• d6es are camera dice, simulating your aim and facing. Roll a pool based on your skill level and pick the one you want. The number determines your facing hex side — matches improve your aim. Facing the wrong way? Too bad for you — you’re just as lousy at moving the thumbstick around as I am!
• You also have X, Y, A and B dice. Assign a d4, d8, d12 and d20  to them however you’d like. X is your attack die. Y is your power die. A is your jump (or tumble) die and B is your defence die. Each task has a 3 step ranking system that unlocks greater range, more spells, etc.
• The bigger your die, the better you do at its governing task. You want to roll high. Matches on your facing/camera roll provide a bonus equal to the number of matches.
• You can also try for combos: matching numbers on two or more dice: X + Y, A + B, X + A + B, or even a button mash, quadruple combo! Combo effects are determined by looking at a table based on the combo and your skill ranks in each component.
• In a combo, multiply the number of aim matches by the number of the match on your button dice. So if you faced hex side 2 after rolling 2 three times, and got a combo with 8 on two dice, your final number would be 24.
• Triggers and bumpers? D-pad? Not sure about those yet.
• Naturally, we’ll need a life bar system for energy and hit points.

That’s all for now. It’s just a sketch! If you’ve got ideas, I’d love to hear ‘em.

The refreshed 360 is a beauty. Every single aspect of the old design seemed to have been rethought and improved except for the parts that Microsoft is devoted to leaving terrible, including some proprietary ports and cabling. A plain old HDMI cable (that you can buy yourself — get the cheap ones from Amazon) mates it to the TV, but Kinect needs the mutant USB cable that comes included.

So I plugged it all in and turned it on — and waited for an update from the included Kinect Adventures, and another from the server as soon as dug into my wireless connection, then a couple of others.

Calibrating Kinect was easy, but it’s is a picky little box. It wants you to have at least six feet of clearance — but if you’re 6’5″ like I am, plan on it wanting another foot or three depending on the game. Kinect gives you access to a limited control panel that you can access through gesture and a few voice commands. Hold your hand in the right spot and wait, and you’ll hit a sub-menu. Some spots let you pull items (and all spots are “sticky” like a cheating FPS reticle). Kinect also needs alerts that you want to use it. You do that by waving your arm like dork. Prepare to do that frequently!

Kinect Adventures is okay. On free play, the rafting game is definitely the best one. One included game lets you fly and pop bubbles, but the virtual space extends about 10-12 feet away from the Kinect — and that’s my stove. It’s annoying to see Kinect recognize you at close range and then get all whiny when you try to play at that range.

Overall, it’s an intriguing device. I look forward to using it. Gesture controls are primitive, but look like that can be built up. Beyond that, Let me toss some scattershot impressions at you.

Jedi Gorilla Arm: Kinect can’t read fingers — an shortcut that apparently exists to let it ship cheaply. No fingers means no way to signal selection except to let your hand hang in place for a couple of seconds. That gets a bit sore after a while. Early touch interface designers called discomfort with using your arms in an odd position for a while “gorilla arm” — this is kind of like that, but with nothing to actually touch.

This Ain’t Minority Report: Kinect’s core interface doesn’t do anything with both hands, though it will recognize either one. You won’t be pinching and zooming, turning things or doing any of that other cool stuff. Yeah, I got a little thrill at “wiping” an options screen away, but it wasn’t much.

Kinect’s penetration into core XBox functionality is pretty low, by the way. You’ll need your controller to do most of the traditional stuff.

It Ain’t Star Trek, Neither: Voice commands work really, really well — as long as you’re on the right spot to order something. An update should really let me emulate the general commands used in the XBox’s standard interface (XYAB). Between voice and gesture, Kinect control is really a novelty compared to the far more robust tooks afforded by your controller.

When It’s Good, It’s Awesome: In spite of the above I have no regrets about getting the Kinect. If it wasn’t so interesting I wouldn’t have said anything about it — unless it completely sucked. This is the feeling I wanted from the Wii but didn’t get because I had to hold silly-ass nunchucks. The best part was cornering my 8 year old, showing him how to shuffle and jump  to move the raft, and coasting down the river with him. You might have to move furniture around to get it working, but the experience is amazing.

I Want Little Games and Apps: I want MS to extend Kinect to do a bunch of cool things:

• Give me object recognition through stickers or something. I want shooting and a sword hilt.
• This could be awesome hardware for a game board. You could roll dice, move figures
• God games are the obvious niche choice for Kinect. Kinect was made for dropping mountains and slapping minions Dungeon Keeper style.
• A set of sclupture and mapping tools would be terrific as well.
• I love tabletop RPGs so I want to see some game table application, but the chances of that are . . . not great. Remote play via camera, voice and gesture all seem doable.

You Will Look Like an Idiot: Kinect Adventures takes snapshots of you playing. You do not look like a multisport superhero, chum. No, really.

Summary: Motion gaming levels up with this thing, but it isn’t the science fiction AR, floaty space cop interface you’ve been waiting for. Still, you can see that from here, even in future software updates (unless MS gets stingy) and it won’t be long until games get comfortable using it. Companies need to get rid of dumb ideas like steering a car with mime. Kinect could be a bit quicker, but it doesn’t lag as some have complained — the delay-as-selection concept is terrible though, and needs to be replaced. In the end, I had fun with my young son and a sense of freedom (even squished into the corner by Kinect’s space requirements, which also need to be fixed via software) I never felt with the Wii. But I see real potential not in AAA titles using this technology, but in novel little applications. MS had better make room for these to show it’s serious about Kinect taking its place beside the standard controller as an equal partner.

Once we got actual tabletop gamers from the “leading edge” of the hobby, he discovered they were so insufferable he changed his business model to stop attracting them. They were bad for business. They weren’t the gamers he remembered having fun with. They were assholes.

How were they assholes? My client used a bunch of methods to tag RPG players and monitor them moving through the system. This is what he found out about them:

• Instead of having social conversations, they focused on concrete goals.
• They related to content in a cynical fashion.
• They dissuaded other users from getting involved with the content.
• They resisted most desired behaviors (that is, the stuff that actually might make money).
• They complained all the goddamn time.

Because it was easy to track user origins, we knew this was more true for gamers, than general users. So the counterargument that everybody on the internet is like this doesn’t work. They aren’t.

This story of mine — a true story, though I’ve kept names out of it — is not unique. It’s why even though there are millions of lapsed gamers, transmedia developers shy away from developing them as an audience. Over on Twitter Gareth-Michael Skarka talked about how transmedia takes lessons from RPGs, but isn’t interested in the RPG audience. Yeah, that’s pretty much true. There are millions of lapsed gamers, but in my experience they’re largely considered no benefit to or a pox on growth.

I’ve met plenty of great gamers, and I don’t think the bad traits listed above belong to the majority — just the ones who have a strong online presence, who the CMO and co. are going to look at after the nerd in the project makes an argument for his peeps.

Meanwhile, the tabletop’s anti-intelligentsia are roaming Outer Fucking Space complaining that they don’t get enough respect, service and other super-good stuff that nobody with a good long term business plan should be especially eager to provide. They are right to think that as a bloc, gamers (not just them, but the whole group of people who are familiar with tabletop RPGs) could have significant power in the market, but don’t understand that they are undermining this power.

One of the first things you learn in any marketing program is that you not only don’t have to cater to everybody, but that you shouldn’t. There are customers out there who can faithfully buy from you and still run your company into the ground. Effective marketing includes making these people go away with a minimum of fuss. Smart folks avoid the temptation to poach from toxic segments. For example, if you want 10,000 subscribers/buyers by a given date it might be easy to grab early adopters from a certain segment to hit this target, but if that segment drives other people away, you’ll miss future growth targets.

This applies to tabletop RPG companies as much as it does to ventures that might pull gamers from the tabletop to somewhere else. WotC’s D&D Encounters may look a bit desperate but it’s smart enough to provide alternatives to the established D&D community. Lapsed gamers can take a fresh look at D&D without getting involved in the war between edition adherents, meeting character-build zombies, or dealing with other public killjoys. The killjoys . . . well there’s a point where you realize that rational decision making doesn’t come into it.

When the visible side of a fanbase doesn’t react with nuance, who wants to deal with that? It means that group will be difficult to work with, conservative and socially intractable. There might be great people beneath the surface, but not everybody has the time or money or interest to do that. You’re not going to get a second chance when there are much nicer people out there to please.

How could gamers be nicer people? Do the opposite of what you did in bullet points up at the beginning of this piece:

• Be friendly, casual and socially full-featured. Shut up about storming the castle every once and a while (and don’t just replace that with combative garbage about some other field.)
• Demonstrate that you appreciate the content instead of developing some fucked up hateful relationship with it. If you don’t like it by all means, move on.
• Respect neophyte insights that jerkwad gamers think are naive or problematic.
• Make peace with the fact that people want money for things and have models for doing so. If you don’t like the model, stay the hell away from the product.
• Create/mod in response to preferences that you will own instead of some inevitable truth you’ll crap on something for defying.

I would really like the tabletop RPG community to be at the center of roleplaying in all media, sharing their insights, but it’s not going to happen unless that center attracts.

What to Expect

Tabletop RPG Stuff: It’s not going away. It’s just getting better organized.

Electronic Games and Media: I’d like to talk about some of the funky transmedia stuff I’ve done, stuff I’d like to do, and rattle off opinions about the whole thing.

Writing: The craft of writing, some short fiction, maybe even a series. We’ll see.

Etc: Who knows? The point is that this is turning into more of a general blogland. Let’s see how it goes, shall we?

I mean, does anything make folks feel more legit than saying, “We cut down the IP bible to next to nothing because we realized that story is what really matters!” Hell, I feel like more of Almost an Artist for even repeating it. But that’s bogus. Here’s why.

Worldbuilding Isn’t Where Your Elves Live

Many fans and a few game designers think building a world is about establishing a kind of extended backstory and almanac that tells you what religion your dwarves are, where trade routes go – crap like that. Most people think this way because this type of thing is what teenage gamers are good at and what Tolkien and successors did.

Real worldbuilding is about creating a context where you can implement multiple narratives across multiple media without getting thematically neutral pap, where there’s always a very strong tendency toward a particular look and feel. This includes:

• Establishing core themes and motifs
• Defining sensory (visual, audio, etc.) characteristics in concert with the appropriate departments (mood boards, justifying the visual language and branding in the world)
• Taking stock of core/launch media requirements (integrating the world with game play, matching elements to available production values)
• Creating exemplars to anchor themes and motifs (signature/iconic characters and locations, epistolary elements)
• Creating social relationships in the world that can be adopted by participants (factions, guild support, relationship maps)
• Creating conflict points that can be extended into stories and foci in statements of fact (backstories that generate conflict, faction conflicts, mysteries, general story hooks)
• Inspecting drafts for excess contrivance and artificiality

I am not making this shit up. I’m just telling you what I actually talk about with clients in RPG and transmedia projects in cases where I have faith in the end product succeeding. Note that getting the creation myth or technology down serves everything above. Hard facts aren’t absent at the beginning, but they don’t rule the roost as much as people think.

Sadly, getting this done is expensive and since it’s an obscure craft, it’s hard to get the same degree of satisfaction from the end result. Nobody cares if you brag that you created a context that made it possible for a cool story to exist at all, and to be part of a huge, extended transmedia narrative. They care about what happened last episode, or whether elves live in the mountains. It’s expensive and hard for anyone to get excited about. Plus, these days, some clever folks think they can just get the fanbase to do it for them, which is a fatal misreading of how fandom works with media.

Cubism Ain’t Stacking Toy Blocks

A story though! That sounds reputable, doesn’t it? Your Favourite Literature has a story, so it’s obviously classy. Best of all, everybody learns the components of a story by junior high, so it everyone feels terribly clever because they can identify rising tensions and denouements and crap.

This means that when people talk about story, they think of all the good parts of media they experienced, but actually just work on plot and structure wrapped around some fan-friendly signifiers. (This is a love story with nanotechnology!) To refer to the section header, people sure love to pat themselves on the back for assembling the toy blocks.

Literary fiction long ago came to the conclusion that this is easy and a bogus thing to feel artsy about, and switched focus to style and characterization. That’s why Margaret Atwood can write Oryx and Crake even though you, the SF nerd, have read about post-apocalyptic biotechnology before. Stylistic innovation is a tough road, however, and often distrusted. There won’t be a magic realist Star Wars novel any time soon, folks.

Structure is easier than style. When you reduce story to structure, structure is cheap to implement. Just mate it with some motifs and lists of facts and you’re done! Your IP will eventually fall apart when fans get bored, because they’ll realize the world has no meaning and the story represents the minimum effort it takes to walk a product down the aisle.

At least it’s cheap.

Have You Looked Around Lately?

In the tabletop RPG community people think that skimping on the world is okay, because the fans can fill it in – everyone has a D&D campaign world, right? It’s also easy to believe that nobody really wants the infodumps in CRPGs because it’s not at the center of the play experience. This is the reverse of the truth. In the post-fanfic world where the greatest trend in user-driven RPGs is based on IP canon freeform, people who represent the progressive edge of the audience want the world more – they’ve demonstrated that they can create stories with its guidance.

Tabletop RPGs may be unique in misreading, ignoring and demonstrating denial-plagued pants-staining terror at the idea that its latest innovations are movements in the wrong direction, but I think you might find it in other media. That’s a pity, because tabletop RPGs have a bunch of things to teach about moving in the right direction.

I’ve been pretty sick for about a month off and on due to strep. That’s why this blog’s been silent. What’s going on?

Aeternal Legends: It’s available in print and PDF, still. Stew and I are slowly talking about some cool stuff to come, but we’re both pretty busy. Why don’t you buy that sonofabitch?

Knights of the Hidden Sun: Still on Chapter Three (not many in the book, so this is further along than you might think). Looking at the engineering and programming aspects of soul manipulation. It’s coming.

World of Darkness: I did some work on World of Darkness: Mirrors and the Mage Chronicler’s Guide. Some of it’s very rules heavy. Some of it involves creatures made from the still-bleeding wounds of the dismembered universe.

Eclipse Phase: I did some work for an upcoming book, but can’t say much more.

Other RPG Thing: I’m working on an adventure for a TBA client. Should be fun.

Other Other RPG Thing: I have in my files an amazing game from a Famous RPG Designer. I hope I have time to do him a small service, because the game is amazing, and I would like to help with it.

Other Other Other RPG Thing, What For Charity: I’m currently in the early stages of designing a game as a permanent charity effort — this is what I wanted to get to in February. If you’re a non-flaky creative interested in this sort of project email me.

Conventions: I’ll be at Anime North again this year. Details to come.

Electronic Projects: I recently finished the first phase of concept and setting design for an ambitious multimedia property but again, I can’t say too much.

Playing: I’m still playing Cinnabar, the warforged ranger. 7th level now. Still enjoying 4e. I tease Steve about it not being the Best Thing Evar, but I like it.

Running: Star Wars Saga. One of the PCs is Darth Vader’s artificially created sibling. The PCs just got captured by the Death Star, which contains 6 million Dark Side Adepts trained to use the Force in concert, not a giant laser.

Planning: Might be the SF game, Indigo. Might be World of Darkness. Might be a light fantasy game. Chris Huth said something about playing a mix of old-style D&D and GUMSHOE. I am very interested in this and might try it myself.

Mage: The Dirty Version: I plan on getting back to entries here.

Bloggage Reading: I finally headed to Zak Smith’s D&D With Pornstars blog. I think the mashed up game and visual bricolage is cool, even if the tone and dungeon focus doesn’t appeal to me.

Your Game: I still judge it and find it wanting! I still think your desire for structure comfort and easy answers is making you bad at playing RPGs and really appreciating what they are, and I’ll tell you why at length!

Seriously though, I have some ideas, you have some ideas. Let’s work so hard it turns into play.

• Distribute a retro cyberpunk RPG this way.
• You’d get an artist to gussy up the hard drive to look like some menacing bit of futuristic technology according to 80s design aesthetics. I’m thinking of early Walkmans with chunky, battered chrome, maybe with an LED readout — actually, especially with an LED readout. I’d probably keep some of the drive’s steel around just because hard drives look agelessly rugged and cool by themselves.
• The game would be written in a user-editable web format (maybe an offline WordPress installation and crosslinked wiki) with the option to print a version or see it in PDF.
• It would of course be graphically rich, with all kinds of art I can’t afford, but it would also include a bunch of tools such as a dice roller, a character creator and sheet, maps and so forth. Of course, if I’m indulging a fantasy maybe an engine for graphical netrunning that automatically implemented skills.
• The offline web format provides the means to port it online as well. Perhaps a hosted chat system should be thrown in there too. Ideally, you should be able to just move the whole thing to a server with minimal tweaking.
• Not many ideas systemwise. It would have a light setting, perhaps with an annex about how to “modernize” it for those who want cell phones, more than three megabytes of hot RAM in the Hitachi, and posthuman pretensions, though I think gripes about the aging tech kind of miss the point.
• It would only be available via hard drive — maybe in cheap old 6GB drives (I was looking through my old Quantum 6GB drive from 1998 when the idea hit me, and looked them up – 5 bucks each on EBay for good ones, 99 cents for maybe-dodgy ones).
• The super crazy and impractical option would be to integrate the game into a dedicated operating system, such as a build of Chromium OS. You would “boot to RPG” when it’s time to play. Chromium is designed to primarily boot from SSD if I’m not mistaken, though, so it’s not my first choice. The *click* *whirr* of battered steel is just too cool.
• . . . and the craziest option of all would be to only ship the game in full computer form — probably an ASUS Keyboard PC because it has the cyberdeck form factor. It would need some case modding to make it look right. Yeah, not gonna happen. But if you’re dreaming, may as well dream big . . .
• There would be some kind of home site for each drive/game to talk to and share resources with.
• Of course, you’d make the game open source, though you’d sell the physical artifact for some outrageous price to cover the costs. In my fantasy I saw one option of using this format to release an official Cyberspace Trilogy RPG (it’s a fantasy, after all) with proceeds going to charity (because of course this would convince William Gibson’s representation to not charge me any money! — and because I am actually considering ideas for a permanent RPG for charity right now) via the inflated price of selling an RPG in an artisan-modified hard drive.

I could actually do 90% of this (not get the license, do the art or do some of the cooler UI mods) if I had a spare self lying around that wasn’t busy, or somebody to pay me a truckload of money to drop everything I’m doing. Maybe a wealthy patron can order it done or a network of nerds can work on it.

Of course, it’s more doable once you scale back expectations, but once you commit to the hard drive format I think you’d need to throw something pretty damned special under the hood.

So what happened?

The Rise of the Practical Tablet Form Factor: Tablets are nothing new but tablets that don’t suck? That’s 2010. Sensitive resistive and inexpensive capacitive touchscreens with multitouch combined with software that works for a change (Windows 7, Android 2.0 to 2.1) made it possible to finally release practical general purpose tablets — previously, this form factor was mostly limited to specialized industries. Virtually every major company presented a tablet. Many were obvious responses to Apple’s rumoured iSlate, but recent patent applications from Apple indicate that the iSlate may end up being released with some dodgy mobile subsidy a la the iPhone, and might feature limitations similar to the ones that prompt people to jailbreak their iPhones. Basically, you want alternatives.

Tablets are important because they let players and GMs use machines at the table without the antisocial barrier of a screen and with natural game table actions such as written notes, page turning and more. Would a pure tablet suit gamers best? I’m not sure about that. HP did showcase an inexpensive convertible capacitive multitouch netbook however, meeting 75% of my requirements for an good next gen tabletop gaming machine.

Lots of E-Readers — Crappy, Crappy E-Readers: It’s easy to look at the abundance of e-readers at CES and conclude that they’ll be the best way for tabletop roleplayers to interact with books. That’s confusing popularity for practicality. CES’ ready for market e-readers don’t suit RPGs graphics-intensive qualities or gamers’ need for supplemental utilities such as character creators and dice rollers. They’ll get better, but will tablets get better first? I think they probably will, and e-readers may end up being an intermediate device.

Pixel Qi (and Maybe Mirasol): As Gizmodo put it: E-ink is dead. I’ve been watching Pixel Qi for a while. The technology lets you switch from a full colour backlit LCD screen to a non-backlit, power saving reader mode just by turning a dial. In reader mode you can still access normal applications and even watch video, though the colour is washed out. Screen response is far faster than e-ink. But the real killer behind the technology is that as a form of mature LCD technology it’s ready for mass production using the current LCD manufacturing infrastructure.

The only thing with a hope in hell of beating Pixel Qi is Qualcomm’s Mirasol display technology. It doesn’t piggyback on standard LCD but it does do colour and video (even 1080p HD) and it’s supposedly going to be installed in next gen Kindles. Basically, if you’re thinking of buying a Kindle for gaming (not standard reading, where the current versions work fine) don’t bother until the model with Mirasol and prepaid 4G shows up. Even then, you’ll want a mature app selection for any such e-reader to match a tablet-form general purpose machine with Pixel Qi installed. Otherwise, you’ll get the books, but not the tools (dice, campaign management) that really make going electronic worthwhile.

Androids in the Cloud: After a few experiments in the Chinese market, Android jumped into netbooks and tablets. This is probably a stopgap, as we all know the Chrome OS is coming (and Google has said it may eventually merge Android and Chrome) but it demonstrates that once again, tech companies want us to try (quasi) thin client computing. Unlike past initiatives, it looks like this will actually work because we can do pretty much anything remotely now. Companies should definitely think about serving tabletop RPGs this way, though it may only be viable for the top of the market.

Slow but Graphical – NVIDIA Tegra and Mobile Flash: One of the most interesting trends to come out of CES is stupid machines — that is, mobile-ish devices that run more slowly than traditional desktops and laptops but work just fine for the Web. The only problems with this approach were that ultramobile devices (smartphones and MIDs) struggled with video and couldn’t read Flash (Youtube on current devices uses an emulation script, not straight Flash video). The NVIDIA Tegra chip is set to augment devices to the point of playing streaming HD video and the Flash problem has been fixed for many devices. That means 2010 is the right to to roll out all of those funky graphical RPG applications like virtual tabletops.

Let Me Tell You What to Do

How should you respond to these developments? Here’s what I think:

Gamers: Buy a capacitive multitouch convertible tablet that uses Pixel Qi display technology. This will give you a flexible device that doesn’t interfere with face to face gaming, allows easy reading and saves power. They aren’t available yet but they should be soon. Find web apps that you can use with a glance and swipe. Unless you have money to spare, don’t buy a dedicated ebook reader for gaming purposes alone. The technology isn’t good enough yet but it’s okay for conventional books.

Game Companies: Develop touch-friendly web applications and get back to graphically ambitious tools such as the virtual tabletop. Look at how magazines are developing new content delivery methods for the iSlate and other tablets. Try developing games in the cloud and get past the idea that a pretended book is the best way to present content electronically.

RPG E-Book Interface

This is probably a Flash application. You can resize, minimize or dismiss each pane in the interface above. The book screen is actually the second screen you’d get after opening up the game, after going to your library from the start screen (and seeing options to click through to campaign management, communities and play tools), though you’d be able to bypass that if you want.

I can visualize a lot of options, and a real danger in giving them near-equal standing that destroys the benefits of a minimalist interface. Funneling people to the most common functions without making it a total pain to go somewhere else is the challenge, and would require some experimentation to get right.

Let’s take it pane by pane:

Book Media Pane: Your book’s images appear here. They fade in when you hit an appropriate part of the text. Additional media plays here too. You can set images to appear in the text body instead, or link media to particular sections, so that clicking on them summons them to the media pane. If you want pure text, just dismiss the pane. Layout/design may configure the pane to automatically resize based on certain cues, to maintain its functionality while taking advantage of the aesthetics of traditional layout. You can also break out of the book completely to add media from your own library, that of the community, or any other mashable media object.

Book Text Pane: The game text goes here. You can select page by page layout, but the default is continuous scrolling, though not in the same sense as a big browser window. It may or may not have embedded media depending on the book and your preferences. The navigation pane makes it easily to find the content you want, but the text itself includes hyperlinks to other relevant sections, tutorials/FAQs, a as developer comments and community content (one touch brings up options and two goes to your default). You can also add your own comments in text regions to build in house rules.

Book Navigation Pane: The basic options here let you tab between text and gallery-style media navigation. In text navigation, the pane lists your current “page” (scrolling spot), chapter and heading, and lets you either navigate back and forth in each category, or pick from a pop up or drop down list. You can also perform a text-based search here. This sticks to the book by default but you can set it to search the entire game-as-service.

Tool and Community Tabs: Your tabs illustrate a major concept: Your book is never just your book, but one emphasis in the resource cloud. You really only need two tabs here because these can “rotate” through a list of options, including play tools like a dice roller, community forums and your campaign notes.

The Current Formula

Electronic implementation is currently a user-organized exploit of current cheap technologies. You could express it this way:

Hardware + PDF + Native Applications + Web Tools + Community = Tabletop Simulation

Unfortunately, there are a number of problems with this model:

It isn’t integrated. Even DDI is a jungle of web apps and PDFs that require individual kludging to wrestle into an easy process. My DM Steve has a DDI subscription and campaign notes in Word. As far as I can tell his processes uses DDI for prep and community insights but it doesn’t have much of a table presence. If it did, he’d be switching back and forth.

Steve doesn’t use electronic dice. I do, using an iPod Touch app. I also use the Touch to share relevant media from the Star Wars setting. I showed them a picture of The Force Unleashed’s PROXY when it joined the party, for example. It’s still clumsy, and I spend about 75% of my time using paper.

It aims low. Theoretically, GMs should be able to show rich media applications with a touch. Rules documents should be extensively hyperlinked, including links to FAQs, tutorials and community feedback. All of this is possible with current technology. Furthermore, PDFs are too wedded to the illusion of paper. Why can’t I have continuous scrolling for one big page, with page markers unobtrusively popping up to let me know my progress? Why can’t I get rid of unwanted art, or change its size and location? Why can’t I make a character as a read character creation rules? Why aren’t there a dozen characters available at a click?

It’s a slave to the tabletop concept. A new medium should inspire a new kind of game. Fandom RPGs already show us the way by building play into the community portal. that I suspect many companies are boldly striding toward dead ends by trying to simulate the tabletop on whatever technology looks cool and trendy.

For example, I’ve read a lot of dubious stuff about using augmented reality to create a virtual game table. Are five guys really going to squint through iPhones to look at a phantom battle map? Plus, even though I loved the demo too, the recent hype around using Surface as a game table disguises its impracticality. Even though we have desktop multitouch now we don’t have cheap, rugged Surface style tables, and won’t get them for a while yet (Surface machines cost about $14,000 now – drop it by half every 18 months and we’re talking about four or five years for viable consumer versions).  Smarter, more practical ways to take RPGs in truly innovative directions are out there.

The New Formula

Instead of talking about how we’ll use sexy-trendy tech to replicate the offline gaming environment, let’s put together a new formula informed by the real potential of technologies that are going to be widely adopted:

Couch Computing + Cloud Portal = Integrated Gaming Environment

Now, to break down each component:

Couch Computing: The big trend in consumer computing right now lies in multitouch interfaces wedded to OLED and e-ink screens that are either built into tablet computers, or into laptops that easily configure into tablets. The rumored Apple tablet isn’t the only game in town, either. Nvidia’s Tegra chip is due to launch in at least one tablet. For those willing to navigate the chaotic Shenzhen OEM market, cheap resistive tablets are already available. These “couch computers” won’t draw users away from play with a clumsy interface, provided they host the right tools.

Cloud Portal: If we’re going to drop the physical book, why stick with the illusion of a book? I can visualize an interface that lets me look at the rules in “book mode,” but will also give me one touch access to a dice roller, character generator, wiki and community, all laid out in one window, not several. We can achieve this by using the browser as our primary way to interact with content. This is something folks partially kludge right now with tabbed browsing and online SRDs, but we’ll be able to take it a step further once browsers make the jump to HTML5, which will display rich content without needing plugins and support offline access to web resources.

Integrated Gaming Environment: When I fetch information from the cloud, summon, mash and dismiss elements at will, and jump straight to community content without tabs and self-bookmarking, it means the game becomes a place instead of an artifact. This place includes community forums, blogs, character databases and campaign wikis. My players know where to go to either continue the game of the table or run new games in a shared setting. This environment should be designed to capture the bulk of the player base not only because it’s where my game comes from, but because the features are attractive in of themselves. Players become interest groups within a bigger community and can opt for any level of interaction they want. Beyond these traditional-style groups, the community should also be able to self-organize massive multiplayer games.

The next time I talk about this I’m going to throw up a few diagrams to butter explain what I’m talking about. For now, take a look at Wired‘s tablet concept:

. . . and Time’s (with Sports Illustrated):