Evidently the fine people at Wizards of the Coast (WotC) saw fit to create a Dungeons & Dragons Facebook application called D&D Tiny Adventures (not to be confused with Tiny TOON Adventures). In this app, you can select from a significantly narrow list of adventurers and begin your own solo campaign, where all of the interaction, storytelling, dice rolling, and camaraderie that make a D&D event fun are completely removed.

To be honest, it’s actually a very well-designed app. Unfortunately, it appears as though WotC didn’t have any clue just how popular the app would be, and it has been functioning poorly since launch. Currently, as I type this, it is simply unavailable. In a thread on the app forums, WotC admits to both broadband issues as well as server errors; both of which they are attempting to resolve so that the app can run smoothly.

In the meantime, I’ve been able to run one complete adventure, and half of another. The way it works is once you’ve defined your character and named him (or her, though the female options are few), you select an adventure from the list of available scenarios. Once launched, you are given a small introduction to the adventure that establishes the setting. And then, you wait. Ten minutes to be precise. You see, every adventure is split up into several encounters, which can consist of either a battle with a monster, brigand, or an attempt to locate a secret entrance or avoid a trap. Once you have launched one encounter, you have to wait ten minutes for the next encounter to become available. This is actually a good idea, because it means you can launch an adventure when you have a free moment, and then you can come back at your own convenience and look back at what you have “accomplished”. This concept has gone far, far beyond the concept of “casual gamer” and into the realm of “utterly uninvolved gamer”. But for a Facebook app, it works.

Each encounter will consist of you “encountering” something, and then the system will give you a skill with a target die roll that you have to hit in order to be successful at whatever task the encounter is asking you to perform. For example, you may encounter an old man that asks you to correctly answer a riddle in order to proceed. As such, you perform an Intelligence check d20 die roll against 14. The system rolls for you; with your roll combined with any Intelligence modifiers, you either succeed or fail. Success gains you movement towards your desination, a sizable amount of experience points, and potentially items or gold. Failure usually also gains you movement towards your destination, but at the loss of some amount of your health.

The dice rolls are really sketchy. In my current adventure, I had three successive encounters where EVERY roll ended up as a 4. I was down to just 10 hit points, and luckily had a Potion of Healing on hand in case of just such a situation. At any point you can enter your adventure and administer a potion to yourself, to either regain health or increase your skill statistics. Between adventures, you can buy and sell weapons and armor, potions, and other items. Also, if you have any friends playing the game, you can help them out by healing them or assisting in their battles.

All in all, it’s a pretty good system for a Facebook app. I wish they had built in a bit more interactivity, but for what it is designed to accomplish, it does it well.

I just wish it were actually, you know, UP right now. I have a Drow stronghold to clean out.