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D&D On Google Wave

Posted by Soulskill on from the i-failed-my-invite-throw dept.

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."

1 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. More like forums, really by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.