D&D’s new virtual tabletop is surprisingly good for playing in person

Last summer, Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast revealed something truly ambitious — a virtual tabletop (VTT) custom-built for playing D&D online. It won’t be a simple top-down game with tokens and flat maps. Wizards has chosen Unreal Engine 5 to build their VTT, which is the latest, greatest, multiplatform development suite for TV, video games, and movies. The project was still at its early stages but I saw promise when I visited Seattle to see a demonstration.

Even in its current form, the D&D VTT works surprisingly well for a session played in person. Even though I was seated behind a gaming laptop with a huge screen, I could still interact easily with other players at the table and even the Dungeon master. Using a mouse, I could reach into the scene and move my miniature around freely — just like I can in a physical game. The VTT is a standout amongst the most expensive tabletop terrain today, with its sophisticated lighting and rich textures. It is surrounded by a light, fast interface. The game looks great and is just right for players and Dungeon Masters.

When you are moving, it almost seems like the digital part of everything is gone. Even though I was using a computer, it still felt like traditional D&D. But it’s still very much a hinky work in progress, with just a single map and a collection of digital renders of licensed miniatures by WizKids. Not all the miniatures are colored yet.

There’s clearly still plenty of work to be done, including the online component. That’s why developers are being careful not to get too far ahead of themselves.

“We should not be going public with this at all when the basic features that we have is roll some dice, have initiative, and have some pieces [move] around,” said D&D Digital vice president Chris Cao. “Because it doesn’t say, Here’s the grand picture. And we actually are purposely trading that off — and this isn’t through nobility, this is actually through what’s best — is that we don’t know the ideal way people want to use this.”

Cao, along with his partner in development, Kale, the principal designer of games, have described their entire process as a form of exploration. The pair’s 45-minute talk sounded like they were professors rather than programmers. The problem they’ve set out to solve: How will they translate a 50-year-old physical experience into a format that clicks for digital natives, without losing the ephemeral core of the brand?

“There’s tens of millions of people who play RPGs and who know about D&D,” said Cao. “The actual number of people who are playing D&D at any given time is nowhere near as large as those playing RPG video games. [We believe that’s because] there’s just a missing piece of a translation there. What can we do to give them something digital that allows them to go? Oh. OK. It’s got my familiar video game things?”

VTTs such as Fantasy GroundsSince the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, players were able to benefit from this partnership. The partnership came at a time when players were desperately searching for ways to maintain their campaigns while also separating themselves from other groups. At the same time, people completely unfamiliar with the hobby came flocking to D&D, no doubt spurred on by programs like Critical Role and Stranger Things — and the tedium of being cooped up at home. Roll20, the industry leader, said that its users had doubled, reaching 10 million by 2022.

But Cao and Stutzman are surprisingly sober about the fact that they’re not just going to be competing against these other, popular VTTs.

“If I’m building a map tool, what is my competition? Google Images,” Stutzman said. “If I can type ‘tavern’ into Google Images and get a better map than my map tool can make in the same amount of time, then my map tool has failed.”

And so the team at Wizards isn’t working on creation tools first. This hard work is coming later. Development has focused instead on refining a shared experience at the dining table. Without that, a lightning-fast building tool won’t make any difference. This means that the team made small adjustments to an existing prototype and conducted a lot of testing.

“The way to think about it is, you need to prioritize the things that you’re going to do together versus the things you’re going to do by yourself,” Cao said. “Because the things you do together are the throughline. And that doesn’t mean that building [3D maps] isn’t important. There’s a lot of good stuff out there and a lot of good programs that are focused on building. That’s great. But the reason you play D&D together, and you spend time together, is because you’re creating moments together.”

How will VTT be monetised in the end? Turns out that’s still on the drawing board as well.

“We know for sure that we want there to be a free part to this, because people have to be able to try it out,” Cao said. “That free [part] can’t be a free-to-play game [though]. It can’t be like, Earn some points by playing for some hours, because that’s not how D&D works.”

Cao acknowledges that the situation is still fluid as Stutzman and his team work to sort out the details.

“I know those sound like soft answers,” Cao continued, “but if we can watch how people can play, then I can align the business with what they’re valuing instead of creating a value structure The following are some examples of how to use you have to play in. Because if we do that, on D&D — that actually is toxic to what D&D is. Because D&D is about that shared play and that permission to pretend. That doesn’t mean it’s free. That doesn’t mean we don’t monetize it. But if we don’t see how people use it, and then align with that — if we try to predict it, or engineer it — we’re going against our own brand. We’re going against the thing that people create and make their own businesses off of, and their own dreams off of. I think there have been mistakes in the recent past where we’re like, ‘We’re not gonna do that.’ And we’re very sensitive to that.”

Wizards will soon share with the public a beta version of VTT.