The D&D Digital Gaming Table
 

I was just reading about D&D 4th Edition:



One of the features they offer is the "Digital Gaming Table", an application that lets you play D&D online with a viewable play surface, dice rolling, virtual miniatures, and voice chat. You can see a sneak preview of it here:



Although it's graphical, the focus doesn't seem to be about competing with MMORPGs. Instead it seems to be more like a social networking system, allowing you to play D&D with people who can't come around to your house every week (a problem that I can certainly relate to, having lost contact with several RP groups due to moving home over the years).

Thinking about this brought to mind the recent discussions about promoting muds. If WotC are able to pull off this Digital Gaming Table, where the emphasis is on finding people to play with rather than fancy graphics, perhaps text-based muds could jump on the bandwagon (particularly the more heavily RP-oriented ones with less automation, like many of the MUSHes).

The Digital Gaming Table seems to be geared towards D&D, a system that many roleplayers dislike - but how might those roleplayers respond to an RP-enforced text-based mud with a fancy graphical client that uses a non-d20 system?

Re: The D&D Digital Gaming Table
 

Actually that's very interesting to me. When I moved away to uni I tried to continue playing with my RP group via webcam and whilst it was an adequate solution it was never ideal. Something like that would be great for not only keeping in touch with groups you're away from but for finding completely new groups too.