D&D’s New Virtual Tabletop on Display at Gen Con
D&D’s new virtual tabletop, Project Sigil, was on display at the D&D Live event at Gen Con 2024. Here’s what we know.
D&D’s new virtual tabletop, codenamed Project Sigil, was on display at this year’s Gen Con. Shown off in an event titled “D&D Live” featuring an actual play game with Baldur’s Gate 3’s very own Astarion and Karlach (played by their actors, Samantha Beart and Neil Newbon), as well as Brennan Lee Mulligan, and Anjali Bhimani led by DM Aabria Iyengar. The video of this goes up later in the day.
But during the live show, Wizards of the Coast brought out their new virtual tabletop for players to use. For many, it was the first glimpse of Project Sigil in action.
Project Sigil – D&D’s VTT at Gen Con 2024
First of all, there’s no denying that it looks good. But it’d have to. You don’t get to be the billion dollar behemoth that is Wizards of the Coast without having a good art budget. And in the pictures of the “virtual miniatures” you can see the sidestepping of the uncanny valley by making them look like they’re made out of plastic/resin and painted. The paint details are intricate, but then they don’t have to worry about the limitations of reality. Which, to be fair, it seems like many miniatures painters don’t have to worry about either.
But what is Sigil? As you can see, it’s a Virtual Tabletop platform. A 3D one, no less. Designed in Unreal Engine 5, it’s capable of all sorts of things, from dramatic lighting effects to spell animations. Animations and particle effects which were, if you recall, at the heart of the OGL controversy from 2023. Wizards of the Coast didn’t want 3rd party creators making animations and effects to show off Magic Missile. Recall this phrase from a list of possible restrictions to virtual tabletops:
What isn’t permitted are features that don’t replicate your dining room table storytelling. If you replace your imagination with an animation of the Magic Missile streaking across the board to strike your target, your VTT integrates our content into an NFT, that’s not the tabletop experience. That’s more like a video game.
Which was a bad idea then, and continues to be a bad idea. So it’s good that WotC executives listened to their customers (who were en masse cancelling D&D Beyond subscriptions), and caved to consumer pressure. But it serves as an interesting reminder of how much focus and depth there is in this virtual tabletop.
Something that, in WotC’s own words, provides an animation of the Magic Missile streaking across the board to strike a target, an animation that makes it “more like a video game”.
And that is the critical question that the D&D virtual tabletop will have to answer. Where is the line between virtual D&D and video game with too many extra steps? Because it seems that the most successful VTTs are the ones that make it easier to play and that get in your way as little as possible (which is still a lot).
Roll20 is trying to make your life easier by working from within Discord, a huge get for them. D&D’s virtual tabletop stands out with absolutely gorgeous set pieces.
But that means it’s more like a 3D level builder. Now, certainly, the Project Sigil versions of published adventures will be easy to figure out. Just purchase the digital pack and it’ll come preloaded. Easy peasy. But what about your home games? Maybe there’ll be a market of pre-built levels. Maybe this will be a cool toolkit for aspiring level designers to play with. But will D&D DMs using this have to dedicate even more time to preparing their adventures, so they can have the maps and models ready to go?
Either way, its worth pointing out that, during D&D Live, once Sigil came out, that’s where the players focused instead of on the game. WotC has a difficult needle to thread. But if you want to learn more about it, you can sign up for the closed beta coming this fall.
