D&D 5E The Glimmering - NFT Heroes in a Blockchain Campaign?

[Tonguez]

It's pretty standard in a con to recruit respectable "faces". They are just as much victims as anyone else, paying with their reputations.

Stephen Radney-McFarland has been attached as the lead designer since the company started NFTs Are Here to Ruin Dungeons & Dragons

 

[mamba]

From that article:

“Gripnr will build a system for recording game progress on the Polygon blockchain. Players will log into the system and will play an adventure under the supervision of a Gripnr-certified Game Master. After each game session is over, the outcome will be logged on-chain, putting data back onto each NFT”

“To sum up: Players will buy a pre-generated D&D character, play with it in pre-generated adventures, level it up on the blockchain, and then sell it. It sounds like easy money, right? You’ll get paid to play your favorite game.”

“As PCs gain levels in-game, Gripnr asserts that their associated NFTs will become more valuable, and when they are re-sold, the owner and any creatives who contributed to the associated portrait will receive a cut of the sale price.”

This is even stupider than I initially thought… certified DM, selling char (I expected items), even thinking anyone wants to buy your char…

Open to fraud as well, because the items apparently ultimately are under DM control, leading to

“there’s incentive for players and game masters to abuse gameplay—or even just fake a game, inputting values onto the NFT without actually playing—in order to artificially inflate the value of their NFT-PCs.

Comer is aware of the issue, and apologetic. He doesn’t quite know how to prevent fraud yet,”

I thought their game would be in charge of that, because if anyone can just assign themselves whatever items they want this is all completely pointless (and worthless). Maybe solve that one before you even start building anything

And then there also is still this, the article rightfully points out that the OGL covers rules and monsters well, but classes very little

“the OGL only allows certain elements and mechanics of the D&D system, not the whole game, and Gripnr has stated that it will “provide better options for 5e play” which players have been “clamoring” for.”

 

[Sorcerers Apprentice]

This is the only thing I've seen mentioned so far that can't be done better with more traditional technology.

Mind you, you can decentralize it with traditional technology as well, but cheating becomes a slightly harder problem to solve.

The blockchain does nothing to deal with the main way to cheat in this kind of shared game: there's no good way to verify that what gets entered into the ledger actually reflects what happened during the game. If a group and DM colludes to run a sham session just to report that character X got the special item his build depends on, there's no real way to stop that.

 

[humble minion]

If a group and DM colludes to run a sham session just to report that character X got the special item his build depends on, there's no real way to stop that.

At one stage they were literally talking about paying people to watch recordings of other peoples games to police this sort of thing, which is one of the dumbest ideas imaginable, and exposes the nakedness of the Gripnr emperor pretty comprehensively.

 

[darjr]

Again, NOPE!!!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I’ve also got a charactersheet on D&D Beyond and some PDFs from DrivethruRPG, all digital. Not that I’m going to get in to the Glimmering but if others want to, more power to them…

A character sheet on D&D Beyond contains actual data. At present, the vast majority of NFTs, whatever they may be, do not contain data, but rather, URLs or other things which point to data. There are exceptions, but they are just that, exceptions.

Every PDF you have purchased from DrivethruRPG is, like the previous, actual data. If DrivethruRPG were to go under, you might not be able to get that data back, but you do, in fact, actually have that data. With NFTs, the one (and only) thing you "own" is, effectively, an ID number which contains a very, very small data file. That very small data file generally contains a set of text, such as a URL, which points to something else.

NFTs are scammy as hell because, in general, they sell themselves as actual ownership of something--an artwork, a data file, a piece of music, what-have-you--but in truth the NFT you buy isn't even a certificate by itself. It's just a chunk of code, which has a URL inside it. If that URL expires, or gets changed, you're screwed. If someone else finds that URL and shares it, you most certainly don't have the ability to stop them from doing so. And if someone takes the data, such as a piece of art, and uses it in ways you don't like, you absolutely do not have any kind of rights regarding the work, even if the work is something like commissioned art.

Like the vast majority of artificial scarcity technology, it's a quirky and idiosyncratic idea in search of a use-case, not a revolutionary change in human existence that the normies are too stupid to adopt. That doesn't mean that artificial scarcity cannot ever have a use case. But you should be as suspicious of any proposed use as you would of snake oil, especially if someone is making grand, society-transforming or fortune-making promises.

It is likely that some kind of real, practical, meaningful application for blockchains will exist someday. It may even be the case that in certain niche ways, NFTs could be useful (perhaps as a credentialing system, or a way to cut down on paperwork by automating certain kinds of bookkeeping.) But in the vast majority of cases, artificial scarcity tech is a solution desperately hunting for a problem.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

At one stage they were literally talking about paying people to watch recordings of other peoples games to police this sort of thing, which is one of the dumbest ideas imaginable, and exposes the nakedness of the Gripnr emperor pretty comprehensively.

Even better, when I tried to look up information on this, my bad-link blocking tools prevented me from actually looking at the Gripnr site directly, because it was identified as a suspicious data-harvesting thing.

Really inspires confidence when reference links from journalist websites about the product are marked as suspicious.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

This is the only thing I've seen mentioned so far that can't be done better with more traditional technology.

Mind you, you can decentralize it with traditional technology as well, but cheating becomes a slightly harder problem to solve.

The problem is, this would require each NFT to actually contain all relevant data inside it, which at present almost all NFTs do not.

Blockchain stuff could theoretically do it, but you still end up with a question of cheating, as said above. As with almost all questions of security, it's only as strong as its weakest link, and it's only effective as a deterrent, not as an unassailable defense. Blockchain would prevent manipulation of the data on the character sheet itself--you would know exactly how the sheet changed over time. So you take the manipulation away from the sheet and onto the people who modify the sheet.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

A lot of cryptobros have been learning, the hard way, that a consensus-backed "trust-free" distributed ledger doesn't actually mean you don't have to worry about trust anymore. The algorithm can't protect you from fraud.

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

I thought their game would be in charge of that, because if anyone can just assign themselves whatever items they want this is all completely pointless (and worthless). Maybe solve that one before you even start building anything

Yeah, that's both worse and better than I expected. I figured that the stuff that got added to to the character would have to be "mined".

 

[mamba]

The problem is, this would require each NFT to actually contain all relevant data inside it, which at present almost all NFTs do not.

that is not that different to overcome. Usually this is not done because storing large amounts of data on the chain is costly, so you store a link instead of a 20 MB picture.

The D&D data is not that large that storing the actual data should be a problem