Interesting musings at OgreCave about the future of D&D. As games like World of Warcraft begin to compete successfully for the attention of tabletop gamers, what can D&D do better than an online roleplaying game?

A few years ago, nobody would’ve been taking this question seriously, as computer RPGs were still relatively crude and offered little of the social experience that’s so integral to a tabletop RPG. But that’s changing rapidly, and it may fall to the next edition of D&D to demonstrate what a traditional tabletop RPG can do better than a beautiful-looking, highly interactive online RPG can. Then and now, most people would cite face-to-face interaction as tabletop RPG’s trump card. From the OgreCave post:

So here’s the question: if having other real live in-the-flesh people at the table with you is a competitive advantage over WoW – and I think it is – how can the next version of the D&D rules take advantage of it instead of just falling back on it as granted? How can tabletop RPG rules actually make the fact of tabletop-ness part of the game itself?

That’s a great question with which to begin!

(As an aside: I’m glad somebody else is talking about it, because I too have been getting the exciting-yet-ominous sense that a new edition of D&D is out on the horizon… distant, to be sure, but getting closer.)

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