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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 4861523" data-attributes="member: 58197">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.</blockquote>

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