If you've spent any time watching the ever-excellent Dungeon Craft channel on YouTube, you know that Professor DungeonMaster is not afraid to take Wizards of the Coast to the mat and has been critical of many of the moves the company has made of late. At Pax Unplugged, he got a chance to play the Virtual Tabletop (VTT) version of Dungeons & Dragons which is now being developed and expected to be a major new direction for the game and WotC.
He didn't hate it. Leading up to playing it, he was concerned it would look, feel, and play much like a video game and gut the heart of what makes D&D special. But he reports that's not the case. It very much is a virtual version of a terrain and minis game where you move your pieces around and interact with the digital environment, much like you would a physical tabletop game.
What the digital version does offer is automatic rules integration, dice rolling, spell effects animations, POV options, and the like. He was honestly more impressed than he expected to be. In the end, he suspects that the VTT will simply join a list of options for how to play the game: theater of the mind, terrain and models, VTT.
