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heruca wrote:

I'm not sure what video you saw, but in the one I saw they did exactly that. Using the mouse, they scribbled in a secret room on the map.

I'm not predicting it won't have these things - those were, in retrospect, really bad examples, because they're both not that hard to code. All I'm saying is, in any computer program created in this day and age, you are going to have to sacrifice open-endedness for structure. D&D already has a lot of structure in its combat, and most of it lends itself well to a computer program, but there are always going to be weird cases that the program can't display or present easily to your players. If I were using this tabletop, I would work with what I was given. To the extent that it can create many or most dungeons, that will be great, but perhaps unconsciously, I'll avoid situations or maps that don't lend themselves well to the tabletop environment. My game would become more structured, more like a board game, in order to fit into the virtual tabletop.

That doesn't mean the virtual tabletop isn't a step in the right (and inevitable) direction. It just means it's not a magic bullet yet.

Khaim]On a related note, one thing a computer can do really well is really intricate calculations, like more precisely defined positions. In other words, we can get rid of the grid. It's just not needed. A cone doesn't have to have jagged edges, sqrt(2) doesn't have to be 1.5, and a DM should be able to make a pit 7 feet wide.

While a virtual tabletop could do this, I suspect that the more complex and less structured you make it, the more prone to failure it will be. More than that, my brain isn't very big - I actually rely on 5 foot squares and familiar shapes for cones and spreads to plan my moves in combat. I think if things were more realistically scaled, it would be more like a MMORPG, in a bad way. It's hard to plan your next move in turn-based combat when you don't know if you're within range of the dragon's fiery breath, or whether you'll be able to jump over the 8 foot pit with 2.5 feet of difficult terrain preceding it when you've got a 42 foot land speed. wrote:

Khaim wrote:

Well, first of all it's somewhat metagaming to know exactly how big the dragon's breath weapon is. Besides which, it can almost certainly fly towards you and hit you no matter what you do.

To respond to your point a little better, though, you could easily have a tool that overlays ranges onto the map. Want to stay outside of 30' of someone? Just click an option and mouseover them. And movement would be even easier: when it's my turn, and I click move, all the areas I can move to are shaded bright green. The ones that require some sort of check are yellow, with the skill required in nice black letters. It is not that hard to do this, assuming the Game Table is a real application and not Java-based.

True. The computerized tool could do it all for you, and give you essentially the same information as before in terms of, are you close enough, or far enough, or whatever. I'm not sure how much value-add there would really be though. Instead of just seeing the squares, I'd have to ask the computer if I'm coming close enough to provoke an attack of opportunity, etc.

Balthanon]The other issue with stepping outside of the bounds like that and going to a wider spread of measurements is that it's not really defined in the rules at the moment. Unless it changes drastically in 4.0, I don't see grid based movement coming out of the rules or having alternatives in the books. This is, ultimately, supposed to be about using the same rules that you're using if you met in person.

That's a very good point. Whatever rules the computer would be following, those rules couldn't be transferred to the real life gaming table. However, the two systems could sort of operate in the same environment, with the same maps, and such. It makes sense not to muddy the waters wrote: