Play Dungeons and Dragons in VR!

From 10 years old and throughout the most of my teens I played Dungeons and Dragons. Because it was awesome. You get a load of friends round and you go on adventures. The fact that it was spoken, and that the story existed in the collective imagination of those present, made it special. Plus there are really cool dice and little action figures.

As an individual who has a pathetic psychologic need to have his views and stories heard by others, I was frequently a dungeon master (DMs rule). You are in control of the story. You can buy pre-scripted modules, but cool kid as I was, I used like writing my own dungeons and adventures from scratch. You create stories and plots and incidences. You get to draw intricate maps on graph paper. And finally you have people play through your story live. It was great and possibly influenced my developing brain to the point where I now write and just make shit up for a career.

People still play Dungeons and Dragons but it has largely fallen out of favour as you can interactively fight orcs and role-play on the interweb these days. Games like World of Warcraft kind of recreate the ‘get together with your coolest friends and smite some goblins’ vibe but it isn’t quite the same. Your imagination is peaked by computer games as you explore, but the story isn’t in the mind of the group of friends chatting round a table. You are walking through someone else’s imagination. (Not that I don’t love computer games as well.)

Unless you have actually played D&D you are unlikely to understand. Sorry if that sounds patronising but it is true.

As there are less people playing Dungeons and Dragons, it can be hard to find a game. Well, now there is a passable solution. You can play D&D using virtual reality! I’m not talking a Skyrim-type experience. I’m talking the sitting around a virtual table and talking experience. I guess you could Skype these days, but then only one person gets to play with the dice and you don’t get character sheets littering the table and the little figures moving through a dungeon and… ah whatever.

Basically a company called AltspaceVR designed a VR Skype kind of idea. Behind intelligent engineer types, quite a few grew up playing D&D and tried to recreate it. It worked brilliantly and they have the full backing of the Wizards of the Coast. That is the company that owns Dungeons and Dragons and Magic the Gathering by the way, not a Cornish cult or anything.

For this post I just meant to just write – hey cool! You can play D&D in VR – look at this video. But I went on a bit. Sorry. Happy memories. Here is the video…