I’ve never been one to get into these “social-network website” things. Every time someone asks to add me to their friends list, I say I don’t have an account, and I get a look of confusion. I have a ton of respect for the social-web thing, I think it’s a great platform and still has a lot of untapped potential, but I just never found a compelling enough reason to get into the bandwagon.
Until I heard abut Dungeons & Dragons: Tiny Adventures (D&D:TA).
I honestly don’t remember where I first read about it, but as I scoured the internets for a regular dose of RPG news, I slowly noticed the words “Facebook” and “D&D” increasingly being mentioned together. I also noticed that the few comments I ran into weren’t all scathing remarks. They say the servers are often down, but then that might indicate that it’s getting more popular than they expected.
So, I thought it might be worth a closer look.
Here’s the official announcement from WotC’s VP of Digital Gaming Randy Buehler (Digital Insider #3):
Yesterday we launched a Facebook Application called Dungeons & Dragons: Tiny Adventures (note: you must be pre-logged in to Facebook). It’s basically a free game that we’re giving away to Facebook users in an effort to draw more attention to D&D in general and to the D&D Insider free trial in particular. The game lets you choose a character and then send that character off on adventures. You can just check in on your character periodically and read updates (I think of them as postcards from the road) or you can spend lots of time fiddling with potions and inventory. In addition, you and your friends can buff and heal each other so it pays off to get all your friends to play too. We’re pretty happy with it – I think it’s a fun diversion for hard-core D&D players and it’s also a fun introduction for newbies.
…
“‘… choose a character, send on adventures, check periodically, friends can buff and heal…’ OK, interesting enough. I’ve never played real tabletop D&D before, so what the hey?! I’ll give it a shot!”
And so I was finally convinced to join a social-network and see for myself what all the fuss was about.
Generally speaking, Randy Buehler’s description above already describes the experience very well. You pick a pre-made character based on the current D&D 4th Edition Classes and Races, then choose “adventures” (missions) to send your character to. Adventures are composed of several story points called “updates”, which occurs every few minutes (usually 10 minutes) from the time you start the Adventure.
At each Update, your character gets into a situation which requires a skill-check on your stats. For example, your character sees something shiny at the top of a mountain. D&D:TA will make a strength check (the game will roll your dice for you) to see if you can successfully climb the mountain, and the narrative text will reflect the results accordingly. If you passed the skill-check, you might find that the shiny object is an item you can equip, if you fail, you might fall and take some damage. Either way, you get eXperience Points to move your character closer to leveling-up, though you obviously get more XP on successful skill-checks. Although you can fail an Adventure, you don’t really die, and you character will regain HP over time to try for another Adventure.
If you don’t leave your character on her own, you can actually change re-equip her based on what she has or what she’s found so far, or you can make her drink potions (that have to be equipped prior to the Adventure) to heal or buff her-up in-between Updates.
Supposedly, your Facebook friends can help you out by healing you or giving you buffs, but I haven’t gotten around to trying this feature yet. I also wanted to provide some screenshots, but I can’t:
Due to events beyond our control, Dungeons & Dragons: Tiny Adventures will be down until 12 pm PST, Monday August 25. We expect that even when we are able to restore the application to working order that we will have lost some of our data in the process. While we are working hard to prevent this it is likely that we will have to roll back to our stored data from Friday, August 22nd. Thank you for your patience.
And so, after several Adventures (some successful, some failed) and reaching level 3, the adventures of Trifle, my Eldarin Wizard, came to a halt.
To prevent you from being disillusioned by what D&D:TA can do during each Adventure, you can’t really make choices other than in the equipment and timing of drinking potions between Updates. Also, you can’t really cast Spells or use Skills, it’s really just the game rolling dice against your character’s stats to determine the outcome of an event. C’mon people, it’s a Facebook app! You weren’t expecting a full-fledged D&D game, were you?! (That’s D&D Insider.)
Regardless, from the little time I’ve had in trying it out, it’s a fun time-waster and (more importantly) it appears to do what it was set out to do. As someone who doesn’t play tabletop D&D, this little app gave me a small, casual slice of the experience (which could perhaps be enough to interest others in the hobby).
I think Greywulf’s post about Dungeons & Dragons: Tiny Adventures describes what slice of D&D is captured by this little app.
If any of this managed to spark your interest, log-in to your Facebook account and send your character off to a Dungeons & Dragons: Tiny Adventure! (assuming the server isn’t down)
— 2008.08/26 18:08 update —
Server’s back up! Trifle was reset to… nothing (I didn’t have an account yet last Aug22), so I’ll have to build him up again.
Unfortunately, Trifle’s rolling pretty bad right now. ;_;
Tags:
D&D,
opinion
