The cool whisper of steel shivers through the darkened room as I pull my blade from my sheath. Before me is a menagerie of creatures, waiting with eager anticipation to destroy me. I and my companions ready ourselves for the inevitable duel. A quick charge, a flash of steel, a parried thrust with my sword and a dodging weave past an enemy attack. An explosion of magical energy swells in the room, and after less than a minute, the enemies begin to fall, death taking them while my friends grimly congratulate each other on a job well done.

But as I take a deep breath and look around the living room and see the lengthening shadows, I suddenly realize this epic battle of quick-thinking and quicker ripostes took a little longer than I expected. Glancing at my watch, I see that it has, in fact, been nearly six hours.

Did a wizard cast “Time Stop” on me? Was I engulfed by a bolt of “Melf’s Really Ridiculously Long Fight Scene?” Perhaps it was merely “Tasha’s Torrential Tangents” that derailed what should have been a quick and fun brouhaha? The world may never know, but what I do know is that Wizards of the Coast is finally taking action to rectify this situation.

The Dungeon and Dragons Game Table is a program that will allow players of Dungeons and Dragons tabletop role-playing games to create 3D avatars for their characters. It’s like a video game supplement to a tabletop game, not unlike a video game of Risk or Texas Hold ’Em. It will allow the Dungeon Master in D&D to create dungeons in 3D styles with icons, walls and traps, similar to Campaign Cartographer. It also creates preset toggle functions for dice rolls so that combat and skills can be rolled in front of the players or at the DM’s discretion.

The real advantage of the program is that a DM can be in Richmond while his friends live in Washingon, D.C. And he can create preset maps and dungeons to use in Richmond while his friends can join in the quest over a high-speed connection that allows them to move their characters over the map. The DM can send messages to various players privately for hidden messages, can reveal the dice-rolls to the players publicly or to certain individuals in the game, or he can even make up results for dice rolls to keep story continuity from collapsing.

Players are free to communicate with headsets or chat, but members of Wizards suggest that it also may be possible to use the program in version of PowerPoint so that players and DM can gather at one location and use the premade maps for greater ease and flexibility of play than simple pen and paper maps and clunky miniatures.

Since the DM can already have maps drawn with the program and is able to digitally reveal elements one at a time, and since players can create to great detail the 3D avatars of their characters, rich and fully detailed combat can be quickly utilized to make a fight fast and dirty instead of long and drawn out.

Though most of the small details for this program can be observed at the Wizards of the Coast Web site http://wizards.com/insider/gametable I thought it would be a good idea to bring up some points that the people of Wizard mentioned outside of the site.

First of all, players have complete control over the design of their character. From the design of eye color, hair length and color, body type, etc. This power of creation deviates from many older MMO designs in which there was a limited amount of prototypes you would choose from. Each playable race in D&D gives the players the option to customize it. Only when the players diverge from the basic playable races into typical monster races such as minotaurs, vampires and so forth do their avatars begin to fit static predesigned characters. In addition, players can upload jpegs for their avatars, and all of it can be converted to a 3D realm for tabletop fans to play with.

Doubling grid size for avatars that become enlarged via the spell; characters hovering for flight spells; creating partially visible characters that are hidden or invisible are some things that the representatives at Wizard hinted may happen to the final project. Add-on and expansion packs for more dungeon icons and templates also may be available. Regrettably, avatars will remain static when they attack enemies — so no swinging swords or animated critical hits.

That Wizards of the Coast refuses to publish anything but 4.0 rules from now on isn’t a problem because players who have a thirst for the 3.5 rule system should know that the program does not compute rules for either the players or DM. Thus, the DM is free to use whatever rules or rolls they feel appropriate. So if players want to play 4.0 or 3.5 rules or even other tabletop RPGs with D&D avatars using this program, they are free to do so.

I was pretty excited about the possibilities here. Waiting 20 minutes for a DM to sketch out a map, the constant moves and alterations on the map, and the space needed for the map really bog down my tabletop enjoyment. And as many of my friends live far away since we’ve graduated college, this will allow me to play with them at long distances and make combat relatively quick and cool even at short distances.

That alone is totally worth it.

Wizards of the Coast has classified this program as in production, so we’ll just to be patient for it to hit the shelves, and they’re not sure on the price, yet. The only sure thing is that Wizards has no option available for the Mac right now.