The Digital World of Analog Play

One of the stories posted in nearly all the news sites I read is that Microsoft is going to make three Spiel Des Jahres winning boardgames available as downloadable content from Xbox Live. Turning boardgames into videogames has been going on for a long, long time: my parents used to play Backgammon and Bridge on their Atari. The question is about the REVERSE- how can technology improve your non-digital games?

I posed the question recently about using software to play D&D over long distances- but you don’t need dedicated software to have part of the experience. I’ve heard tales of people using voice chat software and a webcam to play. (In fact, one of my favorite comics features a player in the regular RPG who plays entirely over Webcam.) Technology has finally caught up to the point to where this is viable; I remember one day when I was in middle school where I tried to play D&D over the phone when I was sick. During the phone call I changed characters to be a Raving Derelict, so all I had to do was ramble incoherently in the phone when I wanted to do something (and in fact, ramble incoherently was all my character COULD do, as it was too difficult for a real character to get the information needed to be effective over the phone.)

I was also in a game this past weekend that used laptops in place of books. I finally got a group to play the Iron Heroes RPG in PDF that I purchased about a year back, and the GM printed off some of the character creation pages, but ultimately we looked at the rules on a few laptops that we had. The GM also had his notes and the GMing book on his laptop, so he was able to manage the rules a bit easier. The next game of D&D that I run is going to mainly rely upon PDFs for reference instead of lugging 8 D&D books plus minis and dice and battlemap to every session. Plus, PDFs are indexed and searchable, and I don’t have to worry about the players spotting what books I’ve brought to the session. If I somehow have more cash than I’m expecting to spend on D&D, I can also consider buying a projector like some other dedicated GMs have done. Personally, I don’t like drawing maps and I especially don’t like designing maps on a computer, but it’s still a neat idea.

Not just for rules reference, PDF publishers are starting to add more digital content to take advantage of the fact that you’re buying something that can be viewed on a computer. This week, I purchased a PDF adventure for d20 Modern called “The Whisper of Horses.” Besides being an investigative horror d20 modern adventure (which should drop nicely into my upcoming campaign), the PDF is hyperlinked to movies of events that happen in the game, sound effects to things that happen during encounters, and links to outside webpages to show places and people that show up in the game. They could have just included some movies and sounds with the adventure, and that would be cool… but they’ve gone the extra step of using PDF to its fullest capabilities and embeded these extra, digital touches directly in the PDF where they’re needed. Good stuff.

Of course, the existence of the internet as a whole is helpful to GM’s. There are some great resources for GMs to use online, and I’ve seen a lot of people say that they’re using Wikis to keep track of the games they’re running. And of course, the biggest boon to boardgaming has got to be Boardgamegeek. Pre-internet, finding updated rules and clarifications to boardgames was near impossible. Boardgamegeek not only has all that essential stuff, but also lots of added content for your games.

The topic is pretty big, and is what a lot of game companies are looking at nowadays., so I’ll proboably cover other aspects in future columns. How has technology helped your non-tech games?