The Journey Begins
This week, Hal and I sent out the first round of invites for people to join and try Shard Tabletop. After 18 months of development, we are excited to share our creation with others. We didn’t start out planning to build a service for others. You see, Hal and I have been playing D&D together since 1982. We both have had long experience in the software industry, primarily at Microsoft. Combined with us both having families, there were many years where we just didn’t have the time to play D&D. However, as our kids have grown up and gone off to college, we finally have the time to get back to playing D&D. With our background in software, it didn’t take long for us to start to look for digital tools to help make it easier to play the game together. Unfortunately, we were a bit disappointed with our options, so out came the development tools to start building our own solutions.
Our goal was to make it easier to play D&D in person, around a table, the way that we had always played, but with less shuffling papers, flipping through books to find information, and delays drawing maps and finding monster miniatures. We want to spend more time interacting and playing our characters. One of our first versions displayed a map on a modified monitor splayed out on the dinning room table. It was great, we could show a map, un-fog sections and move the map around as needed. We could put our miniatures on the screen and interact directly with them. Then reality set in, when we moved the map the miniatures didn’t move, making it awkward to use, we still didn’t have enough monster miniatures and the modified monitor wasn’t popular with our wives while it wasn’t in use. Back to the drawing board to make things better.
If we made digital tokens then we could have lots of different tokens and move them around easily. If you have digital tokens then why not have a combat tracker to manage initiative order. If you have the monsters in the tracker, then why not add players. If you have players then why should the DM have to move them around. If the players have their own tokens that they can move then why can’t they have full character sheets. You get the idea we just kept playing and adding features.
Eventually we realized that we were creating a complete solutions that others may find useful as well. We also realized that we were tired of doing the big corporate development process and would rather do something that we could be passionate about. As a result we decided that we would try to turn our tool into a service. At worst, we would end up with a better tool for us to play D&D. At best, we could build something that others found valuable and build a business for years to come. This week we released our first version for you to try.
While we have not rigorously written down our mission statement, there are some principles that we valued highly throughout the process of building Shard Tabletop and that might give you some insight into where we are going with Shard Tabletop.
Only targeting 5th edition of D&D based on the 5E SRD. It is really hard to do a great job with one gaming system, much less multiple. We are focused on doing D&D 5E to the best of our ability.
We are trying to enhance the role-playing experience. Shard Tabletop should improve the in-person experience and also facilitate the online experience, especially with the social distancing currently in place. We are not trying to build a video game experience. We want to support the interpersonal creativity involved with playing role-playing games.
Support different usage modes to support the full community to increase gaming:
Players: Make it easier to learn how to create and play a character. Reduce the time spent managing a character sheet while playing. Make it easier to find all of the abilities of your character so that you can fully utilize all their capabilities. Make it easier to develop the personality and backgrounds of characters, to make unique and interesting characters.
DMs: Make it easier to prepare and play a campaign. Make it easier to be a DM: reduce time preparing to play, reduce time keeping up with the state of the game, decrease the learning curve for new DMs, and include prepared content that allows you to quickly get started playing.
Content Creators: As people play D&D, lots of amazing content gets created. Make it easy for people to package up the content that they create and make it available for other community members to use. When people spend the time to create amazing content, make it easy for them to sell their content. Make sure that content creators can create all types of content, from artwork, to maps, encounters, books, races, classes, backgrounds, monsters, etc. With more content comes more amazing options for players and DMs.
Leverage our experience building software. We want to leverage the power of the web while providing an application like experience. With the web we can ensure data is always stored and available anywhere you can access the web. With an app experience we can make a responsive user interface with minimal lag. By using web technologies to build that app experience we can have created a solution that runs on PCs, phones and tablets, adapting the interface to use available screen real estate. Using efficient engineering processes, we can rapidly evolve the code allowing us to try, evaluate and evolve rapidly to provide the best possible solutions.
While we think that we have a great staring point. This is really just the start of the journey. The list of capabilities that we want to add is long and growing. We invite you to join our journey to help build the best solution for playing D&D. Sign up, give Shard Tabletop a try, and most importantly, let us know what you think. We want to hear your feedback and suggestions so we can keep evolving and improving.
Thank You