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Show HN: Virtual tabletop gaming

roll20.net

74 pointssilverlight16 comments

Hey everyone -- our startup (a virtual tabletop) just launched today. We originally raised $40k on Kickstarter a few months ago. We've grown to 50,000 users during our open beta, and now we're officially "launching" and introducing supporter accounts.

There's also more specific information about the launch on our blog: http://blog.roll20.net/post/31726725487/roll20-goes-live

If you're interested in pen and paper gaming, especially tabletop RPGs or board games, check it out!

I'm sending my buddy the link to your site, I'm pretty sure me and some old friends from school are about to spend too much time playing games... And I had been so productive these last few weeks.

Sounds like a great idea to me! :-)

Looks interesting! There was a period of my life not too long ago where my friends and I would buy a new board game every month for a while. I love learning new game mechanics. But, I've never really played Pen & Paper games before and don't understand their appeal in this age of technology. Heck, I get frustrated with how manual and tedious regular board games are these days. Digital versions of games are so much better and move faster. How many times have you played a game and then half way through you realize you forgot some important rule or have been adding some points up wrong? I imagine what keeps players interested in this is that the game rules and content are all generated by the players?

Personally, I get over my frustrations and enjoy board games mostly for the in-person/face-to-face interactions. I guess my point is that this all seems a bit backwards. It seems they've digitized the human interactions and kept the games manual? I still hope for a future where it will be common to play games on things such as Microsoft PixelSense [1] (formally known as Surface). Or if everyone I knew would hurry up and buy a tablet then we could have some even more interesting games evolve.

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/pixelsense/default.aspx

> Digital versions of games are so much better and move faster. How many times have you played a game and then half way through you realize you forgot some important rule or have been adding some points up wrong?

The primary mechanic in pen and paper games is the players describing what their characters do and the Game/Dungeon master explaining what happens as a result. All the rules and math are just tools. In a pen and paper game they can be laid aside at any time when they get in the way (and in my opinion are ignored in a good game frequently).

With regard to sticking to rules, it depends on the game. With D&D you're explicitly told to break them as necessary ("Rule Zero").

In Burning Wheel, on the other hand, the designer intends you to follow the rules precisely as written, and the result is a system where players have much more freedom to do unexpected things and even drive the story themselves. Because there are well-defined, mechanical ways to attempt just about anything you can think of.

Video games don't come close to replicating either of those experiences.

You can think of RPGs as essentially ad-hoc story-telling with some mechanics and elements of chance to give it structure. I know when I used to play GURPS, we only followed a vague semblance of the official rules; in practice, we just did whatever we wanted. It would be very difficult if not impossible to contain this sort of anarchy in a fully digitized game!

This is very different from most "normal" board games. The real attraction is not playing a game or trying to win but rather coming up with and participating in an evolving narrative. Given the right friends with sufficiently twisted (in a good way, of course) senses of humor, the end result is often completely unexpected.

That said, I'm sure that playing an RPG on something like PixelSense (seriously, they couldn't come up with a better name?) would be pretty cool.

There is some automation going on (for example, we have a robust dice rolling engine that supports calculation of a lot of mechanics), you can store macros of frequent rolls/attacks, etc.

However, we found that VTTs that try to automate everything just end up ruining the one thing that makes RPGs so special: the GM's ability to completely control the game, bend or break the rules, etc.

There are pen and paper games that require more or less no rules and tend to degrade (is that really appropriate here?) to simple story-telling.

Really, your frustration isn't targeting pen and paper games, but might be valid against the pen and paper games _you played_ (double emphasis, since most pen and paper games that are played over a significant amount of time end up implementing in-house rules to adopt to the problems that arise, imo).

In other words: You played the wrong system, or the people around you valued rules over fun (usually a system tends to declare that it should be the other way around: Play and fall back to rules if needed).

This is pretty cool. Instead of creating an individual board game replacement, you've created an enabling technology to open up the whole space and going for a marketplace play.

Yep! We're starting with tabletop RPGs because there is already a large community that is trying to play those online using similar tools, but our eventual goal is to enable anything that can be played via a physical tabletop to be played online. We'd love to eventually partner with publishers so you could be playing (for example) Settlers of Catan with just one click.

I wonder if the Dice-o-Matic[1] creator offers an API?

Also, how much harder it would be to support multiple shapes of dice for true authenticity.

On a more serious note, looks interesting (although I'm not really the target audience), but you might want to throw some simple styling at it quickly before the anti-Bootstrap people turn up on your lawn.

[1] http://gamesbyemail.com/News/DiceOMatic

Would this have any use for people who are already physically located in the same space?

My players are having trouble keeping up with all their moves and the math for 4e.

There are several folks using in in-person via a projector or laptop hooked up to a TV. We're also working on an mobile tablet compatible version.

congrats! I don't like pen and paper gaming but it looks really great, good luck!!!

Thanks!

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