be done on a regular database.
mamba
Hero
Going by the pics they have there it will be relatively small, but maybe they do not even include it in thre chain anyway and just a link. I was more thinking stats than picture, for char and items.
As to creating a PDF, you can use the stats to create a PDF, you do not need to save the PDF in the chain.
Mind of tempest
(he/him)
I seems like a dumb scam, is anything web 3.0 not a scam?
Grendel_Khan
Hero
Blockchain isn't even good for that. Unless you want have to patient data be re-identifiable, you'd have to go with a centralized, private blockchain, and private blockchains have none of the advantages of blockchain tech, which by nature is entirely about the advantages of public, decentralized databases.
Please, don't believe the hype. We spent four months straight researching and interview experts about this stuff at my job. Crypto is the only "valid" use of blockchain tech, and we all know how awesome and not-scammy crypto is.
Grendel_Khan
Hero
There are tech bros who'd love to bend your ear about the fabulous, non-scam potential of web3. It's all bogus. Ownership of the web by its users comes from the same well-intentioned place as Bitcoin did (if you're being very charitable toward its creator or creators) but the only applications for it are gross.
