Three Hams Inn

Check this out.

Neat, huh? I mean, if I had $10,000 and a team of coders laying around I might be implementing a system like this, too. However, I don't have that kind of scratch.

But that's only one problem. Buy-in is steep, but that's only the first gate. The second gate is designing, coding and implementing the software necessary for this kind of thing. We've got a word in "the industry" for this sort of approach to a problem: Overkill. And for that reason, I probably wouldn't use this kind of system for D&D or any other RPG, even if it was handed to me on a platter. I can only imagine what kind of maintenance has to go into a project like that. Actually, I don't have to imagine. I work on millions of lines of code every day -- tens of thousands of it I wrote myself.

Sure, it's fun for a bunch of college kids with a college CompSci department R&D budget to do something like this, but how does the average gamer (if there even is such a thing) do something like this? Would it actually improve their game, or would they just be gold-plating a turd? I think you can guess at my answer.

I posit this: this guy did this with less than 5% of those other guys budget and resources. Consider that for a moment: one guy accomplished the same thing as that team of guys with the big-ass budget and all kinds of Microsoft support and he did it YEARS ago when even his own implementation would be considered expensive. Additionally, I think he did it better because his solution actually uses miniatures and dice.

I used to run my D&D games like he does. I projected my map onto a playing surface using a brand-new $300 digital light projector (they're cheaper now), implemented a fog-of-war and ran my games. I'm still trying to figure out how to do this with Traveller because the mapping requirements and the tactical game are different. I know what I'm going to use for hardware, though, and it's not going to be a Microsoft Surface unit. I'll just use one of these for my gaming surface. By the time I'm ready to implement that piece of hardware, the price should be less than 10% of a Surface unit. I won't need a lot of code to handle "touch" events on the screen, and I certainly won't need to implement the Surface API to write my software.

But it looks kind of cool, doesn't it?

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Posted by: Alexis on 12/17/2009 12:23:20 PM

                My first thought upon seeing this was a twitchy feeling of being boxed into someone else's tight-minding framework of what makes "D&D."  Better not think you want to change the slightest rule without planning six or seven weeks of careful code reprogramming.

I wonder how long they worked on the completely undesirable die effect.

Posted by: Carl on 12/17/2009 1:01:21 PM

                
I think this system would be great for 4th Edition D&D.  I say that with as much derision as I can muster.  4th Ed is a very slow computer game.

The first thing to consider when applying software to a problem is how well you understand the problem.  I think this was a critical mistake in early computer implementations of computer RPGs.  D&D was an imagination game.  D&D, by it's nature, was a sandbox.  That doesn't lend itself to full computer implementation.  A computer can't improvise and therefore, a computer can't be a DM.

The Surface D&D project is just a much slower computer RPG.  They still aren't getting it.