Whats crazy about this is that Syndic and I were just talking about this last night as we drove back from a rousing D&D session with Eighth and Aeqoureus; using Microsoft’s touch table platform, Surface, developing a mapping system that let you do things on the fly. This was after we went over certain stats on some of the player characters that were kind of off base. So a computerized system would be great– in fact, why not have a dynamic map system, so that you could generate combat encounters on the fly and keep track of everything?

Well, the guys at Carnegie Mellon University beat us to the punch I’m afraid. They’re working on a program called “Surfacescapes” which will allow a band of heroes a dynamic interface that recalls character information via objects, view maps of the world, and map out encounters. You can check out a video of their walkthrough here.

What I can say right now is that any application is better than no application. The use of the pre-game space for story elements is pretty cool, as well as the graphical components. My few suggestions would be thus: I would rather roll real die, since I mean, I’d like there to be some physicality to the game leftover, I would rather just have tokens for the monsters, maybe a music modulator, and lastly, a tile set randomizer would be sweet, so you could just call up the random pub in case the players happen to go in. Ultimately, it really just makes me want one of these displays.