Great post
My take-away is the small modules need to be electronic distribution only.
My 13 year old has been playing with her friends every week when they do early release, so now our 9 year old wants to play. So I’m having to go figure out the 5e rules. Seems far less complicated than I remember 2e being. I was impressed by the younger one this afternoon. She wanted to help come up with a story, and decided it should involve a dragon. Then she wanted it to have a name, so she somehow remembered the handbook had Dragonborn, and that they list example names for the races, so she went looking for a name there.
Now, when you say 2e, are you saying Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd edition, or Pathfinder 2nd Edition?
Both have been referenced in this thread at several points.
AD&D 2e.
The furry inspired Ardlings are being removed for now. Might come back later.
“The real miss was context for people,” said D&D lead rules designer Jeremy Crawford in a video released today by Wizards of the Coast. “There are a lot of fans of the Ardling, but the Ardlings’ time has not yet come. The Ardling is moving out of the playtest for now, and maybe in some future year, we will return.” Crawford added.
I LOVE DREAD lol I love it
Translation: way too many furries showed up to the play tests and scared away all the other players.
If a pun is good enough for Piers Anthony, it’s good enough for me!
Minecraft monsters usable in D&D.
https://www.dndbeyond.com/claim/source/minecraft-creatures-monstrous-compendium
And here’s that first-look at the virtual tabletop they’re going to want everyone to subscribe to:
Looks pretty nifty. Would be great for remote play.
The one thing that does bother me a bit is everyone is staring at their screens the whole time. I wonder if this cuts down a bit on player interaction, or if they just filmed the video to emphasize the tool and interaction between players would be more like normal tabletop in real-life usage.
I’m also wondering what you can import to the tool. As someone that’s dabbled with Blender, it would be pretty nifty if it let you import 3D models from something like Blender. I can imagine an DM going all in and building some really neat 3D environments. And for the players, even relative beginners could whip up a pretty nifty personalized 3D character model with something Iike Daz3D if the tool will allow importing.
I suspect they want to sell you those models, so I would assume no.
Same. Looks good for remote stuff, but if I’m at a gaming table with real people, put the dang screens away! Be present!
Exactly. In the video, I am trying to figure out why they have their laptops sitting ON TOP of an actual map with physical figures and dice and books laying around… “Look at all the things we are not using!”
Online play looks nice (at least for combat) - but it seems sad to have everyone glued to their laptops in person.
I’m wondering the opposite, why they don’t just show the screens instead so we can see what the actual remote playing experience is. I guess it would look too boring. This is why I hate game trailers and prefer actual let’s plays
I agree. Does not fit into what I want as a tabletop game, but would be great as a tool for online gaming.
I do hope the dice are much faster than the current DnDBeyond app (which are too slow to use)
I like they mention we can customize things as DMs, but I wonder how all of this will be priced.
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As someone who runs and plays games exclusively online for over a decade and has used every VTT in existence, the VTT looks terrible for homebrew. It could work if you get to buy fully realized 3d environments for official adventures. But the difference of barrier to entry between 2d mapping and 3d world building is gigantic. So far all 3d VTT are a niche for exactly that reason. If they cannot solve that all the fancy tech is for naught.
All the VTT’s I’ve tried, required some sort of mapmaking to make it a good way to play online, and I’ve done this quite a lot.
If the 3D mapmaking is as easy as say, Foundry (Which isn’t that easy, actually), it should be no issue. I’ve seen a few 3D mapmaking software on steam that does this - allows maps to be more or less painted.
While I have no doubt WotC wants to monetize this, they aren’t stupid - they want this to be as easy as possible, path of least resistance and all that.
I especially like what they said about playing on phone, computer or console - that speaks to me of a browserbased system and probably means its not that intensinve in terms of powerneed.
I guess we’ll see, later this year - more competition is better, also in this specific arena!
Things like Dungeon Alchemist that can procedurally generate 3d Environments are a very different beast than putting together a custom 3d landscape. DA and the like are usually still 2d but with 3d assets. It has no height.
I love Foundry and setting up a 2d Map in Foundry with walls etc is a few minutes. Making the map myself too with Dungeondraft takes a bit longer of course. Still, it is something I can do. And not only me but a lot of more talented people can. Fewer can do 3d work. It reminds me of the jump from NWN1 to NWN2. I had some big mods and ran actual campaigns in NWN1 because it was easy and fast to set up. NWN2 left me and many others behind because the toolset required a totally different skill. And I forsee the same problem here. I can get thousands of maps from 2d Artists from a handful of Patreons. I am sceptical even a D&D VTT will shift that to usable 3d assets. I will be happy to be proven wrong, however :-)