This leads me to another topic I’ve been interested in possibly writing about lately. No matter how popular video games become, Pen & Paper will never go away. P&P is where all the creativity and thinking outside the box is spawned. This is the life blood of story telling. Video games will always look to P&P for inspiration and rip them off completely.

It is so much easier to improvise and create things on the fly, bend the rules, create the rules, etc… to really do things that aren’t possible within the strictly defined confines of constants, variables, functions, and for-loops (video games).

Now that co-op story-driven campaigns are becoming a staple of video games, I expect the next big stage will be the sorts of things you just described, Dave. Having the players become an actual part of the story rather than some character in it that discovers the story as they go along. Character progression has always been such an integral part of RPGs – I’m surprised more video game companies (and DMs) don’t use the freedom to throw monkey wrenches into this progression to really turn a player’s world upside down, but in a good and unexpected way.