Is online play relevant to the hobby?
Posted: March 20, 2010 Filed under: Campaigns, D&D, D&D 4e, Legacy D&D, Online Gaming, RPG 11 Comments »I am in the precarious position that I am criticized for “coming up with imaginary enemies” who only allegedly criticize me, because they don’t really exist. But I am also criticized for other things, by people who ostensibly seem to exist and are human (I have not seen bots who analyze content to this extent). I don’t usually address them mostly because I don’t usually care. If I express confidence in myself then I am an arrogant jerkoff who thinks he’s the David and loves to see walls of his own text, and if I am self-deprecating then I’m a tortured artist emo pissant who should not even bother to write anything if he’s going to be that spineless. I have long since realized that if I’m a Lunatic, then the people who follow me along to criticize me reside in Pluto.
But I just thought this latest criticism was something the community might like to talk about with me.
One of the criticisms leveled at me is that I am not relevant and nobody should care about my opinion because I don’t play on the tabletop often, but rather do most of my gaming online. I don’t have a real life tabletop group, save for the fact that I could show up to Living Forgotten Realms or D&D Encounters, if I didn’t suffer from this disease which makes me more likely to eat the materials for such events than actually have any desire to play in them. So this, according to some, invalidates anything I say.
(In fact I don’t seem to have much of an online group anymore, really.)
I can accept a lot of the criticism leveled my way (and I fully agree that the Athirua and Dromidae races in Eden can be played as very mary sue-ish from what I’ve written, and that I am a creepy evil man with strange hobbies and tastes), but this one I find odd. Not as odd as that last sentence, which is deplorable – but odd. Often I find myself in that scenario of feeling like I’m the only insane man for my generally online-only play. I have, in my youth, where I like a much more amicable and much less poetic Alexander Pope believed in the power of my words, written about this subject once before.
So yes, I have always believed that playing an RPG over Maptools or a chatroom or a forum (or the paradisaical heights of google wave) as legitimate and relevant an engagement in the hobby as sitting around a table. In fact I have always found it much better than sitting around a table. It’s mostly because of the usage of text. As you can see I love text. I love the look of my text. There goes that narcissism again. But no I have other reasons, which I believe well-documented in the above places.
What I want to say is that there is no purer form of the hobby, nor none more relevant than another. The guy playing some weirdo FORGE storygame is engaging in the hobby as much as the people at D&D Encounters, as much as the people running play-by-posts on Myth-Weavers, as much as the three people (one of which was a beloved lesbian friend) who had nothing better to do one night than run some random Wushu game over IRC. But maybe I am wrong. It has happened before. Often. But do you think that those who’s play experiences are online, over chat, over virtual tabletops, over google wave, over play-by-post, are less relevant to the hobby than a physical table in someone else’s house? Do their experiences not transfer? Share your stories. Do you think all online players who like me prefer it that way (if any other than me exist) should try to tabletop more often?
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Yes, it’s relvant. In fact, I think anyone who hasn’t done both can’t really understand what all the options are. I prefer offline to on, but I’m impatient and online goes too slowly for me. Personal preference.
Honestly, I wish you ran something other than 4E or d20 so I could try your game.
I ceased running 4e (and have not been on speaking term with d20 for some years now) to try to play my little NAA D6 invention. Which reminds me of something I wanted to do…
Is online play relevant to the hobby? Yes.
I say that largely because I’m in the same boat–I play online almost exclusively these days, because I like it better than tabletop, for a lot of the same reasons. But I know some people dig tabletop play for the same reasons I’m not so hot on it right now.
I don’t know what’s up with those people who think online play is not “real roleplaying.” There was a dude saying that last week on Trollsmyth’s blog–and Trollsmyth duly pointed out that, by the definition said dude was using, using a pocket calculator at the table means it’s not “real roleplaying” anymore.
I don’t claim online play is invalid, but I do find it largely unrelated to tabletop play in terms of the modes and forms it uses. Increased non-linearity as different threads of the over-arching dialogue diverge, non-contiguous activity periods as people participate in a thread at different times and the overall lack of immediacy make online games a sufficiently different beast from their tabletop counterparts that there seems little of substance they share in common.
I know this isn’t going to qualify for best journalistic response to the subject, but just personally my response is the advice handed down to me from a wise man and something I dispense often:
Fuck’em.
I’ve come to the conclusion that there will always be a consensus of fuckwits on the internet, especially in gaming communities, that just want to sit around and analyze how your method of “fun” is wrong and will stop at nothing to ruin said fun. Do you enjoy play online? Do you have good experiences with it? Well then who cares?
Remember that out there somewhere is actually a collective group that believes if you’re not LARP’ing, you’re not role playing, you’re playing dice games at a table.
If it weren’t for online gaming I wouldn’t be gaming at all. Online gaming and recordings of games online is the only reason I have a skype/maptools group. I still feel emersed in the game and into my character and isn’t that what roleplaying is all about??
People hate what they don’t understand or like for no other reason than they don’t understand or like it.
Which is not logical reasoning.
@Tyler: You seem to be describing play by posts more than anything. Virtual Tabletops and chatrooms are immediate and everyone participates in real time at the same time.
And while I agree that there are substantial differences, I don’t think the differences in the games themselves being played is enough that the conversation becomes alien.
@Wyatt: It was also an element of my admittedly limited experience with chat room play. “Real time” included the time people were called away from keyboards, mulled over what to type and were other-window.
I’m not saying that’s good form or 100% prevalent, but it’s a factor I consider.
I’ve never played in a tabletop game where people didn’t mull over what to do for a tick, get distracted momentarily, go to the bathroom, or get a soda refill or something. So I can’t seem to connect with your point.
Online play is as relevant as tabletop play, perhaps more so. People who say otherwise are much the same as those who claim that movies can’t be as intelligent as books or that rock and roll is just noise, ie the resistant to change.
I think online play is the future of the hobby. In a few years everyone will either be involved in an online game, or know someone who is. Twenty years ago who would have thought we would be using the internet to watch TV, listen to music, read the news or go shopping, but today we do all of those things, most of us do them everyday. It does not seem to me to be any stretch to predict playing pen and paper RPG’s online will become common.