Rust Monster

The online tools demoed at Gen Con have been the subject of much speculation. The demo showed us some pretty amazing things and offers many people around the world who find it difficult to get together with a group of player the opportunity to experience D&D like it was meant to be experienced - with friends around a table. Now you’ll have to have a subscription in order to use all the functionality of the tools, but the digital tools are by no mean necessary to play the game, they are designed to facilitate some of the game’s aspects.

Well Design & Development over at D&D Insider has finally shed some light on what we might see from these online tools. Check it out!

System Requirements

Our recommended specs for the PC platform includes Windows XP SP2, 512MB RAM, AMD XP 2400 + or Intel P4 2.6Ghz, and a graphic card with 128 MB RAM and support of Shader 2.0. These recommended specs allow you to experience the full range of lighting and Shader effects our 3D engine offers.

Well now, a PC based application. I’ve heard back and forth that it would be solely a web based application. I’m sure the product out of the box will be great but hopefully we’ll see the ability for community expansions, much like we’ve seen for Neverwinter Nights.

We are designing the D&D Game Table to be as flexible as we can make it, to accommodate even non-D&D games. The D&D Game Table will not adjudicate game rules any more than your kitchen table adjudicates rules for you.

Wow! Another revelation -I had also heard a lot of talk that this would handle some of the game mechanics - ok, not a lot but some. I’m pleased to see this is not the case. Bring on the House Rules! The dice rolling feature is also optional - use a random number generator, use animated dice, or use your own - it’s still ours to control. Even sweeter is the DM can fudge the electronic dice.

The D&D Character Creator

This is a two parter - the visualizer and the sheet. Now we all saw the visualizer demo and having a custom mini for your game board is nice! No more having to pick a figure the closely resembles your character - or even better, basing your character off the miniature you could find.

But the sheet is still one object that holds some speculation from me. I’ve never been a fan of electronic character builders. You usually can’t get them to use ever rule you want (no to mention house rules) and you’re even lucky if it computes everything properly. But I even tried my hand at a character builder/campaign manger, never got around to finishing it though.

D&D Insider subscribers will be able to create characters using content from any published book. To get access to the full details of the relevant rules and mechanical elements, though, you will need to own the E-version of the physical book where these rules or mechanical elements were published.

But with the online version of the rules it seems like the character sheet will always have access to the latest published rules (and hopefully errata) and we won’t have to wait for a software patch or expansion pack.

The D&D Dungeon Builder

OK, so not much meat here. It uses the builder currently available for download now but allows you to use them on the game table.

The D&D Encounter Builder

This is another tool that I personally have never made much use of in previous applications (D&D Core Rules, E-Tools). They’ve always been overly complex and and took too much of my session planning time. I would spend so much time on minute and pointless details.

It has been mentioned in the Gen Con seminars that 4th Edition encounters are not necessarily combat encounters, but also social encounters and other type of challenges; the Encounter Builder will enable DMs to create these as well.

Well thats great but we still need to see more to make me a believer. I’m holding out hope that they’ll come up with something that I can really use.

Character Vaults

Another name for storage space. So you’ll be able to store your characters online - and they can each even have a blog - damn, even digital characters will have blogs now. You’ll also be able to share your characters with others. Um, doesn’t tickle my fancy but I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who want to show off their characters so this is for them.

Campaign Vaults

And this is storage space for the DM. But this is still pretty cool I think.

As a DM, you will be able to store your encounters and maps, so that they can be loaded in the D&D Game Table. You will also be able to showcase your campaigns, keep track of what is going on there, present background information…

You can even use a wiki to document your campaign! That’s novel - Ok, we’ve been doing that here at Rust Monster for the last year or so but it’s still a great addition to the D&D 4E tool set.

So all in all the online tool kit is shaping up to be something real good I think. I’m still anxiously awaiting the release of 4E and all that entails but until then I’m still looking for some solid info on what we can expect. So share it if you got it.

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