Over the past couple of years, software for playing tabletop roleplaying games remotely has become more popular than ever – for obvious reasons. Not content with people using third-party software such as Roll20, Wizards Of The Coast have announced today that they’re making their own Dungeons & Dragons virtual tabletop using Unreal Engine 5. It looks pretty swish.
The virtual tabletop is called D&D Digital and it was announced today as part of the Wizards Presents stream. You’ll find it around the 7m 20s mark of this video. As reported by (RPS sister site) Dicebreaker, the platform will allow folks to create 3D environments, populate them with miniatures, and then move ’em around as their adventure progresses.
The software provides practical tools to help with play, including in-software dice rolls, health bars and moving characters using a ruler to measure distance. There’s also a tilt-shift effect on the in-software camera to make it all look suitably like a model world you’re tinkering with.
If you don’t fancy piecing the environments together from the provided prefabs, Wizards also say that they’ll bundle the software with pre-build environments and campaigns. The idea is obviously that it be as accessible and easy to use as possible.
Wizards Of The Coast announced the virtual tabletop software at the same time as the successor to D&D 5th Edition. No, it’s not 6th Edition, but “One D&D”, which will effectively treat the tabletop system as a live service game which evolves constantly rather than via occasional major releases. You can read more about One D&D over on Dicebreaker, too.