The real future of D&D

[Dannyalcatraz]

NERO is the larp I play in, in case you care to know, heck there was even an article about it in Dragon Magazine back in September '91, when Dragon was more than just a solely D&D magazine...

NERO was fun enough- I didn't actually LARP in it, but I did do some sparring and weapon design when I lived down in Austin in the early 1990s. I got involved in it maybe a month or 2 after the Dragon article, as it so happens.

I still have my weapons, but nobody to spar with. They're pretty tatty now, but I still enjoy reminiscing about how my longsword was perfectly balanced, how my spear had a crosspiece below its head, how my greatspear was effective against a 300lb professional bouncer using 2WF, how my finely-crafted battlaxe came out at the historical weight for such a weapon...and hit like it! And how much fun my interpretation of the Batlef was to use.

Good times, good times.

 

[Dausuul]

The augmented reality business is complete hogwash. The big problem faced by D&D players the world over, the single biggest limitation on the growth of the hobby, is finding other gamers to play with in a face-to-face game. And his idea of the technology that's going to revolutionize gaming is... a way to add 3D pictures to your face-to-face game?

Talk about your solution in search of a problem. Sheesh.

I do think we're going to see technology play a big role in the future of RPGs. But it isn't going to involve novelty programs for your smartphone. It's going to involve being able to play with your old college gaming buddies who live in California, Texas, Michigan, and Maine. WotC is onto this with the push for a virtual tabletop, although they seem to have underestimated the challenge involved.

As for having a computer handle the game rules and create pretty pictures: Yes, most likely, but it's going to be a slow transition. There are a lot of problems to solve, not least the challenge of avoiding a dramatic increase in DM prep time. Have you ever met a 3D level editor that didn't require many hours of work to put together a decent-looking scenario? Me neither. Would the typical DM want to put in that kind of effort every week for a single-use adventure? Not bloody likely.

And then the system has to have the flexibility to let the DM create scenarios on the fly, since players never do anything you expect them to. And it has to allow for house rules. And adjudication of cases when players want to do something beyond the scope of the rules. And so on, and on.

For the company that figures out to do all these things, there is money to be made. But so far as I know, nobody has yet figured them out. And "augmented reality" is not going to change that. Augmented reality looks to me like the Segway of gaming; a vast amount of technical ingenuity, and quite a lot of hype, lavished on a task that nobody needs done.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

First, I would imagine TTRPGs to be the last game to be easily played online, mainly because it is the last game to be easily played online. Any game where the rules are explicit are easy to get online. Scrabble, poker, settlers of catan, monopoly, etc are all played online right now. They might not be as tactilely rewarding, but thats a limitation of any online game.

What exactly are people playing rpgs on line using the likes of Maptools and OpenRPG doing right now? That said I think the killer app here would be something that allows one to sit in on an actual face to face game. So you can still attend even though you cannot be present because the wife is sick (or visa versa) and you need to babysit little Jimmy.

I'll also point out the author implicitly rejects the subscription model.

In that I think he is wrong, Pathfinder (in Adventure Paths) is a subscription model as is DDI and both seem to be going ok. I can see this expanding.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Be careful, it can still hear you.

Actually, Gleemax could have worked if it based itself more on myspace. And if it was a lot bigger. Most of the social-networking sites that make money on advertisements have to be really, really big. Both Myspace and Facebook have millions of people on them.

But hey, WotC tried a computer tools suite more than once. They just didn't get it right the first time.

I might have worked if it didn't had tons of usability and stability issues.

 

[malraux]

What exactly are people playing rpgs on line using the likes of Maptools and OpenRPG doing right now? That said I think the killer app here would be something that allows one to sit in on an actual face to face game. So you can still attend even though you cannot be present because the wife is sick (or visa versa) and you need to babysit little Jimmy.

I would argue that the easily qualifier gives me a hook out. It takes an investment of time to both learn and set up the VTTs out there right now. Prep time seems to be about double, from what I understand. That strikes me as not particularly easy.

 

[Dausuul]

I would argue that the easily qualifier gives me a hook out. It takes an investment of time to both learn and set up the VTTs out there right now. Prep time seems to be about double, from what I understand. That strikes me as not particularly easy.

Yeah, that's a killer right there. RPGs require too much prep as is. 4E has substantially reduced this, but it's still more work than a lot of people want to do. Anything that increases the amount of prep time is likely to be a nonstarter from a user adoption perspective.

 

[Derulbaskul]

The article that is the subject of this thread is not so good, but I really appreciated an earlier article which, inter alia, blames some of the decline of TTRPGs on the lacklustre adventures that have been published.

This ties into the prep time. Look at 4E: it is much easier to prepare for compared to 3E/3.5E but prepping your own adventures is almost the only way to go because the published stuff is rubbish.

OK, Thunderspire Labyrinth was quite good but Pyramid of Shadows was White Plume Mountain without the imagination. The one about the troll king was also quite good but the later ones just didn't cut it. And Scales of War is a collection of level-appropriate encounters loosely connected by something that may or may not be a plot.

There are still some talented adventure writers at WotC (Rich Baker and Chris Perkins) but they're not used enough. I would love to read Bill Slavicsek in his Ampersand column one day clearly stating that WotC has decided that it really needs a great adventure path/campaign to show off 4E and teach the next generation of DMs how to do it... and then actually follow it up with strong actions and stronger products that have been EDITED and playtested (or just contract it out to Paizo).

Or, as the article recalls, have the adventures repeatedly playtested in tournament situations before finally publishing them.

People look back on 1E so fondly because of the great adventures. That's not the case with 3.xE (with the obvious exception of Paizo) and I don't believe it can yet (or ever?) be said about 4E.

 

[Keefe the Thief]

If you can't say anything nice, then don't say anything at all. That's what the Ignore list is for.

 

[malraux]

People look back on 1E so fondly because of the great adventures. That's not the case with 3.xE (with the obvious exception of Paizo) and I don't believe it can yet (or ever?) be said about 4E.

Without wanting to be confrontational, how much of that is nostalgia? And how much of that is selectively remembering the good modules? 4e is really only a year old. It takes some time to find out what works.

 

[ggroy]

Without wanting to be confrontational, how much of that is nostalgia? And how much of that is selectively remembering the good modules? 4e is really only a year old. It takes some time to find out what works.

The one 1E AD&D adventure path which really stood out to me as outstanding at the time, was the giants-drow-demonweb pit series

G1-2-3 -> D1-2-3 -> Q1

I don't remember many other 1E adventure paths or modules which really stood out in my mind.

Some of this could be nostalgia.