D&D’s got a lot going on this year—a 50th anniversary, new revised rulebooks, and a virtual tabletop to boot. Said virtual tabletop (VTT) was showcased heavily at Gen Con 2024, where several head honchos from Wizards of the Coast took to the stage, including VP of franchise and product Jess Lanzillo, seasoned designer Christopher Perkins, and lead rules designer Jeremy Crawford.

The team went over some of their intentions for the new rulebooks—as well its upcoming VTT, now given the codename Project Sigil. The app, as reported by journalist and attendee Christian Hoffer on Twitter, will “have constraints on it” for free users, adding: “D&D Beyond subscribers have more access. They want to use the beta to figure out what’s most valuable to players.”

As part of the bells and whistles attached to Project Sigil, the cast of Baldur’s Gate 3—who belong to Wizards of the Coast, now—will be available as digital minis. Further details, as shared by our friends over at GamesRadar, note that these minis will come with multiple poses but be otherwise unanimated.

Some of these tools do look pretty interesting. A screenshot (thanks, GamesRadar) showcases a powerful-looking editor that’ll let you cobble together battlemaps in the same way you’d flesh out a custom map in a videogame.

The VTT’s head of project, Chris Cao, boasts that the app is “a 3D sandbox that brings your favourite franchises to life in a fast, fun, and immersive way.” Which, alas, gets my hackles up.

My inner old fogey just can’t help but get an uneasy gut feeling when the words ‘franchises to life’ get bandied about in a hobby I started on cheap craft paper using coins for minis. I’m aware I’m being cynical here, but I don’t really play TTRPGs to explore my favourite franchises, I play them to tell new stories with my mates.

On the other hand, it would be a right laugh to do a one-shot or short campaign following Karlach’s adventures after the end of Baldur’s Gate 3—she practically pitches us on one during the game’s epilogue if you take a certain story path, promising a heist to Zariel’s personal forge we’ll never get to see, since Larian isn’t planning on making DLCs. These shiny minis would be a fun way to facilitate that, if Wizards of the Coast doesn’t beat players to the punch and make an official adventure.

However, I could probably achieve that well enough with some elbow grease and access to the other VTTs out there, and while seeing a 3D-rendered Karlach in all her glory would be nice, one of the TTRPG’s biggest advantages as a genre is that you can bring cities into existence with the power of your words and shared imagination.

WoTC’s seeming insistence on creating a shared, hyper-monetised franchise out of a hobby that’s ultimately held together by graph paper and duct tape is setting off a mental carbon monoxide alarm in my brain. Turning the cast of Baldur’s Gate 3—written, conceptualised, and created by Larian—into marketable minis to promote an app feels just plain weird, if entirely anticipated.

Especially since these new rulebooks have pre-order bonuses for Project Sigil already. I don’t want to keep ragging on it—I want D&D’s first proper VTT to be additive to the hobby, rather than adopting all the worst habits of videogame monetisation—but nothing I’ve seen so far inspires that confidence. I’d like very much to be proven wrong.

That being said, I’m not some luddite who’s strict about pen and paper, either. I’ve run games for a player with aphantasia—a condition where your “mind’s eye” can’t form mental images—before, and I think offerings like Project Sigil could be great for them. Similarly, as someone with working memory difficulties due to ADHD, Foundry’s automations and modules have been a godsend for keeping track of Pathfinder 2e’s floating modifiers as a DM.

Time will tell. All I can hope is that both D&D and the Baldur’s Gate canon don’t drown under the sound of a dead horse being beaten into its own grave with characters I love, all in service to a franchised, more easily monetised future.