TOPIC: RFID on future Dragon Orbs?

So I hear Jeff is putting RFID in the new Dragon Orbs to preventing counterfeiting, What about the previous 3 orbs? They are worth more then the newer ones. Certainly the Eldrich and Legendary tokens are worth more and don't have chips....Thoughts anyone?

Randal Heike wrote: So I hear Jeff is putting RFID in the new Dragon Orbs to preventing counterfeiting, What about the previous 3 orbs? They are worth more then the newer ones. Certainly the Eldrich and Legendary tokens are worth more and don't have chips....Thoughts anyone?

It is hard to re-do old tokens, but we will be re-issuing the Charms of Avarice yet AGAIN with RFID chips, also. We will have readers in each Training Room to authenticate each CoA -- as well as track each use. If all goes well we will expand it to all future Legendaries and multi-year tokens like the big Kilt coming soon.

Stay tuned.

awesome!

Thanks Jeff for the insight!

Jeff Martin wrote:

Randal Heike wrote: So I hear Jeff is putting RFID in the new Dragon Orbs to preventing counterfeiting, What about the previous 3 orbs? They are worth more then the newer ones. Certainly the Eldrich and Legendary tokens are worth more and don't have chips....Thoughts anyone?

It is hard to re-do old tokens, but we will be re-issuing the Charms of Avarice yet AGAIN with RFID chips, also. We will have readers in each Training Room to authenticate each CoA -- as well as track each use. If all goes well we will expand it to all future Legendaries and multi-year tokens like the big Kilt coming soon.

Stay tuned.

Awesome!

I love it!

It's sad that it's come to this.

But it's a good move.

Harlax wrote: It's sad that it's come to this.

But it's a good move.

True but think of the possibilities if we chipped everything, not just scanning at exit but but amino like functions in the dungeon. We could do some wizarding world of Harry Potter at universal level stuff.

The gargoyles anamatronic plays a sound bite of inarticulate gibberish, unless the scanner detects the code for an earcuff of understanding near by .

The individual zones of the combat board detect which tokens are sitting on them and automatically report combat math back to the party card tablet.

The coaching room auto.atically fills out the party card.

It's all pie in the sky but it's fun to dream.

They probably will be passive chips. Those have a very long life but only function when scanned.

Active chips which transmit only last 3 to 5 years. That would be a problem.

Passive chips might not do some of the things you suggest. But my knowledge is limited, so perhaps more is possible.

Even with passive, party card/player mats would be easily feasible if all tokens were RFID, and would be pretty awesome!

Some rooms could have stand alone scanners for things, such as the earcuff of understanding mentioned above.

I wonder what the failure/malfunction rate for chips is?

And how that will be handled when one fails.

Failure rate largely depends on manufacturer/supplier. Some people have found certain suppliers to have a 10% failure rate.

I think the average hovers somewhere around 5% or so. Just a quick search for "passive rfid failure rate" brings up a handful of studies.

RFID Coaching room mats seem unlikely.

If you're doing a mat per player, that's 10 per coaching room * 5 coaching rooms per adventure * 3 adventures = 150 mats (plus maybe another 10-20 for backups). Not only is there the need to build all those mats, you've got extra time to set them up, test them, keep them powered, and dismantle them at each convention. And then test / fix them between conventions.

If you're only doing one mat per coaching room, that is still 15 mats (plus some backups), and you've added in the need to shuffle people around to get their tokens onto the mat.

Flip the idea around and have the RFID sensor in a wand that the coach can run over the tokens, and we're getting closer. Then you are probably only need a couple wands per dungeon (plus some backups). But this still really only works if you've got all your tokens upgraded to have the RFID chips in them (including all your tokens from the past 15 years).

For reading in tokens in the coaching room, I still think image recognition is the way to go, if we care about automating that process.


I do think 1-off RFID-triggered things in the dungeon could be cool. But with chip failure rates and other concerns, I'd really hope that whatever the RFID winds up triggering it is just some neat extra, and not required to solve a puzzle or defeat a monster.