From "Hail to the Chief": 

This is my last month working on Dragon and Dungeon magazines. As many of you have heard, we’ve reorganized here in RPG R&D. We’re moving into a brave age of new media and new ways to play, and we’ve got a fresh, upstart team of rogues and renegades dedicated to bringing D&D fully into the 21st century. We’re calling it the D&D New Business team, and I’m excited to say that I get to be part of it. My new title is Digital Games Manager, and part of my new gig involves working with the D&D Studio to help with the content for all the tools and other digital gizmos for D&D Insider. The other part involves … well, all sorts of projects, none of which I’m really able to talk about. NDAs, and all that. What I can say is that it’s exciting, and I can’t wait to share more—to our D&D Insiders, of course.

Let's parse this for interesting phrases. "D&D New Business"; "Digital Games Manager"; "tools and other digital gizmos"

Now you have all read and heard that we here at the Lords of Tyr love D&D and we are big Wizards supporters because of that. But we also are very critical (with much love) of their forays into the digital world. Their current tools (Character Builder and the Compendium) are leaps and bounds better than previous attempts, but the original lofty goals of the DDI digital tools has still fallen way short of expectations. There is still no "digital game table" from Wizards.

This is frustrating and not all at the same time. We have started using MapTools for all of our 4E games. Our Wednesday night game that we just recently started playing is also using a set of macros on top of the default MapTools that will allow you to cut and paste your character, created by the DDI tool, and pop it right in with all your stats and powers into your MapTools character (your graphical token).

Is it perfect? Well not really. But most of the issues surrounding our problems stem from our own lack of understanding the details of setting up powers properly and not fully understanding the features. It lacks some polish, but it allows us to play remotely very easily. It speeds up our game play by keeping track of initiative, round by round effects, and most importantly the map is amazing! Being able to show vision and lighting on a map makes everything click. It really gives you a sense of atmosphere and impending doom when you can't see around a corner that might contain a group of monsters. It is a boon for any DM because now, as opposed to physical maps and minis, you can have stuff all over the map and the players will never know until they walk right into it.

Frankly I think the people that want to use digital game table tools have already moved on. Wizards has probably lost their opportunity to make a compelling game table tool that people will use. I don't even know if that will be their focus for their "New Business" team or not. But just in case it is, I have some advice.

Please STOP using Microsoft only technology. Microsoft's .Net is nice to program in, but in doing so you have left a lot of folks using Mac and Linux out to dry. There is nothing special about what the Character Builder does that Java couldn't have easily done rather than .Net. Frankly I'm still shocked that you would leave out such a large population of people from having a compelling DDI experience. It makes no business sense to do what you did with Character Builder. Actually I'm shocked it wasn't just all web based. There is nothing special that you couldn't do with php, java script and AJAX for the Character Builder. Then you wouldn't even need people to download those updates. 

Instead of starting from scratch on what many of us expect will be a rather lame gaming table application, how about you support something like the RPTools project? Provide access, through DDI, to your huge library of graphics and compendium information. Create a package of supported macros for their client and a direct, works 100% of the time, way to import characters and creatures from the build tools. Provide a few developers to work on improving the already great open source code and give back to the community to improve everyone's RPG experience. The more people that play RPG's the more people will eventually play D&D. You know... the whole rising tide raises everyone up argument.  

Why should you support an open source project? I'll tell you why. There is already a large and dedicated community so there is a player base to start with that will be interested in your content. But most importantly, it is already able to run on every OS that's out there because it is java based. You don't have to start from scratch. 

If you do build your own from scratch you need to make it hugely compelling. That means you have to solve problems that other people haven't solved. You would think that would mean access to graphics and easy import of characters and monsters, but frankly I can do that now pretty much. It isn't perfect, but it is close enough.

You would think that providing video/audio conferencing within the client would be compelling, but frankly everyone has Skype and they are already doing that. 

You would think that recording a game session for future reference or even marketing would be compelling, but frankly people can already do that with services like uStream. We have almost every minute of every game we have played on uStream for at least the last 2 or 3 years. 

You would think that providing a compendium of graphics for maps and tokens would be compelling, but frankly there is so much of that already available online (even from DDI) that people have already done that themselves. 

You would think that bundling up all of the different services from different companies and making it easy to put together games with your friends in a social and technology context would be compelling, but frankly... oh wait. No one is doing that. All of the pieces for a compelling social and digital experience are out there in spades, but they are just that. Pieces. We need someone to take these great best of breed technologies and capabilities bundled them up into something that makes it easier and faster than ever to build and run adventures with your friends whether they are sitting on the same couch or across the continent. 

Combine Skype, DDI community, RPTools, the online Compendium, character and monster builders, library of graphics, uStream, Twitter/Facebook/Google Docs/Instant messaging (all of them), and you might have something there. I really don't want to see a half assed Wizards video chat client. I want to use what everyone already uses. Make it cross platform so you don't leave people out of the loop (hmmm is that the third time I've mentioned that? Must be important).

Perhaps the DDI community could get more exposed to online standards and become more open as well? I know you are working on some of that, but yoru thinking is backwards at the moment. I don't want to go to the DDI community and post something that will cross post to Twitter and Facebook (would be nice compared with nothing though). I want my DDI community page to post Twitters/Facebook from me tagged with #dnd. Don't make us use your tools (you should still have them for people that do though). Open things up so we can use tools that already exist. Open is a two way streak. Wouldn't it be great to have the Community site read some RSS feeds from my website? Yes I know you are putting RSS feeds on a number of things on the site, but again. Make it a two way thing.  You should think about a Jabber service so that all those great Instant Messaging clients out there could be used to instant message people on DDI. Or just use the APIs available to hook directly into all the IM services and aggregate. 

I guess what I'm trying to say is get connected! We have a ton of this stuff already. We don't need/want dumbed down versions of it from Wizards. But you have the unique position and ability to make some deals and use some APIs from other services and projects that would blow our minds if you did it right. 

I'm just saying... :)