Like others here, I played D&D in my youth, back in the game's early-1980s heyday when so many first discovered that they were "gamers." Given my fond memories, I've been looking to return to the game for a very long time. And while I've tried any number of video games — which obviously offer convenience and a hard-to-equal instant gratification — for freedom and imagination, balance and depth of interaction, there simply is no substitute for the tabletop game.
But, honestly, while I may visit the odd gaming store from time to time, I'm just not comfortable in that environment. And the games I've witnessed are often jovial, casual affairs, with abundant humor, high-adventure hijinks, out-of-character chatting and equally abundant soda. Clearly, the purpose of the game is to have fun, and this brand of play is the preference of a great many tabletop gamers.
But it's not what I've had in mind.
My vision is of a deeply immersive and rather serious game, perhaps with an abundance of suspense and even some horror, or at least dark psychological, moments. It would have the sober, sometimes desperate, tone that dominated much of the Lord of the Rings films or the Game of Thrones series (novels or HBO show). It might at times feel like the D&D version of LOST or The Walking Dead. In the ideal, it'd feel like an improvised book, a good, gripping book. In short, D&D high drama.
And so I was thinking that perhaps the way to achieve this would be to indeed pursue this "spirit of the book" notion and make the whole game text, and played online. This game would benefit from the relative anonymity of the players — no real-world voices, with the inevitable verbal stumbles of extemporaneous speech (text entries are usually more considered) or amateur orc imitations to break immersion and the tension — inherently fragile — that must be carefully maintained. On the flipside, in text (and anonymity), I'm quite sure that many players would lose the inhibitions that may well prevent them from feeling comfortable speaking or, moreover, acting out their character. (Honestly, how many of us can say, "Marshalling my necromantic power, I beckon my undead brethren — dormant far too long — from their musty graves. Their internment endeth." with a straight face?) Gone would be the impulse of a player to follow up an unintentionally goofy spoken line with a joke to offset his/her feeling of awkwardness. Then, of course, there is the way that text fuels the visual imagination in a way nothing else quite does, as we all know from reading even halfway decent works of fiction (or even nonfiction, for that matter).
The question is, technologically and practically, can this be done? Is this something the hopefully upcoming D&D Virtual Tabletop will allow (I can't find much information on it)? Would it be easy enough to exchange the necessary information online and in silence? Of course, the game could be augmented with voice chat to facilitate rapid out-of-character interaction. But, in the ideal, the DM could just copy and paste any lengthy descriptive text that's prepared in advance.
Has anyone had any experience with this? Any recommendations against it? Do you see "mature" players having interest? I'm very enthusiastic about the potential of this, but have no recent experience with the game.
Any input would be greatly appreciated. And if this isn't the proper forum for this topic, I apologize.
Play-by-post is something that's existed for decades. Many large forums have their own sections for such a thing. And yes, it's perfectly possible to play any tabletop RPG online (except maybe Dread). Depending on the time zone the participants live in, things might not progress at the same rate, and conditional triggers that are normally easily resolved in real-time are harder to do, but it's perfectly workable. Depending on your set-up, you can do all sorts of other things like throw in pictures, music, videos, maps, etc. It's not a magic bullet that will instantly make your game a masterpiece, since there's nothing stopping people from being complete clowns with the distance of the internet between them, so I wouldn't go into it thinking things are going to be gripping and gritty. It can do that, but you can do that in real life as well, with both it all depends on the personalities and skills of the group you've assembled.
Play-by-post is something that's existed for decades. Many large forums have their own sections for such a thing. And yes, it's perfectly possible to play any tabletop RPG online (except maybe Dread). Depending on the time zone the participants live in, things might not progress at the same rate, and conditional triggers that are normally easily resolved in real-time are harder to do, but it's perfectly workable. Depending on your set-up, you can do all sorts of other things like throw in pictures, music, videos, maps, etc. It's not a magic bullet that will instantly make your game a masterpiece, since there's nothing stopping people from being complete clowns with the distance of the internet between them, so I wouldn't go into it thinking things are going to be gripping and gritty. It can do that, but you can do that in real life as well, with both it all depends on the personalities and skills of the group you've assembled.
A thoughtful response, thank you.
To clarify, I wasn't thinking in terms of play-by-post, which I imagine to be a slow, e-mail exchange kind of game where someone makes a move and then waits for the other members to respond when time allows. I was thinking of playing a chat-based game in real-time, but I'm hoping for far more robust tools than a simple chat engine (which is why I'm very curious about D&D Virtual Tabletop).
You're quite right that a text-based game isn't impervious to folks clowning around and deviating from its expressed mission. That said, my hunch is that a text game would lend itself better to the consistent maintenance of a serious, gritty storyline than a live group does.
There are people who do what you're suggesting. Basically all you need is a chat engine, and so that's what people have done. It's a pretty simple thing of stating your targets and such and making your rolls, posting larger texts to websites even.
Actually upon thinking about it this might be exactly the sort of thing you're after: www.rpgport.net/terres/
There are people who do what you're suggesting. Basically all you need is a chat engine, and so that's what people have done. It's a pretty simple thing of stating your targets and such and making your rolls, posting larger texts to websites even.
Actually upon thinking about it this might be exactly the sort of thing you're after: www.rpgport.net/terres/
It's good to see that people are actually playing this type of game. While a chat engine would, clearly, facilitate text exchange, I'm interested in a tool that would handle all the aspects of DM-player communication...essentially hosting the game itself. I'm talking about chat, yes, but also maps, graphics, dice rolls, allow for multiple forms of DM communication (whispers, etc.) and so on. I believe that this is the intention of the D&D Virtual Tabletop, made even more functional by, presumably, being preprogrammed with D&D content (and, I suspect, packs you can purchase or upgrade to, like dungeon tile sets, pre-rolled NPCs, etc.).
Combine this with the Character Generator and so on, and this would be ideal.
I believe that currently the VT has no real implementation of the D&D rules and no plans to do so, but otherwise sounds like it does pretty much what you're looking for. It is also not the only such product on the market.
Try this it takes some work to get it going but it's pretty powerful. I don't know if it supports whispers. Features that it does have are dice, tables, line of sight, lighting, fog of war, tokens with properties, you can write your own macros, etc.
Heck PM and I can have you log into my campaign and you can see a tiny bit of the interaction available. On the rptools.net forums there are some bright programmers who have very powerful campaign templates as well.
Like others here, I played D&D in my youth, back in the game's early-1980s heyday when so many first discovered that they were "gamers." Given my fond memories, I've been looking to return to the game for a very long time. And while I've tried any number of video games — which obviously offer convenience and a hard-to-equal instant gratification — for freedom and imagination, balance and depth of interaction, there simply is no substitute for the tabletop game.
But, honestly, while I may visit the odd gaming store from time to time, I'm just not comfortable in that environment. And the games I've witnessed are often jovial, casual affairs, with abundant humor, high-adventure hijinks, out-of-character chatting and equally abundant soda. Clearly, the purpose of the game is to have fun, and this brand of play is the preference of a great many tabletop gamers.
But it's not what I've had in mind.
My vision is of a deeply immersive and rather serious game, perhaps with an abundance of suspense and even some horror, or at least dark psychological, moments. It would have the sober, sometimes desperate, tone that dominated much of the Lord of the Rings films or the Game of Thrones series (novels or HBO show). It might at times feel like the D&D version of LOST or The Walking Dead. In the ideal, it'd feel like an improvised book, a good, gripping book. In short, D&D high drama.
And so I was thinking that perhaps the way to achieve this would be to indeed pursue this "spirit of the book" notion and make the whole game text, and played online. This game would benefit from the relative anonymity of the players — no real-world voices, with the inevitable verbal stumbles of extemporaneous speech (text entries are usually more considered) or amateur orc imitations to break immersion and the tension — inherently fragile — that must be carefully maintained. On the flipside, in text (and anonymity), I'm quite sure that many players would lose the inhibitions that may well prevent them from feeling comfortable speaking or, moreover, acting out their character. (Honestly, how many of us can say, "Marshalling my necromantic power, I beckon my undead brethren — dormant far too long — from their musty graves. Their internment endeth." with a straight face?) Gone would be the impulse of a player to follow up an unintentionally goofy spoken line with a joke to offset his/her feeling of awkwardness. Then, of course, there is the way that text fuels the visual imagination in a way nothing else quite does, as we all know from reading even halfway decent works of fiction (or even nonfiction, for that matter).
The question is, technologically and practically, can this be done? Is this something the hopefully upcoming D&D Virtual Tabletop will allow (I can't find much information on it)? Would it be easy enough to exchange the necessary information online and in silence? Of course, the game could be augmented with voice chat to facilitate rapid out-of-character interaction. But, in the ideal, the DM could just copy and paste any lengthy descriptive text that's prepared in advance.
Has anyone had any experience with this? Any recommendations against it? Do you see "mature" players having interest? I'm very enthusiastic about the potential of this, but have no recent experience with the game.
Any input would be greatly appreciated. And if this isn't the proper forum for this topic, I apologize.
Try this it takes some work to get it going but it's pretty powerful. I don't know if it supports whispers. Features that it does have are dice, tables, line of sight, lighting, fog of war, tokens with properties, you can write your own macros, etc.
Heck PM and I can have you log into my campaign and you can see a tiny bit of the interaction available. On the rptools.net forums there are some bright programmers who have very powerful campaign templates as well.
I just figured I'd echo this. It's the BEST Virtual tabletop I've used and its free. There are others out there that may be better, but would cost you money to purchase and run. If you look at the forums, you can find frameworks to help run a 4e game. Easily my favorite and easiest to use is Rumble's 4e Framework. A framework is a structure for maptools which sets up the ability for your players to use at-will/encounter/daily and consumable powers. It also includes targeting which will display which monster or ally the player is targeting.
