Taking D&D Adventures Online
TTRPG’s have been online a long time
“Are you HACKING right now,” a student asked with eyes wide, horrified at my potentially rebellious behavior.
I smiled.
Online TTRPG’s Aren’t New
I had accessed a multi-user dungeon (MUD) via Telnet in my creative writing class to show my students a unique way of using narrative and dialogue. They’d never seen anything like it. I hadn’t used a Web browser, and it wasn’t a Web site. It wasn’t even an app. I had accessed a hidden program, enabled it, and used the “Run” command. There were no images. The black screen with white serif text convinced them I was accessing “The Dark Web.”
I’d shown them something brand, spanking new. Except it wasn’t at all new. It was old. Like, “old like me” old. And the real kicker is that when I’d originally started accessing Telnet MUDs in the mid 1990’s, I didn’t even know what it was I was doing. I mean, I knew I was creating a character and engaging with other people (who’d also created characters) in make-believe shenanigans while pretending to be that character. I didn’t know that it was a game called a role-playing game (RPG). I didn’t know about Dungeons & Dragons, and I didn’t know anything about character stats or abilities or pretty much anything except the obvious. I didn’t know, at first, that some of it was scripted, and I wondered how other people typed so fast. I liked the weird text-based map and the free equipment room. My character died a lot.
Online TTRPG’s Today
Today’s choices for taking a tabletop game and running it as a virtual tabletop game (VTT) are overwhelming. There’s Roll20, Discord, Owlbear Rodeo, D&D Beyond, the Google VTT add-on, digital map-making sites and apps, virtual token sites and apps, and a whole heap of other sites and apps I haven’t mentioned and don’t even know about or have forgotten. We can open multiple windows, use multiple devices, see each other while we play, talk in real time without tying up the landline phone for hours, roll digital dice, and create characters in a few minutes (if that’s all we have). Maps and tokens can be imported or drawn online, parts of maps we want obscured are obscured and uncovered as the game master desires, and in some cases games look almost like video games. Our need for collaborative storytelling has gotten fancy.
But RPG’s have been online, and we’ve been playing with people from afar, for a long time. Am I glad it’s a little fancier now than it was [MATH] years ago? Yes and no. Chat and video in real time can be pretty awesome, but with all the digital map and token visuals I think something else has been lost, and it goes back to what I was initially trying to show my students: There’s an especially unique skill in writing the MUD narrative and dialogue, and when done especially well, the bells and whistles of all today’s online tools are unnecessary. When done well, the textual elements of the MUD RPG are in the sweet spot that both give enough detail and give enough room to imagine that fantasy. Kudos to those writers who did it for us then, and can still do it today, fancified or otherwise.
Care to visit my favorite MUD?
HexOnyx MUD can be accessed at telnet mud.hexonyx.com 7777
