D&D Next

[MNBlockHead]

Originally Posted by rob

Some assumptions above require clarification.

In general, the only companies who actually sign something at GenCon or other such events are the small ones. For sizable companies, meetings and discussions take place at GenCon, but any contracts must still go through lawyers, so nothing gets signed at GenCon.

Darn lawyers, always the lawyers. ;-)

And, in the case of Wizards, they don't even send people of sufficient clout to GenCon to actually attempt to work through licensing details.

Sad when the folks running a gaming company aren't interested in attending the largest gaming convention. That's a problem when a niche company with a rabid fan base is bought by a much larger company manage a diverse portfolio of brands. Still, I'm impressed with what WoTC has been able to accomplish with 5e.

[MNBlockHead]

Originally Posted by ddaley

For what it's worth, I have been mentioning Realm Works every chance I get on the wizards forums. Not sure if that helps at all...

Another thing that helps is to complete the monthly surveys that WoTC runs. There is always and other-comments question at the end. I figure the surveys are more closely looked at by developers and business leaders at WoTC than the forums.

[Parody]

Originally Posted by RavenX

It seems a bit backwards having a convention for industry authors and the writers not being there. Gary Gygax loved attending. What happened to Gen Con? It's like the spirit of the convention is gone. It feels like Santa giving up on Christmas and just sending out the Krampus.

I think the 60,000+ attendees would say the convention's about them and the thousands upon thousands of events they attended, games they tried out, and products they purchased. That's always been my focus at Gen Con, and to me the spirit's alive and well!

If you want only industry folks, that's the GAMA Trade Show.

As far as what happened, I'd put forth that the Internet and cell phones have reduced the value of gatherings for face-to-face time and centralizing announcements. You can communicate instantly 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. You can put an announcement on your website and have people talking about it immediately on social media, fan sites, blogs, and such. There's times where sitting down with folks is still needed and/or very useful, but you can do a lot more without getting together than you could in the past.

[wurzel]

Originally Posted by MNBlockHead

I'm running a campaign in a world I'm creating myself, and RW was the best product for me to manage it. But if I were interested in running WoTC's canned adventure paths, I would definitely consider FG.

Seems like I need to have a closer look at RW for the management of my own campaign...

As for HL and D&D5 I'm not so sure. Pathfinder with all those complex rules and endless flow of additional material made playing virtually impossible without a tool to manage the information. D5 on the other hand is so simple that you don't always have to investigate rules and their exceptions and discuss them with the players, so you can instead concentrate on real role playing.

It is even possible to play with paper character sheets like in the good old times... in PF that's completely out of scope. I think I should ban electronic tools from the gaming table completely, since in my opinion RPGs are mostly about social interaction between real human beings.

Some people might call me oldfashioned but yes, I am, and proud of it.

[Aaron]

Originally Posted by wurzel

Seems like I need to have a closer look at RW for the management of my own campaign...

As for HL and D&D5 I'm not so sure. Pathfinder with all those complex rules and endless flow of additional material made playing virtually impossible without a tool to manage the information. D5 on the other hand is so simple that you don't always have to investigate rules and their exceptions and discuss them with the players, so you can instead concentrate on real role playing.

It is even possible to play with paper character sheets like in the good old times... in PF that's completely out of scope. I think I should ban electronic tools from the gaming table completely, since in my opinion RPGs are mostly about social interaction between real human beings.

Some people might call me oldfashioned but yes, I am, and proud of it.

Everyone load up your iTorch and uPitchfork apps, and run burn_the_luddite.exe! Crap. Internet's out and they have always on DRM? Oh well, screw it then.

You win this one, wurzel! But we'll be back as soon as we can lynch people without exerting more than our index fingers.

[Vilhjalmr]

Originally Posted by wurzel

Seems like I need to have a closer look at RW for the management of my own campaign...

As for HL and D&D5 I'm not so sure. Pathfinder with all those complex rules and endless flow of additional material made playing virtually impossible without a tool to manage the information. D5 on the other hand is so simple that you don't always have to investigate rules and their exceptions and discuss them with the players, so you can instead concentrate on real role playing.

It is even possible to play with paper character sheets like in the good old times... in PF that's completely out of scope. I think I should ban electronic tools from the gaming table completely, since in my opinion RPGs are mostly about social interaction between real human beings.

Some people might call me oldfashioned but yes, I am, and proud of it.

Let me re-iterate - Yes, D&D5e is simple enough to build a character and play without e-tools. However e-tools (like Hero Lab) allow me to easily test builds without wasting stacks of paper and pencil, allow me to easily stock up custom-built NPCs, BBEGs, etc, without the constant page-flipping and toil of building from the books.

They are not a necessity; they are a god-send of convenience.

[Strategon]

My old gaming group quit playing 5e and went back to Pathfinder just so they could use Hero lab. o.O

[Southern Man]

I gave up on Herolabs, even though I've been using it for years.

I went ahead and picked up Fantasy Grounds, and the 5e ruleset. I didn't think I would, but I really like the online games you can get in to on Fantasy grounds.

[MNBlockHead]

If I were to play or run an on-line game, I would consider Fantasy Grounds, but I just didn't see the need for it for at-table gaming. Even if running a game online, I worry that FG would be just too much extra work required for Game Prep.

I did experiment with a remote player at my at-table game using Roll20 through Google Hangouts. That worked well. Not sure what FG would really add to that other than combat automation. But I'm not sure that the time saved on combat makes up for the extra data entry.

Since I'm about 1/2 a year into DMing after decades of not playing any RPGs, I am doing my best to try out the various digital tools. But more often than not, I don't find that they add much to at table games. For example, I find it much quicker to set up and play a combat encounter with minis/pogs/rocks than move things around digitally. I'm also finding myself increasing doing away with battlemaps and minis, whether analog or digital and just describing the room and having the party describe what they do, or putting up a map but just talking through what the party is doing.

I save battlemaps for more complicated encounters or where the location is interesting enough where having the map adds to the encounter.

I'm trying to spend less time on maps, duplicate data entry, and setting up technology, and more time on developing the stories. When it comes down to it, the only software I really need for my games is Realm Works.

IF WoTC and RW every enter an agreement so that DnD 5e content is made available in HL, I'd check it out, but I see it more as a nice to have. I've certainly been playing fine without it.

If someone took RW away, however, I would probably stop game mastering. At least I wouldn't bother with a home brew world and on-going campaign. I would likely stick to stand-alone adventures with pre-gen characters. Either from published sources or my own creation. But I just can't see managing all the history, session info, background, plots, etc. on paper or even in Evernote or other tools. I would just be work at that point and would take too much time.

[Strategon]

Originally Posted by rob

Something to consider...

There are a LOT of companies with digital tools who all view D&D 5E as a huge opportunity. I know of multiple that have been actively courting a deal with Wizards. In our case, we've been talking to them in earnest for about two years now. Thus far, exactly ONE company that I'm aware of has actually signed anything (FG).

There may be inferences that can be drawn here...

So what I infer from this is WOTC has digital tools through FG; It's extremely expensive and as part of the deal they are not really motivated to license to anyone else. This probably means, that there aren't really any negotiations happening at this point.

How "off" is my inference?