Roll20's terms are more generous than DMsGuild, and again, by no means plagiarism. I'm also presuming the program is popular among user creators?
I guess? In any case, my point wasn't that WotC would offer the same terms as Roll20, it's that game marketplaces are really not notable (though in practice almost everything will be free). Checking some others:
The new video game format has been rolled out, as well as 6e. The new DMG, MM. and PHB are out. DDB accounts can be imported into the video game. This is all as advertised. Now, suppose as the DM, you want your Ankheg to have extra HP, and a Grappling ability. Pretty sure the DM can add the HP to the monster easily enough. But the Grappling ability? Sorry, we don't have a video graphic for an Ankheg grappling a char.
Do you really need a graphic for that? Have the Ankheg do a Str check (or however they end up doing grapple) when they attack; if it succeeds, apply the "grappled" condition to the player's character. Since every creature in the game has the ability to grapple, however they represent that in the VTT will be fine.
for me, I found the VTT to be the most exciting part of the D&D Direct, hands down. we can't be sure yet just how well it'll function in action, especially regarding the freedoms that come with the nature of D&D. (my players are menaces to society and make very strange decisions.) but it seems promising, and since it's been years since I've played at an actual table in-person, it looks like it'll be a very fun new method for my parties. I have hopes for it
The real test for the VTT will be how well it simulates when the PCs inevitably burn down a building/neighborhood/entire town. Will the fire spread on its own, or will the DM have to keep adding it square by square?
The real test for the VTT will be how well it simulates when the PCs inevitably burn down a building/neighborhood/entire town. Will the fire spread on its own, or will the DM have to keep adding it square by square?
See, that is the point. Just like every other video game, the software will not be capable of emulating every single thing that players can think of. It will be limited to to the imagination, and financial resources (money = time) of the video game coders. There is a beautiful irony to this. Rule of Cool will go bye bye and be replaced by Rule of the Coders.
That’s more than a bit dramatic. As it is in current games, people will figure out how to do it. If you play on a battlemat, or with hero forged, you find a way to show a given square has a given property. Even if that sometimes means everyone just trying to remember. I don’t know why this would be substantially different. And you can always, you know, not use the VTT and just go TotM, as you’ve always been able to do.
The real test for the VTT will be how well it simulates when the PCs inevitably burn down a building/neighborhood/entire town. Will the fire spread on its own, or will the DM have to keep adding it square by square?
See, that is the point. Just like every other video game, the software will not be capable of emulating every single thing that players can think of. It will be limited to to the imagination, and financial resources (money = time) of the video game coders. There is a beautiful irony to this. Rule of Cool will go bye bye and be replaced by Rule of the Coders.
That’s more than a bit dramatic. As it is in current games, people will figure out how to do it. If you play on a battlemat, or with hero forged, you find a way to show a given square has a given property. Even if that sometimes means everyone just trying to remember. I don’t know why this would be substantially different. And you can always, you know, not use the VTT and just go TotM, as you’ve always been able to do.
And yes, you have seen what is going to happen. People will stick with ToTM, or continue to play on a battle map. But they cannot do that with game mechanics that are hard coded, literally, into the software. What happens when some DM says "Like in my old game, Mold Earth allows you to collapse part of the ceiling above the monster, doing X damage", while another DM says "I have never allowed that in my game, and never will, even on the VTT", and the coder read the spell, and coded it per RAW, which means no ceiling collapse. Players are NOT going to remember something about a particular grid unless there is something signifying it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you mark or highlight or otherwise color code VTT terrain just like you can with a marker or sticker or whatever on a physical battlemap? Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but can't a DM on most other VTT's just intervene and impose conditions or hit point losses etc regardless of the "hard coding" of the game?
I think your objections are predicated on either a misunderstanding or bad faith premise that the VTT because of its use of the Unreal Engine will impose the limitations of a video game on the more open creativity generally associated with D&D. VTTs are currently a thing, WotC is trying to capture some of that market by making something with a bit more muscular graphics than the current major players. I mean some of this argument seems to have a Xeno's Paradox absurdist logic structure akin to a TotM player objecting to minis with grounds like, "characters can't move on a battlemat because they're HARD CAST as standing." I'm pretty sure WotC, like the rest of the VTT makers, know how TTRPGs are played, and allow for DMs to "fudge" or "force" or "override" this bugbear of hard coding. If they don't, it probably won't be much of a contender in the VTT space. It's not some sort of immersive virtual reality, it's a virtual table top designed to assist or augment gameplay. It's a game aid, no more a frustration to play than those that come with physical maps or TotM narrative hand waving.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Roll20's terms are more generous than DMsGuild, and again, by no means plagiarism. I'm also presuming the program is popular among user creators?
I guess? In any case, my point wasn't that WotC would offer the same terms as Roll20, it's that game marketplaces are really not notable (though in practice almost everything will be free). Checking some others:
Tabletop Simulator seems to rely on the steam workshop (which allows paid mods, though most mods are free).
Talespire looks to be WIP, though they do have something called TalesBazaar.
With TaleSpire, you have 2 sites that people get/upload their boards to, TalesBazaar, and TalesTavern. Everything on both of those sites are free to grab (With the only small exception being a very small amount of maps on TalesTavern being locked behind the site's subscription, though no one else has locked their boards behind it so far)
You seem to believe that this will be like other VTT's. It will be a video game first and foremost.
I see nothing in the demo to make me think it won't be like other VTTs, but even if it is a video game, "I can't make the game engine do this so I'll describe it instead" isn't a new idea.
The real test for the VTT will be how well it simulates when the PCs inevitably burn down a building/neighborhood/entire town. Will the fire spread on its own, or will the DM have to keep adding it square by square?
See, that is the point. Just like every other video game, the software will not be capable of emulating every single thing that players can think of. It will be limited to to the imagination, and financial resources (money = time) of the video game coders. There is a beautiful irony to this. Rule of Cool will go bye bye and be replaced by Rule of the Coders.
That’s more than a bit dramatic. As it is in current games, people will figure out how to do it. If you play on a battlemat, or with hero forged, you find a way to show a given square has a given property. Even if that sometimes means everyone just trying to remember. I don’t know why this would be substantially different. And you can always, you know, not use the VTT and just go TotM, as you’ve always been able to do.
And yes, you have seen what is going to happen. People will stick with ToTM, or continue to play on a battle map. But they cannot do that with game mechanics that are hard coded, literally, into the software. What happens when some DM says "Like in my old game, Mold Earth allows you to collapse part of the ceiling above the monster, doing X damage", while another DM says "I have never allowed that in my game, and never will, even on the VTT", and the coder read the spell, and coded it per RAW, which means no ceiling collapse. Players are NOT going to remember something about a particular grid unless there is something signifying it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you mark or highlight or otherwise color code VTT terrain just like you can with a marker or sticker or whatever on a physical battlemap? Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but can't a DM on most other VTT's just intervene and impose conditions or hit point losses etc regardless of the "hard coding" of the game?
I think your objections are predicated on either a misunderstanding or bad faith premise that the VTT because of its use of the Unreal Engine will impose the limitations of a video game on the more open creativity generally associated with D&D. VTTs are currently a thing, WotC is trying to capture some of that market by making something with a bit more muscular graphics than the current major players. I mean some of this argument seems to have a Xeno's Paradox absurdist logic structure akin to a TotM player objecting to minis with grounds like, "characters can't move on a battlemat because they're HARD CAST as standing." I'm pretty sure WotC, like the rest of the VTT makers, know how TTRPGs are played, and allow for DMs to "fudge" or "force" or "override" this bugbear of hard coding. If they don't, it probably won't be much of a contender in the VTT space. It's not some sort of immersive virtual reality, it's a virtual table top designed to assist or augment gameplay. It's a game aid, no more a frustration to play than those that come with physical maps or TotM narrative hand waving.
You seem to believe that this will be like other VTT's. It will be a video game first and foremost.
It's a VTT. Anyone with experience with VTTs, and I am far from a VTT superuser, can tell from the demo that they're working on a VTT. Everything in its presentation describes its functionality in terms anyone with VTTs would recognize as precedent, not whatever video game limitations you're trying to assert. Your position just doesn't have any basis in the demo or One D&D's current development.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
We play a game that already requires no small degree of suspension of disbelief.
Personally I would rather imagine any character of mine and those of the other players and any we might encounter and the world in which we will encounter them than for my character or any other to be reduced to pixels on a screen.
Is that really how those excited about this VTT see their characters in their minds' eyes? They don't look like real people? They look like characters in a video game?
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
INSPIRATIONS:Clark Ashton Smith, Mervyn Peake, Jack Vance, Michael Moorcock, Fritz Leiber, M. John Harrison, Gene Wolfe, Steven Brust, Terry Pratchett, China Miéville.
We play a game that already requires no small degree of suspension of disbelief.
Personally I would rather imagine any character of mine and those of the other players and any we might encounter and the world in which we will encounter them than for my character or any other to be reduced to pixels on a screen.
Is that really how those excited about this VTT see their characters in their minds' eyes? They don't look like real people? They look like characters in a video game?
Well put it this way, seeing a bunch of people sitting around a game table with their laptops was possibly the worst advertising for the VTT they could come up with. No one wants to play a game staring at a laptop with their friends around them. What they should have done was to have everyone playing at their PCs in different areas to give the VTT a use case. No one is going to sit at a table with their laptops and looking at that rather than listening to the DM. There is this thing called hand and body movements that go with roleplaying and having a table that everyone can look at and talk with each other that is what is part of D&D.
Now, if everyone at that table was autistic and felt uncomfortable looking people in the eye, then that use case where the players only look at the screens and not each other could work. But that is a really small percentage of the population for advertising. That ad did the exact opposite for me from an interest perspective. I've got guys playing online that we have to turn off their dice because their PC takes 5 secs to do the dice roll animation let alone do effects.
The more advanced all this VTT stuff gets, the less interested I get in it.
If I want to play a video game with animations and stuff, I'll play a video game.
All I see with all this digital stuff is a ton of money and effort put into basically not D&D stuff. It's one thing when a video game company makes a D&D game; they make video games, that's their bread and butter, they know how to do it and how to do it somewhat well. WotC makes D&D books, I have zero confidence that this VTT is properly optimized for average computers in a way that will make it accessible for everyone, I have no idea how we'll get assets and the fact that I heard someone say that they're already 'partnering with minecraft' just makes me think that this is their weird attempt at making their own video game so they can make microtransaction money.
When stuff organically grows in need for things, like how Foundry did, it often develops the tools necessary because it's seeing a need, filling a need. When a company tries to just make their own version of that, it's often lacking the necessary tools for that need because they're coming at it from a top down perspective with the end goal of making money. I just can't imagine it's actually a good experience, let alone an affordable one.
My only real takeaway from the video is that I've not seen anything other comperable VTT's don't already have. Maybe barring official Beyond integration, which is... fine? But it's not the biggest thing in the world for me. It also feels like the video is pitching the One D&D VTT as if there is no competition, like they aren't even aware that Talespire and other such systems are already out there.
(I know they know, I'm referring to how the video is pitching it).
I am optimistic that it will ultimately turn out fine, but I'm still waiting for a rock solid argument to say why I should stop using Talespire myself. That one has a great level editor, an active dev team that's pretty chill and open with their community, HeroForge integration, and planned mod support, with some talk of things to allow for sheet imports and stuff.
Well put it this way, seeing a bunch of people sitting around a game table with their laptops was possibly the worst advertising for the VTT they could come up with. No one wants to play a game staring at a laptop with their friends around them.
I have played that way (sort of; we were actually mixed local and remote). Just using your VTT as a replacement for the map is perfectly useful.
My only real takeaway from the video is that I've not seen anything other comperable VTT's don't already have. Maybe barring official Beyond integration, which is... fine? But it's not the biggest thing in the world for me. It also feels like the video is pitching the One D&D VTT as if there is no competition, like they aren't even aware that Talespire and other such systems are already out there.
(I know they know, I'm referring to how the video is pitching it).
I am optimistic that it will ultimately turn out fine, but I'm still waiting for a rock solid argument to say why I should stop using Talespire myself. That one has a great level editor, an active dev team that's pretty chill and open with their community, HeroForge integration, and planned mod support, with some talk of things to allow for sheet imports and stuff.
I don't think the D&D dedicated VTT is going to pull much from people who use Talespire. Maybe Roll20, and to a lesser extend Foundry, but I think the main people who will buy into D&D's proprietary VTT are folks who want that "one stop shopping" experience, that WotC seems to be going for. 3rd Party Integration is still up in the air, or maybe relegated to equivalent of private homebrew. So, for that among other things, I think this VTT is targeted primarily to people who are WotC let's call them "loyalists" (the people who just play D&D, buy the books when they come out, but don't read the trade/fan press, or spend a lot of time in the social media spaces etc). They may have heard of VTTs but never bought into a platform, but now that everyone's DDB account is integrated with a WotC account, there's a convenience to it. At least I think that's the WotC internal logic, and we'll see how it plays out. It's kinda gutsy/bold a move. There are not quite several significant entities in the VTT space, all of them trying to serve the entire TTRPG hobby more or less. WotC is trying to make the case that they can deliver a higher quality product by creating a VTT dedicated to a single rules system.
I don't see them comparing themselves, at least in their promotional material, to other VTTs anymore than I'd see DDB comparing itself to Demiplane. However, much like Demiplane does publicly described itself as "DDB for the rest of TTRPG (incidentally by the founders of DDB)" I could see other VTTs showing their distinction between the WotC's and their own. I could also see usage growing with both that way.
We play a game that already requires no small degree of suspension of disbelief.
Personally I would rather imagine any character of mine and those of the other players and any we might encounter and the world in which we will encounter them than for my character or any other to be reduced to pixels on a screen.
Is that really how those excited about this VTT see their characters in their minds' eyes? They don't look like real people? They look like characters in a video game?
They look like miniatures on a battle map with animation. Unless you're really good at 3D renders or whatever one does prior to the STL file being made, custom miniatures are relatively recent and beholden to the mind's eye of the custom mini vendor's mind's eye. As has always been the case with folks using minis. A VTT at table or online, at the price of computing power (and WotC claims to want to port this to any device not just amped up laptops used in a promotional video) can offer terrain and monster and character options that many D&D players can't have because they don't have the physical space to store it (I'd say more affordable, but I don't think anyone knows how this VTT's pricing scheme will work).
Not liking VTTs is not really bemoaning "what has become of D&D", it's just a flavor of theater of the mind vs. battle maps. There are many accessories available to play D&D, none of them are essential. Heck, even the core rule books books aren't essential to play the game. People have wanted a D&D Beyond VTT since D&D Beyond was a thing. This is that. Not everyone on D&D Beyond wanted a VTT, but the hobby has grown in TTRPG to be a lot of things. Yes, there are those of us who use not battle map scale graph paper map renderings and for the most part play pencil and paper (really, did anyone really ever use pen?) and theater of the mind. But we are in a time where VTTs are as much a thing as paid DMs, digital tools, heck I know a lot of very good DMs and players who don't own a physical copy of any game they play PDFs. And there's people doing really cool things with book formats, miniature terrain, fricken four sided dice so you don't have to worry about the caltrop trap.
What I'm saying is that there is so much going on with D&D, the larger D&D family of OSR, retro clones, Pathfinder, and whatever shakes out in the OGL/CC landscape, and the broader world of TTRPGs, there's little point in making an enemy out of, or spending time denouncing, any particular way of playing or any tool used to play a particular way. I'm not a VTT person. Given my broad TTRPG interests, I'm probably best served by something simple like Owlbear Rodeo. The new VTT for D&D likely won't sell me for reasons I've articulated, but I also haven't dedicated a lot of word count here when I find myself less inclined to buy a lot of stuff WotC puts out. I still play D&D, I just haven't had an interest in most of the new books. My game hasn't suffered for it. Nor will it when One D&D becomes whatever or this VTT trots out.
Well put it this way, seeing a bunch of people sitting around a game table with their laptops was possibly the worst advertising for the VTT they could come up with. No one wants to play a game staring at a laptop with their friends around them. What they should have done was to have everyone playing at their PCs in different areas to give the VTT a use case. No one is going to sit at a table with their laptops and looking at that rather than listening to the DM. There is this thing called hand and body movements that go with roleplaying and having a table that everyone can look at and talk with each other that is what is part of D&D.
This seems to be a misreading of the sizzle vid I saw. The fact I see many gamers play what look like pretty involved games with a bunch of devices including laptops at the table aside, and also putting the fact that we're talking on a discussion forum for a service that actually encourages you to bring a device anywhere from a phone to a table to a laptop to access your character sheet aside, you're presuming the enthusiasm of the people in the vid remarking at what they see on their laptops was the end all and be all of the VTT game experience. It's not. Watch any actual play where VTTs are deployed, even when they play online, and there is plenty of interaction among players and DM/GM. To think the VTT is somehow going to limit interaction, again, is like assuming folks are going to forget about everything but the battle map in miniature play. Some of the critics of D&D's VTT just seem to be hating the idea of VTTs. Well, that ship has sailed.
As for complaining about the beefy laptops. Maybe the all device scales portability ain't there yet. It's possible they used power laptop for technical reasons (but folks, this wasn't an actual play, it was an edited video so unlikely). Most likely, when folks demo stuff at E3, and other tech gaming events, it's sorta a culture style thing to show off what you got on cool hardware. And that's all this was, showing off a work in progress.
I mean, you know people use VTTs at tables, right? Again, VTT is a potential tool for D&D, but not an essential tool.
So ... should I just start using Owlbear Rodeo now, or should I get in with 2.0?
They look like miniatures on a battle map with animation. Unless you're really good at 3D renders or whatever one does prior to the STL file being made, custom miniatures are relatively recent and beholden to the mind's eye of the custom mini vendor's mind's eye. As has always been the case with folks using minis. A VTT at table or online, at the price of computing power (and WotC claims to want to port this to any device not just amped up laptops used in a promotional video) can offer terrain and monster and character options that many D&D players can't have because they don't have the physical space to store it (I'd say more affordable, but I don't think anyone knows how this VTT's pricing scheme will work).
Not liking VTTs is not really bemoaning "what has become of D&D", it's just a flavor of theater of the mind vs. battle maps. There are many accessories available to play D&D, none of them are essential. Heck, even the core rule books books aren't essential to play the game. People have wanted a D&D Beyond VTT since D&D Beyond was a thing. This is that. Not everyone on D&D Beyond wanted a VTT, but the hobby has grown in TTRPG to be a lot of things. Yes, there are those of us who use not battle map scale graph paper map renderings and for the most part play pencil and paper (really, did anyone really ever use pen?) and theater of the mind. But we are in a time where VTTs are as much a thing as paid DMs, digital tools, heck I know a lot of very good DMs and players who don't own a physical copy of any game they play PDFs. And there's people doing really cool things with book formats, miniature terrain, fricken four sided dice so you don't have to worry about the caltrop trap.
What I'm saying is that there is so much going on with D&D, the larger D&D family of OSR, retro clones, Pathfinder, and whatever shakes out in the OGL/CC landscape, and the broader world of TTRPGs, there's little point in making an enemy out of, or spending time denouncing, any particular way of playing or any tool used to play a particular way. I'm not a VTT person. Given my broad TTRPG interests, I'm probably best served by something simple like Owlbear Rodeo. The new VTT for D&D likely won't sell me for reasons I've articulated, but I also haven't dedicated a lot of word count here when I find myself less inclined to buy a lot of stuff WotC puts out. I still play D&D, I just haven't had an interest in most of the new books. My game hasn't suffered for it. Nor will it when One D&D becomes whatever or this VTT trots out.
We don't all use miniatures. Some of us have never used them at our own tables and our only experience with them has been at the tables of others who do. Even among those who do use them most just use them to resolve combat. And I can't imagine most of them envision "in their minds' eyes" that their characters look like miniatures.
I'm sure some do.
Is that how you "see" your characters? As little figurines?
To each their own.
But one of the key motivations that drove the development of table-top role-playing games was imagining who someone was beyond the mere mini on the table. To see that someone as a fully realized character. To use theater of the mind to make that possible.
And if you see no difference between using miniatures on a grid and having avatars representative of them on a screen you would benefit from reading Baudrillard and others and what they have said of hyperreality.
If you read my response to your thread about "what do you see when you play" it's pretty apparent I understood what Baudrillard was trying to protect. Baudrillard was writing largely before digital culture as we know it today was a thing, but whatever you're trying to say there aside, I don't get your challenge. It's abundantly clear I'm not a VTT type, and I also see them as something not to bemoan. Really if Baudrillard is your warning flag about VTTs, everything he's pessimistic about in Simulation and Simulacra equally applies to TTRPGs and many other forms of play, so mise en abyme on that ;). Baudrillard's arguments are more plugged into the alarms of Mazes and Monsters or Dark Dungeons as much as whatever anxiety VTT haters are trying to provoke.
There is a big difference between a group of players sitting in the same room in one another's company and playing a game with objects and a group of players instead staring at screens.
There is, but both are simulations (as are RPGs in general) and therefore hyperreality is an equally valid concern for all of them.
There are drawbacks to VTTs, I still like playing on real physical maps, but on the other hand my gaming group is spread across five cities and two timezones and I'd much rather use a VTT than not play at all.
I guess? In any case, my point wasn't that WotC would offer the same terms as Roll20, it's that game marketplaces are really not notable (though in practice almost everything will be free). Checking some others:
Do you really need a graphic for that? Have the Ankheg do a Str check (or however they end up doing grapple) when they attack; if it succeeds, apply the "grappled" condition to the player's character. Since every creature in the game has the ability to grapple, however they represent that in the VTT will be fine.
for me, I found the VTT to be the most exciting part of the D&D Direct, hands down. we can't be sure yet just how well it'll function in action, especially regarding the freedoms that come with the nature of D&D. (my players are menaces to society and make very strange decisions.) but it seems promising, and since it's been years since I've played at an actual table in-person, it looks like it'll be a very fun new method for my parties. I have hopes for it
Beginner DM & Barbarian
The real test for the VTT will be how well it simulates when the PCs inevitably burn down a building/neighborhood/entire town. Will the fire spread on its own, or will the DM have to keep adding it square by square?
That’s more than a bit dramatic.
As it is in current games, people will figure out how to do it. If you play on a battlemat, or with hero forged, you find a way to show a given square has a given property. Even if that sometimes means everyone just trying to remember. I don’t know why this would be substantially different.
And you can always, you know, not use the VTT and just go TotM, as you’ve always been able to do.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you mark or highlight or otherwise color code VTT terrain just like you can with a marker or sticker or whatever on a physical battlemap? Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but can't a DM on most other VTT's just intervene and impose conditions or hit point losses etc regardless of the "hard coding" of the game?
I think your objections are predicated on either a misunderstanding or bad faith premise that the VTT because of its use of the Unreal Engine will impose the limitations of a video game on the more open creativity generally associated with D&D. VTTs are currently a thing, WotC is trying to capture some of that market by making something with a bit more muscular graphics than the current major players. I mean some of this argument seems to have a Xeno's Paradox absurdist logic structure akin to a TotM player objecting to minis with grounds like, "characters can't move on a battlemat because they're HARD CAST as standing." I'm pretty sure WotC, like the rest of the VTT makers, know how TTRPGs are played, and allow for DMs to "fudge" or "force" or "override" this bugbear of hard coding. If they don't, it probably won't be much of a contender in the VTT space. It's not some sort of immersive virtual reality, it's a virtual table top designed to assist or augment gameplay. It's a game aid, no more a frustration to play than those that come with physical maps or TotM narrative hand waving.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
With TaleSpire, you have 2 sites that people get/upload their boards to, TalesBazaar, and TalesTavern. Everything on both of those sites are free to grab (With the only small exception being a very small amount of maps on TalesTavern being locked behind the site's subscription, though no one else has locked their boards behind it so far)
Add this to an AI DM and what do you have?
The next D&D video game.
I see nothing in the demo to make me think it won't be like other VTTs, but even if it is a video game, "I can't make the game engine do this so I'll describe it instead" isn't a new idea.
It's a VTT. Anyone with experience with VTTs, and I am far from a VTT superuser, can tell from the demo that they're working on a VTT. Everything in its presentation describes its functionality in terms anyone with VTTs would recognize as precedent, not whatever video game limitations you're trying to assert. Your position just doesn't have any basis in the demo or One D&D's current development.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Sort of ironic, the immense stretching of the imagination to assume this VTT will somehow disallow imagination.
We play a game that already requires no small degree of suspension of disbelief.
Personally I would rather imagine any character of mine and those of the other players and any we might encounter and the world in which we will encounter them than for my character or any other to be reduced to pixels on a screen.
Is that really how those excited about this VTT see their characters in their minds' eyes? They don't look like real people? They look like characters in a video game?
INSPIRATIONS: Clark Ashton Smith, Mervyn Peake, Jack Vance, Michael Moorcock, Fritz Leiber, M. John Harrison, Gene Wolfe, Steven Brust, Terry Pratchett, China Miéville.
SYSTEMS: ShadowDark, C&C, AD&D.
GEAR: pencils, graph paper, dice.
Well put it this way, seeing a bunch of people sitting around a game table with their laptops was possibly the worst advertising for the VTT they could come up with. No one wants to play a game staring at a laptop with their friends around them. What they should have done was to have everyone playing at their PCs in different areas to give the VTT a use case. No one is going to sit at a table with their laptops and looking at that rather than listening to the DM. There is this thing called hand and body movements that go with roleplaying and having a table that everyone can look at and talk with each other that is what is part of D&D.
Now, if everyone at that table was autistic and felt uncomfortable looking people in the eye, then that use case where the players only look at the screens and not each other could work. But that is a really small percentage of the population for advertising. That ad did the exact opposite for me from an interest perspective. I've got guys playing online that we have to turn off their dice because their PC takes 5 secs to do the dice roll animation let alone do effects.
The more advanced all this VTT stuff gets, the less interested I get in it.
If I want to play a video game with animations and stuff, I'll play a video game.
All I see with all this digital stuff is a ton of money and effort put into basically not D&D stuff. It's one thing when a video game company makes a D&D game; they make video games, that's their bread and butter, they know how to do it and how to do it somewhat well. WotC makes D&D books, I have zero confidence that this VTT is properly optimized for average computers in a way that will make it accessible for everyone, I have no idea how we'll get assets and the fact that I heard someone say that they're already 'partnering with minecraft' just makes me think that this is their weird attempt at making their own video game so they can make microtransaction money.
When stuff organically grows in need for things, like how Foundry did, it often develops the tools necessary because it's seeing a need, filling a need. When a company tries to just make their own version of that, it's often lacking the necessary tools for that need because they're coming at it from a top down perspective with the end goal of making money. I just can't imagine it's actually a good experience, let alone an affordable one.
My only real takeaway from the video is that I've not seen anything other comperable VTT's don't already have. Maybe barring official Beyond integration, which is... fine? But it's not the biggest thing in the world for me. It also feels like the video is pitching the One D&D VTT as if there is no competition, like they aren't even aware that Talespire and other such systems are already out there.
(I know they know, I'm referring to how the video is pitching it).
I am optimistic that it will ultimately turn out fine, but I'm still waiting for a rock solid argument to say why I should stop using Talespire myself. That one has a great level editor, an active dev team that's pretty chill and open with their community, HeroForge integration, and planned mod support, with some talk of things to allow for sheet imports and stuff.
I have played that way (sort of; we were actually mixed local and remote). Just using your VTT as a replacement for the map is perfectly useful.
I don't think the D&D dedicated VTT is going to pull much from people who use Talespire. Maybe Roll20, and to a lesser extend Foundry, but I think the main people who will buy into D&D's proprietary VTT are folks who want that "one stop shopping" experience, that WotC seems to be going for. 3rd Party Integration is still up in the air, or maybe relegated to equivalent of private homebrew. So, for that among other things, I think this VTT is targeted primarily to people who are WotC let's call them "loyalists" (the people who just play D&D, buy the books when they come out, but don't read the trade/fan press, or spend a lot of time in the social media spaces etc). They may have heard of VTTs but never bought into a platform, but now that everyone's DDB account is integrated with a WotC account, there's a convenience to it. At least I think that's the WotC internal logic, and we'll see how it plays out. It's kinda gutsy/bold a move. There are not quite several significant entities in the VTT space, all of them trying to serve the entire TTRPG hobby more or less. WotC is trying to make the case that they can deliver a higher quality product by creating a VTT dedicated to a single rules system.
I don't see them comparing themselves, at least in their promotional material, to other VTTs anymore than I'd see DDB comparing itself to Demiplane. However, much like Demiplane does publicly described itself as "DDB for the rest of TTRPG (incidentally by the founders of DDB)" I could see other VTTs showing their distinction between the WotC's and their own. I could also see usage growing with both that way.
They look like miniatures on a battle map with animation. Unless you're really good at 3D renders or whatever one does prior to the STL file being made, custom miniatures are relatively recent and beholden to the mind's eye of the custom mini vendor's mind's eye. As has always been the case with folks using minis. A VTT at table or online, at the price of computing power (and WotC claims to want to port this to any device not just amped up laptops used in a promotional video) can offer terrain and monster and character options that many D&D players can't have because they don't have the physical space to store it (I'd say more affordable, but I don't think anyone knows how this VTT's pricing scheme will work).
Not liking VTTs is not really bemoaning "what has become of D&D", it's just a flavor of theater of the mind vs. battle maps. There are many accessories available to play D&D, none of them are essential. Heck, even the core rule books books aren't essential to play the game. People have wanted a D&D Beyond VTT since D&D Beyond was a thing. This is that. Not everyone on D&D Beyond wanted a VTT, but the hobby has grown in TTRPG to be a lot of things. Yes, there are those of us who use not battle map scale graph paper map renderings and for the most part play pencil and paper (really, did anyone really ever use pen?) and theater of the mind. But we are in a time where VTTs are as much a thing as paid DMs, digital tools, heck I know a lot of very good DMs and players who don't own a physical copy of any game they play PDFs. And there's people doing really cool things with book formats, miniature terrain, fricken four sided dice so you don't have to worry about the caltrop trap.
What I'm saying is that there is so much going on with D&D, the larger D&D family of OSR, retro clones, Pathfinder, and whatever shakes out in the OGL/CC landscape, and the broader world of TTRPGs, there's little point in making an enemy out of, or spending time denouncing, any particular way of playing or any tool used to play a particular way. I'm not a VTT person. Given my broad TTRPG interests, I'm probably best served by something simple like Owlbear Rodeo. The new VTT for D&D likely won't sell me for reasons I've articulated, but I also haven't dedicated a lot of word count here when I find myself less inclined to buy a lot of stuff WotC puts out. I still play D&D, I just haven't had an interest in most of the new books. My game hasn't suffered for it. Nor will it when One D&D becomes whatever or this VTT trots out.
This seems to be a misreading of the sizzle vid I saw. The fact I see many gamers play what look like pretty involved games with a bunch of devices including laptops at the table aside, and also putting the fact that we're talking on a discussion forum for a service that actually encourages you to bring a device anywhere from a phone to a table to a laptop to access your character sheet aside, you're presuming the enthusiasm of the people in the vid remarking at what they see on their laptops was the end all and be all of the VTT game experience. It's not. Watch any actual play where VTTs are deployed, even when they play online, and there is plenty of interaction among players and DM/GM. To think the VTT is somehow going to limit interaction, again, is like assuming folks are going to forget about everything but the battle map in miniature play. Some of the critics of D&D's VTT just seem to be hating the idea of VTTs. Well, that ship has sailed.
As for complaining about the beefy laptops. Maybe the all device scales portability ain't there yet. It's possible they used power laptop for technical reasons (but folks, this wasn't an actual play, it was an edited video so unlikely). Most likely, when folks demo stuff at E3, and other tech gaming events, it's sorta a culture style thing to show off what you got on cool hardware. And that's all this was, showing off a work in progress.
I mean, you know people use VTTs at tables, right? Again, VTT is a potential tool for D&D, but not an essential tool.
So ... should I just start using Owlbear Rodeo now, or should I get in with 2.0?
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
If you read my response to your thread about "what do you see when you play" it's pretty apparent I understood what Baudrillard was trying to protect. Baudrillard was writing largely before digital culture as we know it today was a thing, but whatever you're trying to say there aside, I don't get your challenge. It's abundantly clear I'm not a VTT type, and I also see them as something not to bemoan. Really if Baudrillard is your warning flag about VTTs, everything he's pessimistic about in Simulation and Simulacra equally applies to TTRPGs and many other forms of play, so mise en abyme on that ;). Baudrillard's arguments are more plugged into the alarms of Mazes and Monsters or Dark Dungeons as much as whatever anxiety VTT haters are trying to provoke.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
There is, but both are simulations (as are RPGs in general) and therefore hyperreality is an equally valid concern for all of them.
There are drawbacks to VTTs, I still like playing on real physical maps, but on the other hand my gaming group is spread across five cities and two timezones and I'd much rather use a VTT than not play at all.
I don't see that as an accurate analogy. Both the physical tabletop and the VTT are simulating the same thing, just with different tools.