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Message: <blockquote data-quote="robconley" data-source="post: 7647853" data-attributes="member: 5636">There I have to disagree. Whiteboards in combination with dice-rollers, chat/voice effectively recreates the tabletop experience online.  You do the same kind of prep with the same type of materials and manage the game in the same manner. The tech is additional overhead. Now you have an extra step of having to scan any visual material you want to present. You have to make sure you can connect and all your players. In the early 2000s this was a bit of a pain but the technology has become easier and easier as the years go on. As a programmer I know that these issue are not trivial for the app developer. However the state of the art has advanced to the point where they several good examples of how various VTT features should be implemented. For example a word processor is not a trivial program to develop but the various issues in writing have been hashed to death and there are several well known solutions to each of the various issues. The nice about VTTs is that they look to the continuing development of whiteboard and collaboration software for further ideas. For the vast majority interacting through the internet is never their first choice. Internet rather acts as a multiplier increasing the number of social connections we can make and sustain. For gaming this means groups have people move away don't necessarily need to split up. The absent member can use various technologies to link back in and continue to play. If the entire group shift to the point where face to face is impossible then the game can continue on line. The nice thing about VTTs is that they work in conjunction. It is not like a MMORPG where major elements of tabletop are discarded. Instead groups can freely change how they change how they meet while doing the same work and using the same products. As for the hobby in general VTTs is not THE answer, it should be viewed as one piece of the puzzle to keep the hobby's social network going. One more thing in addition to home campaign, game conventions, store games, and the rest. With Neverwinter Nights you had to struggle because you had to be a programmer to create useful stuff with the game. If you had all the pieces it was a killer way to run an adventure (which I did several times). Plus it require to learn new techniques of refereeing where the referee was more of a event manager.  I found my experience running LARP events extremely useful in running my group through NWN.  However the sum of what you had to do run a campaign using NWN was very removed from normal tabletop. VTTs do not share this disadvantage. As for MMORPGs, they are different form of gaming. At this point they compete with tabletop in the same way other forms of gaming. They are not a substitute. I am not ignoring the impact they had on tabletop but let's face in the decades since the early 70s the number of different forms of gamings have exploded. While the overall population of gamer may have grown there more competing for their time. I strongly that tabletop games should NOT try to BE like other forms of gaming. Instead tabletop should play to it's strengths not matched by the other forms.Between whiteboards, voip, and social network sites we have all the pieces. What needed to make it all come together is somebody with a pre-existing social network to use a VTT. This may be a Google+ app, or Paizo creating something, or Wizards finally completing their setup.  My current feeling is that one of major social networking sites will get there first with an app that does what Fantasy Grounds does but using the social network site as the background.All you are going to accomplish is create a new form of gaming. Without the human referee and several other major elements it is no longer tabletop roleplaying. It may be a good strategy for a company to develop in order to survive the changing tastes in gaming. But the try to push as tabletop roleplaying evolved is just going to alienate the existing market and further fracture it like 4e did. One of the reason why we can sell OSR products is because older D&D is a pretty straight forward game to jump into. Plenty of my customer are gamers who like the simplifier approach of older D&D, B/X D&D in particular.That could be. My opinion is that gaming companies that want large sales need to keep up whatever the current taste in gaming. While SJ Games still releases the occasional GURPS product their current bread and butter is Munchkin. In five years it may be something completely different. However the industry is not the hobby. Thanks to the OGL (appreciate Ryan Dancey for being a major supporter) the hobby can take care of itself now with popular and classic games. We no longer depend on the marking whims of X companies to play, and publish for the game we like. Plus it means that however shrunken there will still be a market to sell too. What Ryan doesn't mention is that Model Trains are still a 1.2 billion a year business although it share of the larger toy market is very tiny compared to what it was back in the day.In our own hobby, hex and counter wargames are still being produced and even had a little resurgence a couple of years ago with the organization of some conventions. Of course it is nothing like it was during the glory days of SPI and Avalon Hill.This website and forum is primarily about tabletop roleplaying first, not the companies that currently make tabletop roleplaying games, not other forms of gaming (as interesting as they may be). If Wizards decides the "5th edition" of D&D is to be a series of board games like Ravenloft, etc then they are no longer producing tabletop roleplaying games. So I take a negative view when a columnist comes and say "Oh the game has to change because of X, Y, and Z." It obvious from his comments to John Wick's facebook post, and his columns that where Ryan Dancey is coming from is the survival of the game companies themselves. My general feeling is, "Fine! you made your case, if a game company want to keep their current level of employees and profitability then the type of games they need to make has to change." But once that happen my interest in those companies ceases because they are no longer making tabletop RPGs. But I am not interesting playing those games as my primary hobby. I am a tabletop roleplayer. I like playing them, refereeing them, publishing, and writing for them.  What I work for is having the largest number of tabletop roleplayers to game with. And if I can't rely on the industry to do it then I will do it myself.</blockquote>

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