Now you can play Dungeons & Dragons — the real kind — with virtual reality

By Jamie Lendino 

There’s a new way to play Dungeons & Dragons without having to gather five of your friends in the kitchen or basement around a big wooden table. And no, I don’t mean by firing up a CRPG like Wizardry, Ultima, or The Witcher 3. I don’t mean by joining an MMORPG either. I mean the real thing: AltSpaceVR has teamed up with Wizards of the Coast, which acquired the rights to D&D back in 1997, to develop an AD&D-focused online virtual reality space that lets you play the paper-and-dice game with other humans, move around miniatures on graph paper, and more.

Here’s how it works: AltSpaceVR aims to make playing Dungeons & Dragons in virtual reality exactly the same as playing it in person, including talking with your friends, gesturing at them, and deciding what to do as an adventuring party. To get started, you need a dungeon master (DM), some players, and the online app.

First, you start a campaign, name it, pick a start time, and get a link that you can send to your friends to bring them into the private tavern where you play the game. Next, you set up what’s called the battlegrid, a virtual table for the miniatures, terrain tiles (including cities, dungeons, and wilderness), and graph paper. You can drag pieces onto it from the end of the table, including tiles for movement and also for UI items like flipping pieces. Players, meanwhile, can create a character sheet or choose an official one, and then can roll dice to attack monsters or make saving throws as the game progresses.

Each player gets two tomes that they can use to bring up and reference character sheets or rules of the game. They’re basically Web browsers, so you can google anything you need during play. The dice float up in virtual space; you grab one and press the blue arrow key to roll it (and you can roll several at once as necessary); all of the players can see the dice and the roll results, but the tomes are private. In addition to those, each person also has three private Web browsers that you can use to, say, google a frost giant and beam the image to the wall in the tavern. The DM can also collect items, get them ready, and keep them private in order to surprise the players later on.

Clicking the bucket icon lets you clear the board. You can also lock the board so that you don’t accidentally knock pieces onto the floor, which is something I could have used when I was 14, a klutz, and hyped up on Mountain Dew. The game works online in a Web browser on a PC or Mac, but it’s really designed for a virtual reality head-mounted display like the Oculus Rift DK2 or the HTC Vive. No word on whether you can throw potato chips at another player when he’s being too much of a rules lawyer. Watch the video below to see how it works in detail, or hit up the AltSpaceVR subreddit to learn more.