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. Â So I haven’t done very in-depth or broad testing of this stuff. Â 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. Â 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. Â 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. Â 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. Â 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. Â 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. Â 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. Â There are already some robots for things like dice rolling, maps, and other such things. Â I’m excited to see what can and will be done.