D&D 5E The Glimmering - NFT Heroes in a Blockchain Campaign?

[mamba]

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".

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]

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

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.

 

[Umbran]

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.

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.

 

[Umbran]

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.

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.

 

[robus]

“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.”

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!…)

 

[UngainlyTitan]

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.

And all of this, since it is centrally organised could be done on a regular database.

 

[mamba]

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.

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]

I seems like a dumb scam, is anything web 3.0 not a scam?

 

[Grendel_Khan]

Save the blockchain for stuff like tracking medical data.

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]

I seems like a dumb scam, is anything web 3.0 not a scam?

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.