Once it’s finally debuted, will Google Wave be the best way to play pen-and-paper RPGs online? Is this the ubiquitous, dynamic, app-driven platform we’ve been waiting for?
With my fingers crossed, I’m hoping for apps that bring dice and statistics tracking to the Wave table as soon as possible. I dream of game-specific apps (D&D&W?) and Wave-native mapping tools that handle everything from one-inch-gridded dungeons to Google Maps-driven modern investigative games. By Christmas, maybe I could be playtesting a new RPG in real time with a brain trust scattered across the US, Canada, and the EU, with time zones our only foes.
Sure, there’s a lot that can be done with online RPG clients now — video chat alone has altered the way more than a few college gaming groups survive in the apocalyptic post-graduation wastelands — but something like Wave has ubiquity and competitive, independent developers to drive it towards options and solutions no games-only platform is likely to reach. Let us hope.
Until then, I’m going to be considering two things:
- how managing information is important not only to facilitating RPG play, but capable of structuring thinking (and suspension of disbelief) for genre-appropriate play, and
- an RPG designed specifically for Wave.
Update: It’s usually a good bet that if I have tossed out a quick thought about something intriguing, Matt Colville has written something fuller and better about it already.
That was my first thought about Wave, as well: Its application in online RP Gaming.
As soon as it is released, I will start to look into ways to implement dice rollers into it, as a kind of “step 1”.
This seems to be a platform that is begging to be used to run an ARG.
I’m really looking forward to this. As my own 1 and 2, I want to:
1) Build a game collaboratively with other online contributors, and
2) Play that game in a Wave.
Fantastic! This is exactly the technology I was looking for when I was “remote-gaming” between Texas and Chicago. Now, from what I’ve seen, it looks like you can upload documents such as maps. I’m mostly curious about how easy it is to modify such images, like moving characters around or the like. Still, very exciting. This really could be revolutionary.
I ran across a Daring Fireball post about Wave that summarizes pretty well the way that I really don’t know what to think about this thing.
I don’t want to be a piss-monster; I love stuff that’s revolutionary (once I’m done with the piss-monster-ing). I’m just having a failure of vision with regard to Wave.
Properly done, a play-by-wave rpg would have a dice-roller robot playing along and would contain a tile- and sprite-based map gadget. The robot would interactively change dice expressions, such as roll:3d6-2, into results. The map gadget can be communally edited for character placement, preferably with some sort of “fog of war” type of hiding so players can only see within their light radius or only areas where they have explored.
Really, the potential for this in online gaming is tremendous.
So, what about this RPG for Wave?
Shortly, I’ll begin using Wave to playtest a game. Maybe a simple storytelling game native to Wave will follow that — once I better understand the medium.