NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7648083" data-attributes="member: 82106">I think there are a couple of things based on my experience running games on a VTT for 3 years. VTTs are still a bit of a pain technologically. They need to get easier to use. A truly successful VTT is going to run on tablets, require no installation of software (at least nothing beyond 'click here') and really should be a seamless experience even for the DM. It will need to be as simple as going to the 'adventure shop', selecting what you want to run, clicking on it, paying, and having it come up in your VTT ready to run. Creating content needs to be equally simple. I know FG isn't too far off from that, but with any of these tools there's a lot of grunt work involved in creating an adventure. Nothing is seamless. What WotC for instance can promise is in its own way getting close, but they too need even more seamless integration with DDI and just a lot more features that they don't have right now. Of course the problem is there's not a huge amount of money in VTT development, so progress is really slow.I think the game/MMO publishers may eventually get there through the back door. The successful ones have the cashflow and subscriber base. They could evolve into being customizable refereed private worlds that are effectively RPGs. I don't know how that will play out, but I suspect there is a decent fraction of the people who play MMOs that would really relish a deeper experience.There is of course the one final difference between an MMO and an RPG though. You can play your MMO any old time. You can only play your RPG when other people are available. Maybe the concept of 'campaigns' simply won't ever have that much traction in the online world because of that (clearly there are text based chat type games, but they are really a rather different kind of experience). Heck, back in the OLD days we pretty much played D&D that way anyway. There weren't really persistent campaigns. There were a 100 or so players and many DMs, people just pretty much ran the same characters in one guy's game one week, and a different guy's game the next week. It isn't quite the same, but with a shared world you can do a 'living world' sort of play that would probably scratch most people's itch.</blockquote>

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