Please give me my official Luddite membership card.

[hwango]

Recently I happened across an appeal to fund a Kickstarter for a system that could "revolutionize how we play tabletop RPGs."

Something like this is going to exist, and it's going to change how everyone plays tabletop RPGs. That'll happen within the next 5 years or so. We'll all be sitting there with tablets instead of books.

The way I see it, either the app that takes over gaming will be created by a big corporate entity, or by group like this. They're a small group of passionate lifetime gamers with a deep understanding and respect for the experience of sitting down with your friends to have fun.

This made me angry for two reasons. First, it assumes that everyone who wants to play a tabletop RPG can afford a tablet and a subscription to this proposed system, which strikes me as rather elitist. I always thought one of the great things about tabletop roleplaying is that you could get many hours of enjoyment from one member of your group spending $30-$50 on book(s). If your group could afford to get more books, or everyone could afford to have their own, or whatever, that's great. But the minimum bar for entry was pretty low - certainly lower than it would be for this system.

The second is that technology was perhaps the greatest reason my long-running D&D campaign was scuttled. I could no longer compete for my player's collective attention with their #&$%! tablets and smartphones. If I could have set off an EMP at the start of every session, that would have made me incredibly happy. The absolute last thing I want to do is get together with my friends so we can share in a collaborative gaming experience in which we spend the entire time each staring at our own little glowing screen.

And yes, the subject line is hyperbole, because I don't hate all technology...I'm posting this on the internet, after all. But I despise the idea of making a tablet a standard and required component of tabletop roleplaying.

Comments

[anyonesghost.livejournal.com]

I admit that I'm of two minds here. On one hand, we've had sessions derailed by tech. On the other, using a wiki for campaign notes and PDFs instead of lugging around the manuals can make things go a lot faster. (Our clerics are abysmal, no pun intended, at remembering their spells.)

Either way, your stone tablet "card" will be arriving by pack mule in the next nine months. :-)

[hwango.livejournal.com]

Certainly there have been handy tech things - the searchable database of monsters, powers, items, etc. meant I could use more content without having to browse a lot of books to look for it and keep track of it (though that was all pre-session technology). As for actually improving a session in real time, when other people have run games they used a combat tracker that seemed to work pretty well. I admit that my own dry-erase board method occasionally forgot ongoing effects and whatnot. But we were using those things before the first person in the group got a tablet, and possibly even before the first smart phone showed up, so I have a pretty clear idea of what tech level I wish we could go back to. = P

[shogunhb.livejournal.com]

I'm with you. It's so much harder to run games when everyone is dicking around on their computers and phones.

[hwango.livejournal.com]

On the one hand, it's nice to know I'm not alone in my disgruntlement. On the other hand, sorry to hear that your games are fraught with distracting techowidgetry. = P