Personally, I say let things fall to the medium that best suits them. If D&D is sufficiently complicated rules wise that it is actually more fun to have software take care of that so you can just focus on the tactical combat and scripted story choices, then the video game is probably your best bet! There are many other TTRPGs where this is not the case, and where any digitization would take away much more than it would add. Such RPGs are elegant enough rules wise that they do not slow down play at the table, and you can spend 99% of your time just relishing each other's madcap plans and imaginative descriptions of things.
[0] https://www.polygon.com/2020/2/27/21156082/baldurs-gate-3-di...
These kind of stuff never happens in CRPGs - it couldn't because there's infinite number of possible open-ended solutions to any problem. If AI can improvise them I'd argue it's as good as a Turing Test.
BTW complicated rules aren't that big of a problem - there is a compromise between CRPGs and TTRPGs - and it's computer-assisted TTRPGs played over internet. The most important advantage is that you can play with people from other continent, so it's much easier to find players. But the computer-assisted part is also making the rules much less of a problem. You set up your character (all the items, feats, skills, abilities) before the game, and when DM wants he asks you to roll the attack, you click and the system rolls the dices for everybody to see, adds the needed modifiers, calculates the damage (including critical hit if needed etc. ) and shows how much hitpoints you lost.
It's faster than doing all this stuff physically and beyond the initial setup and occasional level-up it makes complicated rules more bearable.
No kidding. I've been writing a WinForms program that is basically a combination character progression tracking, inventory management and basic battle system for Star Wars Fantasy Flight Games.
Why? Do we not want the person-to-person experience? Hardly! We need more wetware space for strategy and thinking of creative ideas, so we need to free up the parts for calculating what number of ability vs proficiency dice and what talents may mess with the roll etc.
You still use voice (usually over discord) and DM decides what happens on the fly.
But most importantly you don't have to play with people that live close to you, makes it much easier to find someone to play with, it's why I started playing p&p rpg again after over a decade.
I could see sites like roll20 recording the sessions with metadata (at this point they said this and GM told "roll perception" and they rolled d20 + 3) as a way to train a virtual DM. Of course it would need crazy amount of games.
It also requires a lot of GM research and development, even for those games that are at least partially supported.
Roll20 also has a marginal audio chat solution. It was so bad that we chose to replace that part with Discord in my current campaign.
There is a background music solution available in roll20, but I was never impressed by it.
In my current game, we found it was better in the long run to convert everything to Discord, because it was better on the collaboration and audio chat functions, which helped the humans communicate with each other better and resulted in an overall better game. We lost the interactive mapping functions and the mostly kinda semi sorta integrated character sheets of roll20, but in the end, those were less important to us than the other collaboration functions of Discord.
There's some tips for 5e:
- set "always roll with advantage" in campaign settings to true, it removes the fiddling with the system by the player each time they want to roll, now it's just a click on a weapon or a skill, and it lets DM decide after the roll if it was advantage and change the interpretation without rerolling. You simply ignore the second roll if it was a straight test, take worse or better out of the 2 rolls if player had disadvantage/advantage
- install free chrome extension "vtt enhancement suite" - it allows for executing macros on all selected tokens at once - especially useful for starting combat with lots of enemies - you select for example 10 tokens and click on a macro that rolls initiative for each of them and adds them to the initiative tracker, you ask players to select their tokens and click the same macro - 5 seconds and combat with 16 participants is ready to go - normally I would have to roll physically 10 times, ask players and sort it manually and it would take a minute or 2
- use DM layer for hidden enemies/traps/secret doors/notes/etc - you can then easily move them to map/token layer when players roll perception
- reinforcements in a combat are easy when you put some tokens in DM layer - you can add them all to the combat tracker and the tokens on DM layer will be hidden from the players until you move them to token layer
- make players drag and drop their most used spells and items to a quick-use bar on the bottom left of the screen - it's 15 minutes to set this up on the session 0, but later it eliminates the problem "I closed my character sheet, wait 20 seconds for me to find the button to roll the attack"
- set up tokens to have hitpoints and AC bars on them (keep them hidden from players) - when you click on hitpoints bar on a token and write "-17" it will automatically decrease the hitpoints by 17 points, don't need to substract in your head every time
All of this allows me to run combat several times faster than I could possibly do physically, it adds up quickly.
Overall, in trying to reduce the complexity of the game, they gave you a finnicky spreadsheet nightmare of half-baked solutions to problems no-one had.
> Something as simple as equipping a piece of armour is an excersise in trying 5 different things
You just drag&drop it from compendium to your inventory?
Plus, we already have (weak) AI DMs. They're called video game RPGs. You're the player (as are many others in the case of an MMO), the game itself is the GM. They do many things better than a human could (handle lots of background math, present gorgeously rendered environments, have professionally voice acted NPCs, have skill based real time combat), but the audiences don't entirely overlap because TTRPG players are seeking the freedom of choice and limitless outcome that video games cannot really match.