Knights & Knaves Alehouse

"Virtual Table"? WTF.
That's the gaming equivalent of those 1-800 sexchat lines. F2F will always be best.
If it were totally free with absolutely no strings attached, I would consider it for a lark, but to date I still think the equation WotC = Evil holds true. You cannot turn PnP RPGs into video games and that's the direction they have taken things in the past few years.

Odhanan wrote:Ryan Dancey (the guy who came up with the OGL in the first place) has just been telling us on the RPG Site that several industry sources confirmed to him "one direct competiting game" (his choice of words) sells more than D&D 4e right now.

Ryan Dancey is the Enquirer of RPG industry news sources. The fact that he's shilling his "insider" news to a backwater like The RPGsite says everything that needs to be said about his credibility amongst the greater RPG community.

Wheggi wrote:I know nothing about apps or how difficult they are to make, but how tough would it be for a programmer kinda guy to come up with just such a thing for OSRIC?

And of course we'd have to give it away free, too!

and that's from them

thedungeondelver wrote:and that's from them

Glorious irony.

That is just such a poor choice of words in that ad in more ways than one. It sounds like a punchline for a sublime parody!

francisca wrote:I don't care if they support 1e or not, I'm not paying a monthly fee to play the game on a virtual table.

If I can't find the time and players to sit down face to face for a regular game, I just won't play.

+2

'nough said.

Apparently they missed the part where their promo film for 4e said "Go fuck yourselves old dudes, you were playing wrong for years".

Throwing a sop to 1e in this pile of shit java code interests me not one whit. I'd place it only slightly above the D&D cartoon box set, the "D&D essentials" box that imitates the Basic Edit done by Mentzer (seriously, where are all these "ZOMG THAT'S THE SET I GREW UP WITH!" people coming out of the woodwork from? nobody I knew started with that D&D. Nobody!), and that bus covered in Trampier and Otus artwork.

DD,

I started with the Mentzer boxed set and, while I'd seen a 1e PHB and UA, my first personal hardback rulebook was the 2e PHB.

So they are targeting my age cohort, not yours. And, from what I'm hearing among friends of mine who loved 3.x and hate their memories of D&D from adolesence (which for us was all 2e or BECMI/RC), it's proving somewhat successful.

Most of the guys I know in my age group who still retain an interest in D&D have no interest in the rules -- they didn't like them back in the late 1980s or 1990s when we were playing two or three times a week. They like M:tG, CRPGs with railroad tracks you can't deviate from, invulnerable superhero characters, and all the other stuff that we, and those like us, either don't care or regularly execrate.

But these guys I know do remember the Mentzer artwork fondly, and some recall, dimly, that there were some D&D books around before the ones we started with...with lots of "weird" art (Tramp, Otus, inter alia). Probably owned by an older brother, a cousin, or (in my case) a weirdo up the street.

So I understand the demographic WotC is targeting with this...I'm smack-dab in the middle of it. Early 30-something, probably has a couple of young kids now, little time for pen-and-paper stuff but will make time for something that allows more time in front of a computer (especially if it can be played from work like Fantasy Football), doesn't involve arithmetic, hides the rules the way a good MMORPG or CRPG does, and evokes (through the artwork and trade dress) the nostalgia of having hours a week to spend on a game, but doesn't expect me to recall anything about the rules because this person didn't care for them "back then".

Does that make any sense?

Can't wait to collect virtual miniatures and print the screenshots. I'll probably print them on archival quality paper and preserve them in comic book bags inside of a humidor or other controlled atmosphere environment.

thedungeondelver wrote:Apparently they missed the part where their promo film for 4e said "Go fuck yourselves old dudes, you were playing wrong for years".

Throwing a sop to 1e in this pile of shit java code interests me not one whit. I'd place it only slightly above the D&D cartoon box set, the "D&D essentials" box that imitates the Basic Edit done by Mentzer (seriously, where are all these "ZOMG THAT'S THE SET I GREW UP WITH!" people coming out of the woodwork from? nobody I knew started with that D&D. Nobody!), and that bus covered in Trampier and Otus artwork.

Actually I do know one quite well. My brother (3 years younger) bought me the 1981 Basic Set for a Xmas present because I was very curious (in particular, about the weird bags that they had jam packed with dwarf soldiers that said AD&D on the yellow labels) the Summer earlier and he hit a windfall of piles of money (just emphasizing we were never tight). I took to the game quite well and was introduced to AD&D within a few weeks in 1982 buying everything and anything but he didn't take to it (with the exception of miniatures) until 2 or 3 years later and when he did he went berserk over Mentzer. I think he was the first bonafide deliberate anti-Gygaxian but it was just to piss me off. (He would say bizarre statements like the FIEND FOLIO was superior to the MONSTER MANUAL, etc.) We really didn't get along and these days its even worse. His BECMI-based campaign world was the most gigantic thing that I've ever seen (huge city maps, etc, way too many NPCs) and he just abandoned it as an adult. I tried to get him back into it but he's hopeless. I held on to all his characters and gave them to him five years ago. Next time I saw him a few months later he said he lost them. He is the "classic stoner D&D player with problems" type for sure and not the "gazetteer-thumping standard BECMI" type.

It would be quite a bit easier for WotC to create a system agnostic Virtual Table than a system specific one. Probably more efficient, too, in that they won't have to alter it much as 4e goes through its inevitable rules changes on the way to whatever 5e is in the next five or so years.

So, take the "supports 1e" thing with a grain of salt. It might support 1e, but support it no more than it supports 4e, 3e, Palladium FRPG, and Tunnels & Trolls. You put together your dungeon, you grab some pre-made virtual figures, there's an on-line dice roller, and everything else is handled by an IM-style chat function.

thedungeondelver wrote:(seriously, where are all these "ZOMG THAT'S THE SET I GREW UP WITH!" people coming out of the woodwork from? nobody I knew started with that D&D. Nobody!)

I started with that D&D

T. Foster wrote: I started with that D&D

Same here. Why? It was 12 bucks at the time.

DungeonDork wrote:

T. Foster wrote: I started with that D&D

Same here. Why? It was 12 bucks at the time.

Me too. It was a copy previously owned by my friend's brother. Not my first introduction to adventure games, but definitely to D&D.