Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition

OK, I've held off on writing about the newly announced Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition for as long as I can.  I can't help it: I'm interested in this and that's that.  As Nate would have it, this post is suitably captioned, and you non-gamers whould consider yourselves waved-off.

Pen and Paper games companies have had a bad time of it, recently.  The hobby as a whole, aftet the great growth of the 70s and early 80s, has tailed off greatly in recent years.  There have been a couple of rennaissances in the last fifteen years: the launch of White Wolf's Vampire line added a lot of new people to the hobby, and then the launch of D&D 3rd Edition brought a lot of the older players back to the game, as well as prompting a spurt of growth in the industry itself through the D20 "open" ruleset.

But P'n'P gaming faces a challenge to its existence which is drawn from its very nature: it is pen and paper in a digital age.

Computers offer many of the elements that the pen and paper hobby lacks.  The computer provides a GM and opponents (or partners) who will always be there on time when you want to play.  And many of us now play Massively Multiplayer Online games in order to achieve the social aspect which single-player games lack.  The adventures are richly detailed and narrative structure is, at least, better than that which some GMs come up with.

Add to this the changing demographic of the core, veteran customers: we have plenty of cash but are encumbered with many other demands on what leisure time we have.  Wizards of the Coast can no longer afford to sell simply to a shrinking, school-and-college-based, cash-constrained market.

So they have decided to focus far more in this upcoming version on an attempt to incorporate online tools.  You can see a demonstration of some of these in this video on youtube.  View the linked videos in youtube's side-panel to see more detail.  At first, I was very dubious.  WotC have tried, before, to incorporate digital tools, rulebooks and products into the D&D line, and the results have been less than stellar.

However, at least the ideas are right here.  The target marketplace for which WotC are aiming are time-constrained and not many potential players know the three or four others within a reasonable travelling distance with whom to play.  So Wizards have decided to offer a virtual tabletop, so that distant groups - the college buddies who now live hundreds of miles apart, perhaps - can play online.  Some tools to do this have been available for years - IRC clients, messageboards, dice-rolling tools and more - but Wizards (as seen in the youtube link) are offering a 3D, graphical version more in-tune with the expectations of modern media consumers.

The service is to be a subscription one, priced competitively ("it'll cost more than a cup of coffee but less than an MMO" according to WotC's Bill Slaviscek).  While subscription services do present a mental barrier to many people, providing that the service is technically successful, I suspect that they will find themselves with decent MMO subscription numbers of 20k: if the other tools succeed then, given the add-ins like online subscriptions to both the flagship D&D magazines, I wouldn't be surprised if that grows five-fold over time.

Given the major time constraints mentioned before, help in speeding up preparation will be a big draw.  If I can more quickly build an adventure for my ongoing, 20-year-old campaign using the online monster generation and book-keeping tools then I will undoubtedly do so, even without using the virtual tabletop.  If the latter is comparably quick then I'll find a use for my 44" TV, instead of scrap paper for cack-handed on-the-fly mapping!

Long-distance gaming, done right, really has immense potential.  Going back to the networking issues mentioned above, I know a lot of gamers.  But I only know half a dozen or so who can make it to my house in Edinburgh every week on a Monday evening.  That is the fundamental chokepoint on growing the hobby: the network effect.

There are caveats.  When Neverwinter Nights was released a few years ago for the PC (not the earlier online version) there was a rush of enthusiasm from a great many people for the idea of running their friends through adventures in exactly the same manner as is portrayed in the Virtual Tabletop video.  In the end, virtually every attempt seems to have ended in failure.  The effort required was huge and the learning curve too steep for the average GM, who does not tend to dabble in scripting encounters or trying out virtual world software.  The minimalist approach will be best: draw a quick map (or, even better, seed a random one with style and size) and drop in some encounters, then  off you go.  The ability to fudge on the fly when the GM realises that he has grossly miscalculated an encounter's difficulty will also be important.

There are, as well, issues with the sort of conferencing experience that the virtual tabletop represents, and I experience those in the distance-conferencing that we do in my work.  It is important, in a performance medium like collaborative gaming, to get feedback from the audience.  Each player (particularly, but not exclusively, the referee or "dungeon master") is effectively playing to an audience of each of the other gamer in a group.  To perform without any feedback at all is not an easy skill.  Ideally, I would want video thumbnails of each of the other participants in a corner of my screen, but that level of penetration of video-conferencing is several years away, yet.

Anyway, this looks fun.  I worry that it may be a couple of years early, measured against the advance of both technology and consumer attitudes, but i doubt if those two years of delay were available.  The potential upside is huge, both for Wizards and for the gamer.  Just what the effect on the rest of the gaming industry will be is more questionable.  White Wolf have CCP's online expertise o back them up.  There is not another company in the entire nidustry who have the capital or the expertise to provide anything similar.  Trickledown, or rising tides floating all boats, may work as it did with D&D 3rd Edition.  But the key result of a successful implementation would be enhanced market dominance for the industry leaders, and a solid lock on that dominance caused by greatly increased barriers to entry.