The repopularization of RPGs pt 1

This video has been making the rounds of geekdom lately. It's a rough demo of D&D playable on the Microsoft Surface. It's popular with good reason, because it is the nascent future of tabletop RPGs.

D&D is nowhere near as cool as it was 20 years ago (much less 30 years ago), but it still has millions of players worldwide. World of Warcraft touts their 11 million subscribers. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that many people also play D&D once a month.

Eleven million people is a decent customer base, and professional hobbyists have programmed extremely complex programs (Campaign Cartographer and Fantasy Grounds to name two) which cater to them.

People talk about the wonderful social aspects of MMOs, but building and maintaining a friendship in an MMO is like building a ship in a bottle -- a lot of delicate work done through a desperately small opening.

The very best social platform is F2F. In games, you can only do this with a LAN party, a LARP, or around a table. LAN parties and LARPs are very resource intensive. They go away after a certain stage in life. Tabletop games remain viable regardless of age, station, or income.

The part of games that MMOs do best is automating tedious, precise mechanics. Players have complained about the difficulty of running 3rd edition D&D, but even that is checkers compared to the multiple thousandths-of-a-percentage mechanics a single home computer adjudicates running WoW.

More on this tomorrow.