Dec 8 2009

Roleplaying Via Google Wave

First off, let me say that I’ve only been in one Google Wave gaming session so far, and have seen a few other sessions.  So I haven’t done very in-depth or broad testing of this stuff.  Also, Google Wave itself is evolving — it’s still in beta, so I’m not going to talk about bugs, or technical issues that I’m sure will be hammered out.

My friend and former coworker Justin Achilli is running a 3.5 D&D game via Google Wave, as an experiment in its viability for online roleplay.  He’s shared his own thoughts, and I’d like to share a few of mine from a player’s perspective.

So, from my perspective, so far I’m getting exactly what I expected.   It’s somewhat of a mix of playing via live chat (of which I have several years experience on White Wolf’s now-defunct moderated chats) and play-by-post, with most of the advantages and disadvantages therein.   I’ll list some below, and again, I’m going to refrain from putting any disadvantages down that I expect to be addressed (e.g. it’s still fairly slow and has the occasional glitch).

Advantages (compared to tabletop)

  • It’s easier to schedule.  No transit time to/from; just log in and bam, you’re in game.
  • When a player misses a session, the playback feature makes it easy for them to get caught up.
  • It’s possible to narrate aspects of your character’s actions in more stylish detail.
  • It’s easier to have secret side-conversations where necessary (no passing of notes or leaning over and whispering).
  • There’s a complete record of each session, which game masters or payers can look back on (or search) if they’ve forgotten something.
  • It’s possible for several people to type simultaneously without the “talking over one another” effect you get in real life.
  • It allows you to multitask without being distracting to others.

Disadvantages

  • Hell of a lot slower-going than tabletop for character interaction.
  • Even slower than that for combat — and the more crunchy the combat, the slower it is.
  • More impersonal.
  • Can’t use things like mood music/lighting to set the mood (though it would be easy to use a third-party app to stream a playlist).

Overall I prefer tabletop, but I do like online mediums (including Wave) as an option if tabletop isn’t.   I think Wave offers some advantages over both chat-based and PbM/PbP play as well — it’s the best of both worlds when talking about those two options.  I also think Wave is better for more story-centric games/systems than crunchy games, but I’m sure that there will be a number of plugins (or “robots” as Wave calls them) for that sort of thing.  There are already some robots for things like dice rolling, maps, and other such things.  I’m excited to see what can and will be done.