It was always our student house joke about Logical Positivism. You can’t doubt the existence of the table in front of you, if you can put a pint on it. It was the sort of test that we were sure the Vienna Circle would have deployed, down the boozer, in the 20s.
I’m starting to think about gaming around real tables with real people. I think I may find it a challnege on a number of fronts. Virtual Tabletops are here to stay. All of my three regular games have people from other places, either in this country or much further away, so the games will go on and, in any case, I think I prefer playing online. That’s right, I think it is more me. This may place me in a minority, but that is just fine. Embrace the weird.
It isn’t just the convenience of the ‘switch on and play’ nature of virtual gaming, or that I can connect with so many more people and play the games that I really want to play. I think I like the creating of the session experience online. The ease with which you can create the richness of the surrounding assets that give the game the visual pizzazz, and the way the tabletop provides a dynamic concensus to what is going on. Accepting the limitations of the video box we sit in, the commnication tools on chat provide lots of opportunities for group communication.
You can’t go back to savoury now.
Nevertheless, I have space and a gaming table, and our local conventions are going back to the hotel venue, so I will be running realspace games before very long. Getting my current jam of 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons to physical has been occupying some spare processing space. I have ordered some 5cm wooden disks to go with my 2.5cm fridge magnets to give me quick, cheap and portable tokens for grid based play. Oh yes, all hail the beauty of the grid. I may also have to say hello to Loke, not the blind alley, but the battlemat purveyors. At least I hope that’s not a gaming cul-de-sac, but something like this looks pretty good:
Dungeon Draft and printer ink may also be deployed.
Genesys is something I’d definitely like to do more with, and I have my sights on the Summer Twilight Imperium release as the space opera for me. physical will encourage me to get out the specialist dice that I have and watch them clatter around the very real table next to my pint.
Yeah, that sounds pretty good.