Wizards of the Coast announced its new virtual tabletop, Maps, is entering public beta after a year of alpha testing. This new phase of Maps takes all of the virtual tabletop’s original features — which includes rolling digital dice, character tokens, and integration of maps and monsters from a user’s D&D Beyond library — and adds the ability for players to run combat encounters and track initiative directly in the virtual tabletop.
However, there was no mention of Wizards of the Coast’s shiniest new toy, Project Sigil, a 3D virtual map that is currently in closed beta. Sigil premiered at Gen Con earlier this year to mixed reviews in a live actual play starring Baldur’s Gate 3 actors Samantha Béart and Neil Newbon alongside actual play titans Brennan Lee Mulligan, Aabria Iyengar, and Anjali Bhimani.
Among those low-prep features are easy integration of player and enemy tokens, real-time encounter balancing based on the updated Dungeon Master’s Guide, and a flexible initiative without interrupting the encounter. For bigger encounters or multi-stage dungeons, monsters can be hidden until the time is right, giving Dungeon Masters a tool to always up the drama (or take away some extra monsters if things aren’t looking good for the party).
Over the last year, there’s been a lot of buzz about Wizards’ push to make Dungeons & Dragons a digital-native game. In the wake of the COVID-19 lockdown and the ongoing pandemic, more people than ever are using virtual tools to play the world’s most famous tabletop role-playing game, with the D&D Beyond platform claiming over 10 million users during Hasbro’s initial acquisition of the digital toolset in April 2022.
Parent company Hasbro has faced a number of challenges with D&D Beyond since shifting to the new version of D&D’s 5th edition ruleset, prompting some issues with the virtual integrations. Public backlash forced WotC to clarify and walk back some of its statements regarding the new edition’s backward compatibility, but this update seems to prioritize making playing the game easier, not harder.
This Maps update, oddly enough, makes Wizards a powerful competitor in a digital landscape full to bursting with competing products, including popular solutions like Alchemy and Foundry. But it also puts it into direct competition with its own partners, including officially licensed VTTs like Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds. The advantage for harried game masters, of course, is that after having players roll up a character digitally, they can just hit a button in the web browser to seamlessly take the action out of the theater of the mind and into a 2D, visually immersive digital combat experience. According to the post on the D&D Beyond blog, “the goal of Maps has always been to allow Dungeon Masters to prep less [and] play more.”
According to the D&D Beyond announcement, only Master Tier subscribers will be able to host game sessions in Maps, but all users with a free account and browser-based internet access can join a hosted game.
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