Grognards, this interview is not for you.  Today I had the pleasure of interviewing Andrew Reutter, the creator of iplay4e.appspot.com/. iplay4e is a web-based app that allows you to play your character, with only your iPhone and an internet connection. In addition, the website gives you a place to store and access your .dnd4e character files. As if that weren't enough, you can also view your character in a character sheet formatted for the browser and play off your laptop instead. DM's haven't been left out either, since you can view the whole party in a "Party Panel", which can be pretty handy.

 And, by the way, he's a Mac user.

 1) How did you get started playing D&D?

 When I was a kid in Detroit, around 2nd grade, I noticed a red box on a shelf in the coat closet at my grandma's house.  The dice and books inside fascinated me, but I didn't really have anyone to play with.

 It turns out one of my uncles or aunts (I have 12!) had gone through a brief D&D phase.

 A couple years later, one of the kids down the street from me got his hands on the AD&D books.  We made up characters, and basically just ran fights against the monsters.  No story, no plot, just glorious battle.  I remember that monster XP was listed as something like "1000+ 4/HP", which we misinterpreted as 1000 XP and 4 HP.  Needless to say, our ever-increasing amount of hit points made it pretty hard to lose a battle.

 It was in junior high, after my family moved to the suburbs, that I actually had a gaming group and played D&D "properly."  We'd have sleepovers and play for entire weekends.  I'm the only one of my friends that would still happily do that, which either makes me a fanatic or makes everyone else lame.

 Ever since I found that group, I've been the DM probably 80% of the time.  I get a real rush out of providing fun to that many people. It's similar to a performance high.

2) iplay 4e is a fantastic concept that we've used quite a bit. What led you to create iplay4e?

 Straight-up personal interest - I wanted to run my character on my iPhone.  I also wanted to learn the Google App Engine web application framework.  I've always found that a project is the best way to learn a new technology, so I built iPlay4e on Google App Engine, which is excellent, by the way.

 I just personally love showing up for a D&D game with nothing besides my phone.  I really didn't expect so many other folks to get use from it too!  But once there was a lot of interest, my "performance gene" kicked in and I started adding features that would broaden the audience and help current users get more out of it.

3) What do you think of Wizards of the Coast's efforts to bring new technology to D&D?

 I'm a big fan.  As much as I love the books (I have every 4.0 hardcover, and most of 3.5), I really hate needing a pile of 15 books just to make a decent character.  The Character Builder was inevitable and wonderful, and the Monster Builder as well.  I've been really impressed with the quality of the software.

 I'm also impressed at their technological openness.  The fact that both builders represent things in XML makes it possible for sites like iPlay4e to exist.  They didn't have to do it that way; they could have used some custom or encoded format that would be painful to deal with. They've also been quite friendly to me, which I appreciate. I'd rather talk to developers than lawyers.

 The only thing that raises my eyebrow is their choice of framework, but that's probably a personal thing. I'm a web bigot.  I think that every piece of software should be a web application.  At very least, it needs to run on my Mac.  But hey, if they had done the Character Builder as a web app, there wouldn't have been room for iPlay4e!

4) How long did it take you to put together the site once you had the concept?

 It only took a couple months to get the basics going.  I've been programming for a long time, so there's a lot of previously written code I can use when I want to build something.  For example, I already had libraries for making web apps that act like iPhone apps.  I didn't have to start from scratch.

5) Do you have any idea how many players are using iplay4e? How about the total number of characters stored? Based on your numbers, what would you say the "state of D&D" is?

 There are about 10,000 public characters on the site.  I'd guess there are probably half as many private characters.  In my infinite wisdom, I haven't been counting users (that's getting fixed in the next update).  But I think the large number of characters on the site, which has hardly been marketed at all, speaks to the continued popularity of D&D.  Furthermore, it shows that there's quite a demand for technology around the game.

6) Do you think anything is lost from the gaming experience by using new technology (i.e. "diceless gaming")?

 Of course!  You lose the experience of rebuilding a character after losing your sheet.  You lose the experience of pausing the game because someone doesn't think they recalculated their attack bonus after the last time they leveled up.

 But to be less facetious, there's something to be said for the rolling of actual dice, with the attendant superstition and ritual.  You can't really have your favorite lucky random number generator.

 To me, D&D is about telling a good story and having kick-ass combat scenes.  Unfortunately, there's traditionally been a lot of accounting and homework involved.  Those aren't the fun part to me, so anything that helps to automate the accounting lets you get more storytelling and ass-kicking done.

7) Is there a new audience created for D&D (or any tabletop RPG for that matter) due to tools like iplay 4e and the new technology from Wizards or do these efforts just keep veteran players gaming?

 I don't think the tools directly create a new audience.  I'm having a hard time imagining someone who was only willing to play D&D once the character sheets went digital.  I think it's more about retention. If someone is trying D&D for the first time, they may not come back if they were intimidated by the math or if they spent a lot of time watching the other players argue about numbers.  So by improving the overall gaming experience, digital tools can help people keep playing the game.

8) What else is left to for iplay 4e?

 Well, you can always visit labs.iplay4e.com to see what's coming up in the next release.  That's our public beta site, where we work out the wrinkles in new features before pushing them to the main site.

 Currently in the labs we have a major site redesign.  When I started iPlay4e, it was pretty iPhone-centric, and the site shows it when you visit it from a normal browser.  The redesign changes that assumption and makes better use of the browser window.  Full-page characters sheets are the standard, instead of being hidden away behind an icon on the mobile sheets.

 We've also redesigned the search functionality, so you can just type in a character's name or "dwarf fighter 5" and get what you're looking for, instead of messing around with a bunch of dropdown lists.  And finally, we've added campaign functionality, so groups of players and characters can be bundled together and automatically be visible to everyone else in the group.

 We'll be going live with all of that in about a month.  We're pretty much at the testing and "make the damn thing work in Internet Explorer" phase.  After that, we start in on support for the Monster Builder.  You'll be able to upload monsters to iPlay4e, group them into encounters, and interact with them just like characters. 

 Once Monster Builder support is in place, we'll finally be ready to build a combat tracker, which will be sweet.  We'll be passing real-time updates around, so a player using an iPhone can mark some damage on his sheet and the DM will see the change on his laptop. Hopefully we can pull off some sort of Google Maps mashup so there will even be a virtual tabletop.