Thursday, February 11, 2010

Update to MS Surface D&D Game Table

The very idea of this is sure to make the traditionalists rant, the edge bleeders rave and the rest to go, meh? Short vid, but looks like they've improved some stuff compared to original MS Surface D&D Table. Still, dice response is too slow. [They really need to keep physical dice and use camera to read values, or something.] See also, other electronic game tables.



CNET Story with claims of coming soon to a store near you.

Even if you rage against mixing electrogadgetry with your RPG you gotta give the Carnegie Mellon crew credit for doing interesting research that will spread well beyond games.

4 comments:

  1. I'm not a traditionalist. I would totally build one of these things myself if I had the tech know-how or buy one if it was on the market. The ability to move maps around without having to redraw is worth it's value.

    The dice feature is cool, because it can do a lot of save time features such as generate initiative and combat and get going.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ah, come on. "meh", you can rant better than that.

    We don't play entirely in our heads. We use technology to handle the hard/tedious/difficult bits. Tech such as paper, and pencils, and dice. This is just the continuation of that trend.

    Besides mmorpg is 3d. This is retro 2d!


    To be honest I don't like that table either, But, I'm not against this cause it's a computer. I'm against it cause it's not simple/slick enough. It breaks my immersion and imagination of the game. 10, 20, 100 years down the road, after this is perfected, I'm so there.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Looks like is would slow the game down more than it would help it. I can draw a map 1000x faster on a battlemat than I could generate one on that new-fangled contraption. Sure it wouldn't look as pretty, but what's on that soul-destroying abomination isn't nearly as evocative as what a player can come up with in his mind.

    Having said that...I wouldn't say no if someone offered me a free one :)

    ReplyDelete

All Time Most Popular Posts