Slashdot Mirror
D&D On Google Wave
Jon Stokes at the Opposable Thumbs blog relates his experience using Google Wave as a platform for Dungeons and Dragons — the true test of success for any new communications technology. A post at Spirits of Eden lists some of Wave's strengths for gaming. Quoting:
"The few games I'm following typically have at least three waves: one for recruiting and general discussion, another for out-of-character interactions ('table talk'), and the main wave where the actual in-character gaming takes place. Individual players are also encouraged to start waves between themselves for any conversations that the GM shouldn't be privy to. Character sheets can be posted in a private wave between a player and the GM, and character biographies can go anywhere where the other players can get access to them. The waves are persistent, accessible to anyone who's added to them, and include the ability to track changes, so they ultimately work quite well as a medium for the non-tactical parts of an RPG. A newcomer can jump right in and get up-to-speed on past interactions, and a GM or industrious player can constantly maintain the official record of play by going back and fixing errors, formatting text, adding and deleting material, and reorganizing posts."
Pretty much all of the described things (three separate threads. Private messages. Logs.) are exactly as they would be in PbP (play by post, usually on a forum) game. In addition, RPG oriented forums (Myth-Weavers, GiantITP...) often have dicerollers, character sheet managers, etc... Those could be added as gadgets here too, I guess. But nothing there seems revolutionary as in offering anything new.
I think that the point is easiness of use compared to other options and stuff like that. Rather than letting you do something new, wave lets you do all the old stuff in one program instead of having multiple ones. One useful scenario for this could be: A PbP game that is played normally on forums, but on wave you see "Ah, those two guys are online now", send them a message "Want to do some playing in real time?" and begin chatting with them. Much easier than telling them to fire up IRC, connect to a server, etc. (especially if they aren't "computer people").
So I could see wave potentially being useful for this (like many other things). There just has been too much hype about it so people first act more among the lines of "This will cure cancer and HIV and everything!" and then go "Uh, this isn't THAT awesome. We'll need to desperately look for things in which this is superior to other mediums!" instead of going "Oh, a new alternative for forums and chats. Neat. I'm sure we'll come up with some interesting uses for this over time."
I have been designing a program to play DnD over the internet lately. One with battlemaps, chats, dicerollers, stuff like that. I am aware of OpenRPG and similar products but I'm not completely happy with them (the UI, the functionality, a lot of things) so I've decided to write my own one. I think that writing a wave plugin for the missing stuff instead might be worth giving some thought.
Persistent wikified irc with integrated permissions management?
That, right there, is a killer app.
Realities just a bunch of bits.
Well, a backhoe does nothing that a shovel couldn't... It's just a lot better at some things (moving lots of dirt). I use wave on a regular basis for project collaboration. One of the best things about wave is that you don't have to respond in a linear fashion. So, this is a conversation that could happen in IRC:
Sally: When I [description of what she did] I get the error message [some random error message]
Sally: Also, if I [description of what she did] the program [description of how the program fails]
Jack: Well, on that first issue, what happens if you [some thing to try]
Jack: And for that second issue.....
With wave, jack can respond directly to each of sally's messages (or even a particular part of a message) so Sally knows exactly what Jack is talking about without Jack having to clarify. As Jack finish up things from his to-do list, he just deletes the threads from the wave, as they are always accessible via Replay (which lets you see all previous states of the wave), keeping the wave nice and clean. And if Sally isn't online when jack deletes something, it will be obvious to her what Jack deleted (it's marked with strikeout, and is removed after the next time she views the wave) when she comes back online so she knows what he's finished.
Not to mention that there are gadgets and robots and waves are embeddable (though the apis are in early stages at the moment).
Does IRC do all that?