Tales of Fablecraft?

Some time within the last year, I wondered why TTRPG rulesets are still distributed as books. As opposed to being distributed exclusively through virtual tabletops, or some form of digital asset management system.

We currently have to buy D&D books six different times if we want to access them at a table, or on Roll20, or on DNDBeyond, or Fantasy Grounds, or Foundry VTT, or whatever other place.

That’s because the thing you’re buying is still, essentially, the text of a book. But surely the TTRPG hardback book full of cool artwork is a relic of the past by now, only of interest to collectors. (Disclaimer: I have two shelves of them.)

Then I watched the opening bit for a recent episode of Critical Role and saw an ad for Tales of Fablecraft, available for free on Steam.

It’s a TTRPG virtual tabletop distributed as a computer game on Steam. It has all the video and audio conferencing and chatlogs and dice rolling and rules and stuff built into one convenient software package. It’s not a tabletop that you bring your own rules to, it’s the rules and the tabletop together.

Is this the beginning of the future for TTRPGs? Is this the beginning of the end for the D&D empire?

It would be a massive chore to do something like this for D&D, since the D&D rules are so frickin’ complicated. But it’s kind of weird that Wizards of the Coast isn’t leading the way in this space.

I understand Wizards is working on their own virtual tabletop experience, but I’ve never seen it and I’m guessing it’s probably stuck in development hell. It’s probably going to be one of those things that’s developed in partnership with 50 contractors, and ends up being terrible for everyone. That’s just how software development works now.

Instead of Wizards, the leader in this space is apparently somebody called Riftweaver Game Studio, with something called Tales of Fablecraft.

It looks like a very rules light game system, which is perfect for getting people on board with it. It seems to fulfil the virtual tabletop promise of showing up and having everything there on the computer, but in a way that is tightly integrated and might actually work the way it’s supposed to.

Anyway, it seems like a noteworthy development to me, if you’re into the world of tabletop RPGs, and actual play media, and so forth.

P.S. I challenged myself not to just go to DALL-E and get a blog post image in seconds, but rather spend a frustratingly long time getting a picture from my phone to my image hosting directory. Anyway now I can use that picture for any posts related to TTRPGs.

Related

• Reading Old Writing S1 E5 - Airworld (2012)
• Does AI Steal?
• Reading Old Writing S1 E4 - Kubak Outpost (2011)
• Recent Blog Updates
• AI-ing Yourself