Swiping across several screens saw large boxes that were filled with numbers fully generated and ready to go – from skills to attacks and spells. Answer a few questions and it’ll spit out an iconic character that fit’s your playstyle.Īs the character creation finished, the game dropped you into a digital character sheet made up of information filled boxes. If that’s too much for you, Trapdoor is making a beginner-friendly quiz version of character creation. That easy accessibility was the killer feature, what would have taken twenty or thirty minutes of writing and rulebook searching instead took moments of swiping and typing. Confused about the rules halfway through? Pull up a search bar and see exactly how bonus actions work in moments. Don’t know the Armor Class adjustment for a breastplate? Tap it.
As you tap around, the relevant sections of content from the Player’s Handbook simply pop up. Creating a character was a breeze, with successive screens giving you races, classes, and backgrounds to choose from, all decorated with lovely art from the game books. Of all that, the character sheets and creation was the most fully implemented in the demo I touched. It’s got tabs for characters, adventures, campaigns, parties, a creation called forge, and a library of D&D game rules. The app itself is straightforward, with a homescreen that tells you the latest official D&D news and app updates. “We would put something in and say, oh, I’ve just automated the fun out of this,” said Matney.
That’s the part that was tricky for the Trapdoor team, who would sometimes implement a feature and realize it was a bad call. The basic functions like the character creation and character sheet are a blast to play with, and the automated functions at the heart of the app actually speed up, rather than roadblock, the experience at the table. After a few hours with the app, though, I was well pleased.
Matney and his developers had to be constantly aware of when their electronic experience was taking away from what makes D&D fun: Social experience. In a hands on session with the latest version of DungeonScape at Gen Con, I saw that Trapdoor is closer to making a functional digital D&D than anyone before them. At the same time, they wanted the app to “eliminate that 45 minutes of looking at rulebooks that’s eating up your gaming time,” he said. “We wanted it to be no more intrusive than a character sheet,” said Chris Matney, the managing director for Trapdoor. Trapdoor Technologies is trying to change that with D&D DungeonScape, their companion app to the brand new 5th Edition of D&D. Trapdoor Technologies is very close to making the first true digital Dungeons & Dragons experience, with the help of Wizards of the Coast.ĭungeons & Dragons has a history with digital companions that’s at times more frustrating than not – half fulfilled potential and disappointing functionality leading to an at-times frustrating experience trying to integrate tech into the game table.