If you want to “roll initiative”, then there has to be a way for the players to roll off-table and supply a number, or for the DM to input the numbers himself, or for the DM to choose to auto-roll and indicate the result to the group.

On the topic of Maptool – I’ve used a few different products over the years. For 4e, I’ve used Masterplan, DnD4eCM, iPlay4e and several others. Most recently, our group used MapTool. I can say without a doubt, that my ideal DM-ing software is some mythical combination of these things. They each bring something to the experience that the others do not. When one of our group couldn’t make the drive up MapTool’s remote capabilities saved the session. With Skype, and a web-cam and the rest of us on our laptops round the table, it felt just like he was right there with us.

BTW – none of them come with animated dice rolling.

There is no question that the D&D SurfaceScape looks amazing. But because it is not open source and readily available to… well anyone but some MIT folks its not really practical to anyone for playing. Even if it was available, how many people actually have a Microsoft (yuck!) surface to use it on? Hmmm. I know a lot of gamers and not a single one has a Microsoft Surface.

@um It has taken our DM’s about 2 sessions each to get really comfortable with the tool. You don’t have to use all the bells and whistles to start with. Just using it as a free form digital battle map works great without any prep work at all. You can just draw a map on the fly just like you would on table. Although I dare you to try and draw a perfect line or circle on a table . I can agree that there are some interface improvements to be made. But its still highly useful and it works great. Not to mention that it is open source (this is a huge selling point to me). Open source means it is free. It means that it will always be free. It means that, God forbid, the entire RPTools team got ran over buy a bus and died, that the project could continue on no matter what . It means that any Java programmer that wants to spend time improving can improve it. It runs on Java so it runs on every PC OS platform really well. RPTools is worth using and it is definitely worth improving.

As for images to make it useful. Well you have the same issue for all of these types of tools. Luckily for us, we have found 10′s of thousands of images to use. Not to mention the handy use of a scanner. That argument is like saying that you have to go buy minis and a battlemap or dungeon tiles to use minis for your RPG. Yep. There is work involved, but its no different than using any visual aid you would use either real or digital.

I am able to fully create/find all of the digital resources I need for an entire adventure in about 3 hours of prep time. This also includes all the npc information/stats, maps, and graphics for the npc pieces.

Let’s wait and see where the D&D Surface and RPTools are in a few years. My prediction is that RPTools will have more users and more functionality, but will still not be as pretty. In the end, an open source project, running on an open cross platform technology, that doesn’t depend on a really expensive piece of hardware, with unlimited potential, and a much larger use base is going to do better in the long run (IMHO).

All that aside this table is a really good implementation of a somewhat obvious idea.

The post is here:
D&D Gaming on Microsoft’s Surface.