There was in fact a great split between roleplaying games at a table and those on a computer, but it happened years ago. The first digital version of D&D came about in 1975, merely a year after the game was released; it was called Dungeon and was originally developed for the PDP-10 mainframe. Although Dungeon was an unlicensed emulation of the D&D ruleset, the primary thing that prevented it from taking off in university computer labs was its exceptionally steep memory requirement…36 kilobytes. Needless to say, the reality of the RPG video game has changed.

Dungeon, and its successors like DND (Dungeons of the Necromancer’s Domain, but we all know the intent of the acronym) helped to kick off the RPG video game in the mid 1970s, but by the 1990s it was a completely different world. While TSR was failing and getting acquired by Wizards of the Coast, games like Baldur’s Gate and The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall were both imminently successful and also almost nothing like their tabletop forbears. Video games were already doing things that no tabletop GM could have dreamed of, while also casting aside the elements of RPGs that computers weren’t really capable of doing at the time. Baldur’s Gate has faster and flashier combat than any game table you can imagine, but no matter how many times you play it, the basic story will be the same each time.

Let’s gather back here in 2024. Video games, aided by unimaginable computing hardware and multi-million dollar budgets, have become something that the average nerd in the 1990s (let alone the 1970s) could only have dreamed of. At the same time, though, tabletop games have continued to capture imaginations and, over the last ten years have also exploded in popularity. The RPG has also headed back to the digital realm, just like it did in 1975. This time, though, there’s recognition. The massive, high fidelity world of video games exists, and it’s big business. Tabletop RPGs, though, are wandering back to the digital realm with virtual tabletops, digital assistants, and soon, AI game masters. With the continued re-integration of software into the hobby, it seems like a prudent time to ask: Where is the line? And, perhaps more importantly, how is this time different than it was in 1975?

One of the primary inciting factors for the RPG explosion in the late 2010s was an explosion of accessibility. While the pandemic truly clinched it, the development of better and better teleconferencing software through the 2010s made it easier and easier for groups to come together without needing to be in the same place. I lived through this directly, running a game entirely online in 2010. At the time, we had to beg and borrow a chat channel on a Teamspeak server used by one of the players in order to play, and more than once we had a confused WoW player enter the room, thinking that there was a raid going on. We quickly moved over to Skype; while Skype had been released a long time prior to the group starting it actually didn’t support enough concurrent users in a call to be useful for our group until sometime around the Microsoft acquisition in 2011. We’re still on Skype now, though there were a number of years in between when we used Google Talk/Meet.

Alongside the mere communications element of a tabletop game came virtual tabletops. Once again I have the (mis)fortune to have started gaming online at the very beginning of virtual tabletops; I very briefly looked at MapTool back around the same time we started using Skype but I wasn’t interested in setting up a tool from scratch, which is what open source projects like MapTool required. Instead I used Twiddla, a free website that was literally nothing more than an online whiteboard. I did return to the world of VTTs, using Roll20 for a few games and finding its automation incredibly useful as a Burning Wheel player. An inordinately complex game becomes much easier with some backend assistance.

And this is where we find ourselves looking at the role of digital tools in our games. While VTTs can be easier than writing or drawing in a game, especially if that game is taking place with players hundreds or miles apart, when you start applying the tools provided in a VTT it enables you to effectively run complex games that would have been a quagmire otherwise. This is a good thing, don’t get me wrong. You do begin to run into a bit of a problem when a game becomes complex enough that as a GM you’ll only run situations which you know the VTT can adjudicate for you. And the minute the software becomes a binding constraint, that’s the minute we start slipping back down the slope into reinventing video games. This is an issue with some VTTs, especially content portals like D&D Beyond. While D&D Beyond does allow homebrew, the implementation of it is enough to let you know that Wizards would rather it didn’t.

The existence of content portals isn’t going to start constraining how we play anytime soon. That said, the business model of content portals is the main reason that the advent of digitally distributed games is worrying. I don’t want to go too far on a tangent about distribution; I have my qualms about how Marvel Multiverse sells its digital rulebooks but at the end of the day they’re still rulebooks, and they still have a paper equivalent that is equally useful. Where things get muddy is where software is needed to play the game at all. 

While none of them have quite broken out into the mainstream, digital RPGs have entered crowdfunding and done quite well for themselves. Ember is a game/setting built by Foundry VTT which enables groups to play through a 25,000 hex fantasy world using Foundry’s existing software. Fablecraft is a completely digital RPG, aiming to be distributed on Steam. Both of these campaigns did well; Ember in particular raised over $700,000 for its campaign. There is clearly interest for more digital RPG content, and to be clear what both of these campaigns are really selling is content. Ember has a ruleset but it’s also completely compatible with D&D 5e, implying the ruleset is either vestigial or an extensible demo for Foundry-specific mechanics and features. Ultimately, that’s fine. A 25,000 hex world is a pretty ambitious campaign, whether distributed digitally or in print.

My real issue comes to the consideration of what these games are outside of their content. What does a digital RPG let you do? That might seem like an odd question, but that’s because a tabletop RPG traditionally lets you do anything. If you’re playing a game in a digital environment and you come up with something a bit wild, is that within the parameters of the game? Will this turn-tracking, damage-calculating, pretty picture-sharing platform let you do something outside the logic of how the content is written? We already know that a lot of D&D pre-written content doesn’t really work without a DM to think around the narrow quest triggers and pre-determined outcomes; locking that sort of content into a piece of software will make the problem worse.

My issue with digital games comes not from the fact they’re digital, but the fact that they are being built with a storefront in mind: Playable once and then something to replace with the next piece of content. Fablecraft began touting the ability to buy more content in their crowdfunding campaign, and we don’t really know how the game even works yet. More concerning to me is the fact that locking content into a digital format makes it that much more difficult to actually make anything of your own. Not being able or willing to make digital content for my games was the whole reason I never got into MapTool…and MapTool is open source and completely free.

I’m not going to dismiss games like Ember or Fablecraft completely. I mean, I already dislike their business practices, but the same goes for Wizards of the Coast and their games come in a dead tree version first. If these games work the way they’re advertised, they’re still allowing a GM to run a game for their players and giving them control over the outcome. Ember really does look like it’s just a really big module designed to make the most of Foundry, and I can’t fault that. For me personally, it does stick in my craw that using these pieces of software (and this does include Foundry as a VTT to some extent) makes it that much harder for people to create their own content; I would rather make some ugly sketches on a whiteboard as long as it meant that I got to run my game in my settings with my premises. Not everyone is me, though.

There’s another piece of software that is looming on the horizon for tabletop gaming, and that has to do with AI. There are clearly a lot of problems with consumer-side AI now, mostly consisting of generative algorithms built on plagiarism and large language models that have significantly bigger limitations than they’re advertised with, not to mention the appalling power consumption. But, fact is, machine learning started long before consumers were being sold on ‘AI’ and the field of artificial intelligence software will continue marching on, bringing along with it some massive changes. One of those might be to your GM. AI Dungeon has been around since 2019, using backends like that of OpenAI to provide one of the first AI-driven roleplaying experiences. From what I’ve seen of it, there are some fascinating stories created, given the wide range of text that models like GPT-4 draw from. It is also far, far away from actually being able to be a GM. Limited storytelling aside, the software wouldn’t necessarily know what to do with a party of four players, but that’s functionality that’s not yet built into most large language models, instead being built for simple two-way interaction. Nonetheless. The point of bringing up AI Dungeon is to illustrate that bringing the digital into gaming has the ability to expand the possibilities of roleplaying significantly, even if the technology isn’t mature enough to do so. Once we have a piece of software that can act like a GM, though, the floodgates are opening. It’s entirely possible that the floodgates will open into places much more complicated, incredible, and yes, potentially problematic than simply a computer GMing a roleplaying game. But that’s complexity that society as a whole is going to have to deal with, not just nerds.

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I do not intend to gatekeep digital tools and digital games. In running an almost entirely online-only gaming group for nearly 15 years, I’m well aware of the power of VTTs, content portals, and other digital roleplaying aids. I’m also aware that the imagination works a lot faster and a lot wilder than most rulesets. When bringing digital tools into your game, it’s important to be cognizant of how using the tools will change your game. Sure, you never remember to use the in-game calendar you invented, and dynamic lighting sounds really cool. But if the combat system is being run in the game client, will there be an option for swinging off a chandelier? If you want to bring in a monster from the latest weird OSR book you read, how long will it take to import or convert the stats, and will that prevent you from bothering? How many spur of the moment ideas will you abandon the second you try to get a game client to parse them? The incredible uniqueness of roleplaying games lies in what happens between the players, and the best games are the ones that encourage players to come up with great moments together. Before I jump into the deep end with a digitized RPG, I want to make sure that the freedom to create those great moments is still there.

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