ePawn

[VenomousFiligree]

Wow, just come across this - a "budget Microsoft Surface", looks great! Just the thing for using all my maps and tokens on

[Mellock]

Wow, goodbye Chessex maps eh. from this link, I found the following release and pricing info:

We do plan to have a commercial release by first quarter next year, with a 23" screen for 400$ (this price being mainly driven by the screen itself).

Interesting.

[Moon Wizard]

This looks promising. If reviews look good, I might have to pick up a copy and run a local game with one.

Cheers,
JPG

[JMOxx75]

I will be real happy when there is a VTT for tablets. Then the ePawn would really be cool in conjunction with the tablet.

[Valarian]

Technically, it depends on the tablet. There are Windows 7 tablets out there that will run any of the VTTs currently around.

Call me a curmudgeon, but I can't see this being big for roleplaying any time soon. Until the technology is ubiquitous, the cost will be too high for niche software developers to support. A niche product for a niche product isn't going to be a big market. There again, I rarely use battle maps. I use maps to illustrate the area or to give the players an idea of the layout of a location.

It also looks to me as if it might serve a product like MapTool or BattleGrounds better than FG2. The focus in FG2 is on the character, with the map as an additional aspect (treated as another type of image). I like this aspect of FG2 as, I think, it encourages roleplaying over playing with virtual minis. With the map focussed VTTs, the map is the tabletop and tokens have attributes. This sounds very much like the ePawn tokens.

Sorry to sound negative. Yes, it looks good and it might (with a lot of work) be possible to run a game with one. Just, I think, not for me.

[damned]

i was thinking initially that a tablet app wouldnt be overly useful due to its limited screen space... but someone suggested tabs within the app and i do think it would well.
character sheet
map
other images
story
library

[JMOxx75]

I was thinking in terms of each player using their tablet for their character and the DM would use his for story, pics etc and use ePawn to display the battlemap or anything else the dm would normally share with the group. Also dice rolls would be displayed on the ePawn. Just my ideas of what I would like to see but I know that I never will. Like Valarian said "niche for a niche".