Moving your campaign online

July 26th, 2007

Today, Tobold wrote about what may be the death of turn-based strategy games, pointing out that even though technical limitations don’t force game developers to opt for a turn-based model, in some cases a turn-based model can offer greater depth of play.

Attempts to move tabletop gaming online have mostly failed. For instance, I ran a campaign in Neverwinter Nights that didn’t work for two key reasons. First, it took an enormous amount of time for me to create the game world between sessions. Even if I’d had more and more time to practice developing the world with the provided toolset, I’m sure I would always be spending more time creating scenarios than running them.

Second, as soon as combat began, the players were hopelessly outgunned. I kept lowering and lowering the difficulty of the fights in the game, but the players couldn’t keep up. Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop roleplaying games are designed to simulate combat to some degree of accuracy, but the all depend on a turn-based model.

Sure, this means a few seconds of battle can take an hour to play out. Sure, in a real fight people don’t have time to make such decisions. But it allows people pretend they actually have combat skills. No one’s ever penalized for not remembering a keyboard shortcut and losing because her war-hardened combat veteran character forgot to raise her shield at the right moment.

(Neverwinter Nights actually was a turn-based game, though by default set to simulate real-time action. In a multi-playered, game-mastered game, though, allowing all players to pause was impractical. It simulated D&D reasonably well for the solo campaign, but failed for group play.)

Porting board games to computers has been more successful simply because no one’s trying to change the rules. No one wants to play speed-Monopoly, with button-mashing magnates making a Trump-like killing in the real-estate market simply because they can roll their dice the fastest. (Okay, maybe that’d be fun, but only in a weird way.)

But something breaks down with roleplaying games. Computer RPGs are an almost completely different genre than tabletop RPGs, even if they’re built around the same ruleset.

I asked before (in the context of voice chat) about non-MMO online roleplaying. But I’m thinking about it even more, now, ’cause I’ve got a friend from college who wants to start a campaign up again.

How can I get the tabletop roleplaying experience with remote players? Now that video conferencing is effectively free, we can at least talk to one another. And I’ve mentioned Gametable before, which provides a shared map and die rolling.

But are there any tools that really take advantage of web-connected computers to simulate the game itself while still giving the richness of turn-based play? Any tools that can handle the intricate interplay of a multi-character fight—with positioning, fancy moves, conditions that persist from turn to turn, all the number crunching—while still giving the players freedom to choose at (at least moderate) leisure their characters’ next actions? If so, I very much want to hear about them!

Has anyone successfully moved a tabletop campaign online? If so, what tools did you use? If it failed, what didn’t work?

Entry Filed under: Strategy Games, Online, Board Games, Computer Games, Roleplaying, Video Games, RPG