Roleplaying, Web 2.0 Style

Now that I’m a bit settled in Hong Kong, one of the first things I did was start recruiting friends to for a tabletop roleplaying campaign. My first brush with world of dice was back in 6th grade with Shadowrun. I spent a good deal of high school playing Robotech and Rifts and dabbled in D&D 3rd Edition for the last few years.

Of course my being in Hong Kong makes it difficult to get the regular cast of characters around the table, so we’re moving the game online this time. There are a lot of options to do this, from IRC and Google Groups to Second Life. To keep things simple, we decided to reuse some tools we have now—37 Signal’s Basecamp and Campfire. So far it’s worked very well. The biggest advantage is that these applications are very easy to use and require no extra software, so I didn’t have to teach anyone how to use IRC, for example. While 37 Signals does offer free accounts for these services, you couldn’t run a very large campaign that way, so this wouldn’t work for everyone.

We’re just getting started and I’m interested to see how well these tools work out for roleplaying. I’ll try to post an update after a few games (in a month or so).

Oh, and while I’m on the subject - there are a lot of really impressive open source tools for roleplaying too such as PCGen, RPTools, and OpenRPG. However, none of them are easy to use. That’s a real shame and I would love to find the time to help on that front. If anyone has other suggestions, include them in the comments below.