The Best Laid Plans…
Just like any other tabletop game, wavletop games must cope with several basic obstacles. Finding players, matching up schedules, settling on a game to play, and so on and so forth ad nauseum. Wave does make some of these issues a bit easier to resolve. If you have a group of people all online at the same time, it can be a cinch to plow through a lot of the planning stages of a game in under an hour.
If.
So far that “if” is a fairly rare occurrence. Once you get past whittling down the “Who” of the game, it can be hard to keep that momentum going unless you did it with the whole group online at the same time. The Spirit of the Century game I’ve been trying to pull together has stalled out on the “When” for the past week or so while waiting on feedback.
Of course, it’s not all lost time. Over the past couple days, a number of concepts have been hashed out for gaming over Wave.
Content Management
There are some things Wave handles quite well. Other things… not so much. For example, Wave isn’t so hot for things that take up a lot of screen real estate and don’t require much on in the way of collaboration beyond the ability to let others have a look (like character sheets). Fortunately, tabbed browsing means that players can keep sheets on Google Docs. Wave also isn’t so great on its own for content that shouldn’t be edited. This, too, has a fix: Watexy. Watexy takes any string of text $$marked like this$$ and outputs an image that cannot then be edited by flesh-and-blood users of Wave. Better still, RandomLee now detects when Watexy is a participant in a wave and outputs die rolls in that notation so that Watexy does its thing.
As a result, this...
...turns into this.
Of course, it's not all a battle to get Wave to do what you want it to do. The Wave paradigm lends itself quite well to some things with no shoehorning required. Take Spirit of the Century's character generation, for example. One of the earliest steps in creating an SotC character is coming up with a backstory in five parts. In the first part, you figure out your character's early childhood. In the second, you work out what your character did during The Great War (WWI). In the third part, you come up with a little back-cover blurb for a pulp action novel your character starred in. In the fourth and fifth parts, you take a different novel starring another player's character and insert your character as a guest star.
It turns out is the exact sort of thing that Wave helps make easy. Players can copy/paste the template from that starting blip into their own blips, collaborate with other players in another wave on novel ideas that will suit the mutual strengths of their characters, or even directly edit other players' blips to insert their guest-star blurbs for completion's sake. Once all of that's done, players can paste the results directly into their character sheets over in Google Docs.
Coming Soon!
Hopefully sometime in the next week or so I can get things started at least on chargen for the Spirit of the Century game. Once that's done, you can look forward to some musings from behind the virtual GM's screen and some actual real-world examples of how Wavletop gaming will shape up in practice.
Happy surfing!
-BowlerHatMan
Note: For those of you already on Wave, I have created a Questions and Comments wave. Hopefully, this link works as it's not something I've tried before and I can't exactly create a dummy account to make sure. If it does work, please say so in the wave. If not, please say so in the comments here. Linky!
Note: For those of you already on Wave, I have created a Questions and Comments wave. Hopefully, this link works as it's not something I've tried before and I can't exactly create a dummy account to make sure. If it does work, please say so in the wave. If not, please say so in the comments here. Linky!
