What makes Google Wave work for role-playing games?
I’ve been playing around with Google Wave for a few weeks now, primarily with role-playing Waves. These are Waves in which people pretend to be characters in a story.
There are tons of ways to role-play; sitting around a table, over live text chat, or on a forum. Wave appears to be well-suited to role-playing.
I’ve noticed a few things:
- Players are less committed. That is, players leave for relatively long periods, then come back. This is partly due to Wave’s youth; checking Wave is not yet an ingrained habit for players.
- Parties are less cohesive. Same thing here; Wave’s not yet a habit. But I can see parties as being much more malleable; people will come and go.
- Systems must be simple. I’m observing a D&D 4E game on Wave, and one combat round took 2 days. I love D&D 4E, but I think it—and other relatively “heavy” systems—are less appropriate for Wave than their simpler cousins.
- Everything’s visible and malleable. Anyone can jump in and fix a mistake or restructure content.
My Response
I’ve created an RPG experiment on Google Wave. It’s a floating fantasy city that anyone can interact with. It’s a sandbox role-playing game of exploration and intrigue. It has elements of:
- Wikis
- Choose-your-own-adventure books
- Old school text adventures
- Tabletop RPGs
Even better, I’ve created a website where you can see all of this. I think it will be visible even if you don’t have a Google Wave account. Go here:
There are already 10 locations you can explore and interact with, and a fairly robust (and original) system for creating your character. Hop on in!
What do you think? Does this interest you?
Google Wave logo courtesy Google; fountain photo is courtesy antmoose on FLickr.