I do not know how to introduce this bullshit…

I’m gonna keep it short. Not the bullshit itself. I failed at that. I’m going to keep the introduction short. Because I don’t want to get all maudlin and personal and apologize for what I’m going to write or to justify why I think it’s worth writing. Especially because it would turn into a long, rambling, tearful apology for failing so many of you, my readers, for so long.

That’s what monthly updates and live chats are for.

I’ve got something to whine and moan about. Gaming-related. But it’s really minor whining and moaning. I do think it might entice some of you to think about how you’re running your online games and consider experimenting in different ways to see if you get a better experience, but I know it’s probably going to come across as an old man yelling at you kids to put down your TikToks and get off the skibbidi toilet and touch some grass because everything was better thirty years ago. Except, actually, it’s probably not going to sound like that at all. Besides, I know my stats, and many of you reading this don’t know what the hell that skibbidi toilet thing is all about either.

I want to piss and moan about virtual tabletops because they’re pissing me off right now. But I promise I have something new to complain about, and I promise this isn’t all, “online gaming is bad and you shouldn’t do it.” Actually, I’m probably going to end up saying a lot more nice things than any of you might expect from me.

I promise I’ll keep it short — which is a lie; I didn’t — and I promise I’ll give you a new initiative system before the end of this week. Cool?

The Two Things I Hate About Virtual Tabletops (And One Thing I Love)

Y’all know I’m a cranky old man with cranky old opinions. Except I’m not really. I mean, I shit on the generations that came after a little, but that’s the right of every generation. I’m sorry, you Zoomers and Alphas don’t have a monopoly on the previous generation leaving you a shit world and then telling you the real problem is you. That shit’s as old as time. We all inherit crap worlds, and we’re all told it’s our fault that life sucks. The real truth is that life pretty much universally sucks. It just sucks differently for every generation and every generation eventually learns to function in the suck and then, when the suck changes and the new generation has to learn how to function and the old generation’s lessons don’t work because the world is different, they have to figure it out all over again while the old generation keeps trying to say the world doesn’t suck because they had thirty years to figure out to function in it and don’t realize the rules have changed.

The thing is, I actually do the generational thing less than most because I’m not a Boomer, I’m a Gen X-er. I just want to suffer quietly and be left alone and work myself to death. I don’t care what anyone else is doing. It wasn’t until the Millennial assclowns started calling me a Boomer and the Boomers told me it was my own fault my life sucked that I started yelling back.

Honestly, you Zoomers? You and me? We could be tight. It’s all the same shit. It’s cyclical.

What the hell was the point I started off trying to make? Oh, right…

You all know I’m a cranky old man with cranky old opinions. I’ve had a lot to say on the subject of online roleplaying gaming with virtual tabletops. A lot of it wasn’t kind, but that was also mostly my passion and my hyperbole talking. That’s just a thing I do. The truth is, I don’t actually hate online gaming at all. Really, I kind of love it. The fact that I can run games for anyone, anywhere, anytime from my computer is pretty frigging amazing, actually. In fact, I honestly don’t think gamers — especially gamers of my generation and older — actually appreciate just how frigging amazing the world we live in has become. Every week — recent scheduling kerfuffles notwithstanding — I run a game for four really awesome people that, in the past, I’d only have an opportunity to game with once a year if we happened to attend the same convention. And I don’t even have to wear pants as long as I remember to keep the camera angled up, but I only ever made that mistake once, and that’s why I don’t stream my games anymore. Twitch is unsurprisingly Twitchy about banning you if you’re not wearing pants.

Well, it bans certain people for not wearing pants. Apparently, some people are allowed to stream without pants. I guess I’m just not the right “body type” if you know what I mean.

Anyway…

I love online gaming. I love that it exists, and it lets me run more games with more people than I’d ever be able to run in real life. Anyone who says online gaming sucks or that it’s a bad thing is just a cantankerous moron. That’s a stupid-ass position.

I have been honest about its limitations, though. It isn’t the same as running games in meatspace around a table. You do lose things. But that’s how everything works. There are costs and there are benefits, and you pay the costs and you enjoy the benefits. You learn to work within the limits of the medium. If the costs are too much for you, you don’t pay them, and that’s your choice, but it’s stupid to think everyone has the same value proposition as you anyway. For some people, the costs of running online are too high for the benefits. They only want to run meatspace games. For others, the costs are trivial, the benefits are high, and the costs of running in meatspace are too high, so they only play virtual games. Most people are somewhere in between, with a preference for one, but a willingness to go both ways. I love online games and I love meatspace games and I prefer meatspace games because some of the things I lose running online are things I prize highly about gaming in general, so given the choice, I’ll pick a meatspace game over a virtual game, but I’ll also run virtual games and have a blast.

My job’s to give people advice. I’ve been forgetting that job a lot lately, and I’m sorry. I’ve been bitching and moaning and screaming and fighting too much and not giving nearly enough practical advice and my release schedule has been a mess and I also forgot how much people like meaty, mechanical systems and haven’t been putting out any of that crap in far too long and…

Sorry, I was trying to avoid that when I tried to cut the introduction. Moving on…

My job’s to give people advice. As an accident of human nature, I mostly talk to people who are mostly similar to me. Thus, most of my commentary on online games is on how to mitigate the costs. Because the costs do hit me hard. I’m all about pacing, I’m all about performance, and I’m also about gaming as a social outlet. That’s the shit that virtual gaming hits the hardest. Online games are slower, and they’re harder to pace because of the limitations of the communication. The technology is close enough to feeling like you’re communicating with someone in the same room — even if you’re seeing them through a window — to trick you into acting like you are, but it’s also just limited enough to fuck you up if you try to act like you’re in the same room. It’s taken me years to adapt to that. I still haven’t quite adapted. Likewise, everything is delayed. Everything is just slightly slower. In absolute terms, things are slower by fractions of a second, and it’s easy to think everything isn’t slower, but, again, those fractions add up, and if you’re used to keeping a tight hand on the pacing reins, it chafes. It really does. Psychologically, talking to someone through a screen, even with a camera, does not hit your brain the same way as talking to them in real life. Your brain literally responds differently. So there’s a sense of social distance if you’re sensitive to that kind of thing. Not everyone is, but I am, and so are lots of gamers I know. Gaming is actually a social hobby, despite the stereotypes, and many of us got into it because it provides a sense of structured social connection. Hell, as social as people think I am — and as animated and performative as I seem — I’m actually a little shy and socially awkward, and I struggle in unstructured social situations. Having a structured activity with defined roles helps me be more social than I’d otherwise be.

Not that any of you can sympathize with that, I bet, right?

That was sarcasm. I know I’m not alone in that. Gaming is actually a great hobby for people with average or higher social needs but who struggle with social awkwardness, shyness, or even anxiety. Which is probably how it got the reputation it did for being a hobby for antisocial loser loners.

Anyway…

The truth is, I love the fact that I can run games online. I’m actually a dumbass for not taking more advantage of it. But, you know, time… Also, by fixating so much on the negatives in an effort to help others mitigate the limitations of the medium, I’ve convinced myself I hate it way more than I do. Human brains are such stupid things.

I love online gaming, but my relationship with virtual tabletops is a little more complex. A little more lovey-hatey.

It’s important, by the way, to realize that online gaming is not synonymous with virtual tabletop gaming. You can run a game online without using a dedicated virtual tabletop application. You don’t need D&D Beyond or Foundry or Roll20 or Fantasy Grounds to run a game online. All you really need is a way to communicate. Like Discord or Zoom. Of course, other things help too. It’s nice to be able to roll dice virtually and share the rolls. That’s important to me and there’s a psychology to that. I hate running online games when people roll their own dice at their own desks or in their own apps and just report the results. The whole table should see all the die rolls. Except the secret ones. We should all share in that.

Of course, gaming these days is very dependent on visual aids and positional tracking and fancy-ass maps, so it’s also helpful to have a way to share those things, right? Which is how Big VTT actually gets you. At least, that’s how they suck you in with their pretty shared maps and tokens and animations and miniatures and line-of-sight and fog-of-war and all that shit. But let me say something that’s probably going to shock the hell out of a few of you. I’m actually into that.

One of my favorite things about online gaming — one of the real strengths of the medium — is the whole maps-and-tokens thing. I had an experience a few months ago when my players were exploring some sprawling, underground, cavernous spaces. I had the map all set up in my VTT of choice — I was using Fantasy Grounds at the time — with the line-of-sight and the lighting and the fog of war all set up right and filters to give it all a very unsaturated look. Each player could only see what their character could see from where they were based on their senses and the limit of their torches and lanterns and things, so some people could see more of the layout than others, but the space was also too big for anyone to see it all. Standing in the middle of one large cavern, it looked to the players like their characters were standing in the middle of a pool of light surrounded on every side by darkness, with no sense of the size or shape of the cavern they were in.

The players thus were talking back and forth about what their characters could see that others couldn’t, and one of the players commented on how oppressive it was. Later, they actually doused their torches so the dwarf could use his darkvision to scan the space because this was AD&D 2E and any amount of light at all spoils darkvision, so suddenly, everyone was plunged into darkness except the dwarf.

At a physical table, I could never, ever capture that sense of standing in the middle of a circle of light surrounded by oppressive darkness, not even knowing how big the space was, as powerfully as I did then and there. Oh, sure, I can narrate that shit and make it hit, but in that moment, all I had to do was let the visuals do the work, and the players felt the crushing weight of the darkness and the terror of the unknown without me saying a word. Fucking awesome.

Moreover, there is just no way at a meatspace table to really handle different players having different sensory capabilities. Everyone can hear the narration, so everyone shares the same set of senses, which is why everyone groans when someone says, “I have darkvision.” It’s not that you have to reveal stuff to that one character; it’s that, when you do, you’re going to take the oppressive darkness and terror of the unknown from the entire table.

But every silver cloud has its dark underbelly. As much as I absolutely do love the fog-of-war and line-of-sight and everyone-sees-their-own-map thing — because it’s seriously the greatest thing about running online games — there’s a bad side to it. When running games online, you tend to stop presenting things on a room-by-room basis. You make a single, big map for the entire dungeon or complex or cavern or whatever, and then you move the characters around it, gradually uncovering it. Gradually, then, the players get to see the whole map, and they always know where they are and where they’ve been. The game automatically maps for the players.

Now, this isn’t about making the players map for themselves. I don’t really care if the players map the space or not or just take notes or just try to remember how to get back to the exit. That isn’t the point. It’s up to the players to decide how to handle their exploration. My concern is that the players should have to build a mental map of the space if they want it. Once you leave a room behind, it should be gone from view. It should vanish. If you want to remember where you were, that’s on you. Build a mental map, write a note, draw a physical map, but I am not going to leave any of the spaces you’ve been on the board.

Most virtual tabletop applications’ mapping tools remember the spaces each character has seen and continue to show them on the map. They’re grayed out a bit, and the players can’t see any tokens or pieces in spaces they can’t currently see, so the map is just retaining a memory of where they’ve been. For the same reason, the players can’t lose track of where the wall is in a space that’s too big to see by the light source they have.

Now, I am not looking for solutions. I have solutions. There are settings to counteract this in some virtual tabletops, and there are other approaches you can take. For example, I am getting away from using the entire dungeon’s map and instead chopping the spaces into single-room maps. When the players leave a room, I close that map and open the next. I also don’t let them see maps of every room. I mix in some narrative-only rooms and halls and things. That forces them to build a mental map or take notes or draw a physical map or find some other way to keep from getting lost. Because, just like I want the players to feel the limit of their senses as a source of danger, I also want them to feel the limit of their memory as a source of danger. I want my players to start to worry in a particularly windy and difficult-to-manage space that they’re never going to find their way out. It’s hard for them to do that if they can see the map.

My point is, I’m not looking for solutions. Instead, I’m suggesting to all of you that maybe you want to find solutions. If you’re running an exploration-based game and you provide an automap feature, you’re actually destroying a lot of the tension and engagement that are the hallmarks of exploring dangerous, hostile, and alien spaces. Spelunking wouldn’t be scary if you could see perfectly in the dark and had an automap.

Cost and benefit. Capitalize on the benefit — love the medium for its benefits — but recognize and mitigate the costs so you don’t lose something valuable without realizing what you’ve lost.

Another thing the virtual tabletops give you is tracking and automation. They’ll keep your character sheet handy and condense rolling checks down to a single button press. They’ll track turn order and they’ll track hit points and conditions and durations and time and all that crap. Some of that is actually tremendously helpful. I did fall in love with Fantasy Grounds’ duration and condition tracking. I ain’t gonna lie. That shit took a lot of pressure off me. Turn order tracking is also great.

But tracking and automation aren’t things I consider minimum viable tools to run an online game. The minimum to run an online game is, for me, a way to communicate and a way to share dice rolls. I have some specific, picky rules about sharing dice rolls, which I admit are a me thing, but they’re not important.

Tracking and automation aren’t things I love or hate. The whole automapping problem and the consequent board-game feel that exploration picks up as a result? That’s a hate for me. That’s one of the things I hate for those of you wondering about the title. Meanwhile, the individualized line-of-sight and fog-of-war thing is one of the loves hinted at in my title. Which is why I sought a solution that let me have what I loved without the parts I hated. It means more work for me, but the benefits to my exploration gamefeel are too great to pass up.

To me, tracking and automation are gravy. They’re nice if I can get them, but I can live without them. At least, that’s how I felt for a while. And this brings me around to a major annoyance I’ve been experiencing with virtual tabletops lately. It brings me around to the other thing I hate. But this is worse than hate because I think it’s having a bad impact on the hobby and on the Game Masters who run in the virtual space. After all, it’s an invisible cost. It’s a cost you don’t know is a cost if you never didn’t pay it. It’s one of those inherent limitations in the tools that just becomes a part of your assumptions. And as companies increasingly focus on providing an online play experience — which they absolutely, totally should do; it is stupid for a gaming company not to recognize that people want to be able play roleplaying games virtually at least as often as they play in meatspace — as companies increasingly focus on providing an online play experience, I fear it’ll affect the hobby as a whole.

The problem is versatility.

You might remember from a 5,000-word screed I published the other day in lieu of providing an actual, mechanical solution that I’m angry about turn order and Initiative this month. That’s what’s stuck in my craw for August. One of the things that bugs me is that no turn order and initiative system has ever been designed from the viewpoint of someone who has to keep track of that shit. I mentioned that in my rant, so I’m not going to repeat myself.

As I’m working on my own roleplaying game engine and as that project has expanded from a quick-and-dirty replacement for D&D to a complete and completely unique fantasy adventure roleplaying game package, I am constantly asking myself, “How would I do this at a table?” I am also asking myself, “How would an online system handle this?” As far as I’m concerned, a tabletop roleplaying game must be playable at both a physical table and in a virtual space and provide an equally satisfying experience with roughly equal amounts of effort. So, when I designed the turn order system — the Initiative Stack, I nicknamed it — for my combat engine, I was thinking of a system in terms of how a user would interact with it. I didn’t just design rules, I designed a process someone could actually follow at a physical table. One that, conceivably, I could pay someone to build into a Foundry module or whatever.

I am not going to complain, by the way, that making a roleplaying game work well on a virtual tabletop requires you to actually build software tools. That’s like complaining that making a roleplaying game work well at a physical table requires you to actually publish a book. That’s how making shit works.

But what drove home for me the versatility issue was this. One of the elements of the turn order and initiative variant I was ranting about for D&D 5E was the idea of just putting a spin-down die next to every miniature to represent their place in the turn order. Technically, it’s a d10, but it’s the same idea. When someone takes their turn, they just take away the die. Then you set it out when you roll initiative again. It’s easy to track, everyone can see the order, and rolling the check is tracking the turn order.

At a meatspace table, not only is that super efficient and easy to manage, but it’s also easy to implement. I just have to say, “Guys, here’s how we’re doing initiative now…” In a virtual tabletop game, though, I can’t make that kind of simple little hacky change without writing a fucking Lua script or some XML module or whatever. Even if I’m going with my more minimalist, non-VTT style of play, that’s still not something I can just easily do.

See, game mastering has some very strong DIY roots. As much as I complain about having to make tools and sheets for myself, the truth is that that’s part of the hobby. It’s easy to customize your game and make minor tweaks and experiment with different systems and come up with solutions to little speedbumps and shit like that. That’s part of being a Game Master. And doing that sort of shit is the gateway drug that leads you to the hard stuff like homebrewing and publishing hacks and eventually building your own rules system. Not everyone goes that route, but lots of GMs end up somewhere in that talent tree eventually.

Virtual tabletops and online tools add an entry barrier to that sort of DIY shit. You can’t just come up with a quick-and-simple fix for a gaming slowdown or throw a random little mechanical system into your game because virtual tools, by their nature, cannot do anything they cannot do. A virtual die can only be rolled like a die. It can only generate random numbers. I can’t use a virtual die as a counter or a tracker or a stand-in for a miniature or a ticking clock or a projectile weapon to speed up my players’ decision-making.

There’s a whole underlying psychology here about functional fixedness and functional flexibility, and I’ll eventually end up exploring that shit in an article because it’s very important in problem and puzzle design, but that’s a story for another day.

The same’s true, when you get right down to it, with character sheets. A virtual character sheet is not actually a piece of paper. It’s just a visual representation of a database entry, really. It’s just a picture of data fields and the data contained therein. You can’t write little reminders in the margins. You can’t highlight something you need to make sure you don’t forget. Hell, it’s often difficult to record anything the system doesn’t expect you to record. Not to mention that it’s time-consuming.

Take inventory items, for example. It is actually incredibly quick and easy for me to give a character an item in any virtual tabletop system. It’s just a drag-and-drop kind of thing. That’s provided the item is already defined. Or I’ve defined it during my prep. If I want to give a character an item on the fly, it’s a little trickier. Most virtual tabletops let you just type text entries directly into the inventory lists, sure, but if you’re tracking encumbrance or the thing has stats, that’s a different matter. Of course, it’s not always easy to add something that changes your stats to a physical character sheet either, whereas doing it virtually is pretty simple if the item’s already in the database.

The issue is when you look at the actual friction of adding an undefined, minor item to a character’s sheet in response to, say, the character picking up something from the environment you didn’t expect them to pick up that isn’t defined in the database of items. Like, if you describe an enameled ewer sitting on an end table or a pillow on a bed, and a player says, “Can I take that?” The actual physical actions required to record that item on a paper character sheet with a pencil are less friction than the actions required to record that same item in a virtual tabletop character sheet.

This isn’t an attack. You don’t have to protect Foundry from the evil, angry Internet asshole. I’m not even saying the difference is that substantial. It’s not even really about the time in seconds so much as the friction of the actions. Honestly, a lot of it is just about how character sheets are organized and designed in virtual platforms because they’re mostly made to emulate fillable computer documents, which are the absolutely fucking worst of all worlds. Ever watch someone try to add an item to a PDF character sheet on a tablet? Holy mother of fuck.

Lots of people — sometimes even me — also note the versatility issue when it comes to maps and visual aids. I love everything virtual tabletops empower me to do with maps, like I said, but what I don’t love is that I can’t do any of it off the cuff. If the players end up going somewhere I didn’t expect and then starting a fight and I have to improvise a map of a combat space, not only can I not use any of those awesome fog-of-war and line-of-sight tools, but it’s also pretty high friction to just shit out a map with the same speed and freedom I can on my Chessex vinyl battlemap or a Paizo dry-erase flip map. It’s not impossible. I’m not saying it is. I have solutions. There are simple whiteboard-like functions built into every virtual tabletop, plus Zoom itself. I’m just acknowledging that the platform is less versatile and higher-friction.

We’re having a frank, mature discussion, right? Costs and benefits.

The versatility thing and its consequent infringement on the Game Mastering DIY reflex wouldn’t be a big deal to me except that open-endness, flexibility, and adaptation are such central promises of the whole roleplaying gaming medium. That shit’s what RPGs are all about, right? Infinite flexibility, infinite openness, no limitations except for your own imagination. Virtual tabletops just aren’t designed to deliver on the promises roleplaying games make. Not really.

Again, I don’t think virtual tabletops are bad. I don’t think they’re ruining gaming. In fact, I think they’ve vastly improved the hobby. Hot take. But I also think the designers of the tools focused too much on building clients to execute rulesets then they did on building something that actually, really is a virtual tabletop. Of course, such things exist. There’s Tabletop Simulator, for example. It is literally a virtual tabletop. The dice are physics objects. The sheets of paper are sheets of paper. As a result, it’s awful. Translating real life into a virtual space just gets you a crappy, clunky version of real life you have to drive with a mouse. I want virtual tabletops to keep doing most of the things they’re doing, but I wish they were more freeform in what I consider to be very critical ways, and I also wish they were built for basic users to modify. You can make Foundry do whatever you want. All you have to do is program it to do that. But there should be visual, GUI-based ways to make it do what you want.

Except, in the end, I know I’m being somewhat irrational. I’m demanding the impossible and calling people out for not already having done it. When you get down to it, what I’m really saying is that I wish it were easier for me to slap together a mechanic or system on my website and make it instantly usable in any and every virtual tabletop for everyone ever. That is kind of a big ask. Especially given the inherent limitations of the technology and the fact that, while purpose-built roleplaying game virtual tables have technically existed for twenty years now, they only hit mainstream awareness in 2015, and they only really exploded in popularity in the last five to seven years. So who knows what they’ll be able to do tomorrow or next year or five years from now.

Meanwhile, though, I invite all of you who do run games online to carefully look at the costs and benefits of whichever platform you’re using. Find the strengths, like I did, and find the weaknesses. Think about switching your mapping setup so you can take advantage of the best parts of your platform of choice without giving up some kinds of tension and engagement you maybe didn’t realize you were losing. Lean less on automation and tracking just to see if the versatility that you gain from handling some stuff with a piece of scratch paper doesn’t let you find creative new mechanics, systems, and tools that enhance your game.

In fact, I challenge you to scale your online game down to using just the absolutely minimum number of tools you absolutely need in your platform of choice to make your game happen, and then add back one tool at a time to see which ones are making a difference and which ones you can live without. Because the automation is costing you. If you’re willing to pay the cost, that’s fine and I’ll never tell you you’re wrong, but you should know precisely what you’re actually paying.

So much for keeping this short, huh? Well, fuck it. There’s always September.