OK, so this showed up in my feed, does anyone know anything about it beyond the article? Is this the start of hybridized computer games to more closely imitate tabletop games?

Quote from: TheVerge ArticleDungeons & Dragons doesn't have the best history when it comes to video game adaptations, but the upcoming Sword Coast Legends could well be an exception to that rule. At a glance it's just a typical generic RPG with D&D trappings, but it also lets you emulate the experience of playing the venerable pen-and-paper game. Key to that is a "DM mode" that lets one player act as a dungeon master, guiding the experience of four other players in real time.

It's not entirely clear how that dynamic will work, but the developers — the game is actually being co-developed by studios n-Space and Digital Extremes — are hoping that the new feature will help set the game apart from the plethora of forgettable D&D video games before it. "Dungeon master mode is going to allow players to quickly jump in and play as a real-time DM in a way that has never really been fully realized in a video game," n-Space president Dan Tudge told IGN. "DMs are able to adjust encounters, place, promote, manage and even control monsters, set traps, reward and punish party members — all in real time."

Aside from that defining feature, however, the game looks to be fairly standard RPG fare, with four-player cooperative gameplay and an isometric perspective reminiscent of Diablo. Sword Coast Legends will also feature a single-player story mode written by members of the Dragon Age: Origin development team. The game is slated to launch on PC-only sometime this year.

Looks like a more user friendly version of Neverwinter Nights DM mode.

That isn't a negative, I'm kind if interested from the promo as it looks like the tools might be user friendly.

Neverwinter Nights had that, a GM mode who could be invisible, create anything, award exp, gold (or take it away) basically had all the dev tools to pick from.  Without a toolkit to make your own adventures like NWN had, not sure how exciting the GM mode could be with canned modules only.

my impression is a multi player version of Baldur's gate

Quote from: Sacrosanct;815519my impression is a multi player version of Baldur's gate

I playtested that! It was fun!

As for the article.

Guess these jokers never saw the various D&D PC games that were damn good. SSI's "Gold Box" series were excellent. Along with Baldurs Gate and Neverwinter, some of the best D&D PC adaptions.

And yeah. Neverwinter had a DM mode for miltiplayer.

Actually the original SSI/AOL Neverwinter MMO had a DM mode as well. But only the moderators had access to that.

Quote from: CRKrueger;815512Neverwinter Nights had that, a GM mode who could be invisible, create anything, award exp, gold (or take it away) basically had all the dev tools to pick from.  Without a toolkit to make your own adventures like NWN had, not sure how exciting the GM mode could be with canned modules only.

Trouble withe NWN was you had to build it all up front.

I had a view of a game where you could just drag in prefabed objects from a library and monsters off a list, add in a prebuilt trap or whatever.

Effectively you could tie all of that to a digital version of the random dungeon generators. If I have that then I could DM a great game but I always found in NWN as I was running it that I wanted to add a thing I I couldn't as it was all done up front, and that was after spending weeks building a city

Its been ages. But I believe NWN 1 had options for the DM to drop in NPCs and monsters on the fly. It was clunky if I recall right. But do-able. Then the DM took over the creature as needed.

But you had to prep the rest beforehand. Someone had a Keep on the Borderlands worked up.

2008 called, it wants its obviously doomed project back.

On a more serious note, fuckin' City of Heroes had a "GM mode", as did both NWN games, as already pointed out. All of this makes Wizbros' continued failure to implement an online GMing interface all the more puzzling.

Quote from: Omega;815542As for the article.

Guess these jokers never saw the various D&D PC games that were damn good. SSI's "Gold Box" series were excellent. Along with Baldurs Gate and Neverwinter, some of the best D&D PC adaptions.

My exact same thoughts. WTF was that?

Quote from: snooggums;815510Looks like a more user friendly version of Neverwinter Nights DM mode.

Or a slightly more adversarial Diablo.

iirc, the first V:tM computer game (Redemption?) also had a GM mode.

Quote from: jibbajibba;815543Trouble withe NWN was you had to build it all up front.

I had a view of a game where you could just drag in prefabed objects from a library and monsters off a list, add in a prebuilt trap or whatever.

Effectively you could tie all of that to a digital version of the random dungeon generators. If I have that then I could DM a great game but I always found in NWN as I was running it that I wanted to add a thing I I couldn't as it was all done up front, and that was after spending weeks building a city

You have to run it  like LARP event with your locations preplanned in the advance. It is more flexible on dropping in NPCs. I ran like a half-dozen session of a campaign using NWN. Ironically with players drawn from the boffer LARP I managed.

Aside from the convenience of being on-line, the automatic handling of mechanics was nice, and the fact that there was a rudimentary A.I. to handle the NPCs you were not currently possessing.

I really like the feature that allow the GM to possess an arbitrary NPC. I got good enough at to have roleplay three or four NPCs in a group conversation with the PCs.

With that being said Virtual Tabletops, to date, are the only type of software the replicates what you do with the tabletop on-line.

Quote from: The Butcher;815557On a more serious note, fuckin' City of Heroes had a "GM mode", as did both NWN games, as already pointed out. All of this makes Wizbros' continued failure to implement an online GMing interface all the more puzzling.

NWN style roleplaying will always be a specialty interest. The overhead of incorporating 3D graphcis is just too limiting compared to the whiteboard approach of Virtual Tabletops.

Imagine if you ran a session of tabletop and the only way of showing anything was through the one set of Dwarven Forge Dungeon Terrain you one. You can shell out time and/or money to build an entire collection of Dwarven Forge style terrain but it still would not me enough if that was the only means you had to describe show anything during the campaign.

You could saw that is true of Virtual Tabletop as you need some type of bitmap to show anything. However the skill required to create a 2D bitmap of something are far more widespread than the skill to create a 3d Model. The same hold true with people willing create professional work and sell stuff you can buy conveniently. (Battlemaps, images, tokens, etc).

I'm far more interested in the singleplayer mode. If that can reach the quality of Baldurs Gate or at least Icewind Dale I will lose a lot of time.


As for the promise of enabling the real D&D experince in a computer game, well, we've heard that before. At the tabletop I can create a unique NPC with a few sentences. A few sentences more, and I created a fantastical city. I don't see a digital representation beating that.

Quote from: estar;815568You have to run it  like LARP event with your locations preplanned in the advance. It is more flexible on dropping in NPCs. I ran like a half-dozen session of a campaign using NWN. Ironically with players drawn from the boffer LARP I managed.

Aside from the convenience of being on-line, the automatic handling of mechanics was nice, and the fact that there was a rudimentary A.I. to handle the NPCs you were not currently possessing.

I really like the feature that allow the GM to possess an arbitrary NPC. I got good enough at to have roleplay three or four NPCs in a group conversation with the PCs.

With that being said Virtual Tabletops, to date, are the only type of software the replicates what you do with the tabletop on-line.

What I really want is a collection of a thousand or so location templates so I can just stick a temple in round the next corner, then I want a set of about a dozen textures and settings I can apply on the fly. So I can select temple, dress it with "eldrictch horror", "desolate ruin" or "sacred goodness".

I want to be able to add doors , pick up one of the 3 dozen preloaded or my own custom trap objects and chuck it in the corridor.

All that stuff should be doable its not complex it just requires a slightly different coding paradigm and the client server relationship needs to be tweaked so that he players don't download the map to their PCs they log into a remote citrix style session so all the grunt takes place server side. They you would be able to build and render on the fly.

The community would quickly populate thousands of location objects and a few dozen set dressings.

When running NWN I would find that I hadn't set the door up properly and it only opened one way or a range of other minutia that simple don't matter on a table top but entirely fuck it on line. Partly my personality for sure but I found the only way to test a build was to run through it 3 times yourself. So between building and testing you were doing 5 hours prep for a 1 hour game. You also need a vast quantity of content. A typical structure that would take a four or five hour session to go through on the table might take 30 minutes if the players were skilled, quick and efficient.

I can spin random stuff into a coherent game all day but prepping to that degree just not me.

Didn't that Vampire computer game also do something like this?