Today's topic:

The Evolution of Table Top Gaming

So, I think most of my fellow nerds have at least heard of Dungeons and Dragons. If you haven't, get out from under your rock and go to a damn bookstore. It's going mainstream here. If you can't read, how the hell have you even gotten this far in the page? Not the point. Let's go through a brief overview of table top gaming.

So, tabletop started off with war games. Not sure what a war game is? Well obviously, it's a game about war. How clever you must be to have figured that much out. But really, it pretty much started with games akin to Warhammer 40,000 where sci-fi miniatures 'fought' other pieces until one persons army finally decimated the other. Albeit, you didn't see actual combat, the rules and flavor texts allowed us to fill in the images with our mind, creating epic movie fight scenes every time you played. Eventually, Gary Gygax decided to change that by making fantasy miniatures that he called "Chainmail". Fast-forward a bit, and Dave Arnesson teams up with Gary and they made our first adventure based table top game, Dungeons and Dragons.


Next thing you know it has a huge cult following, and people are being paid to write professional adventures for it. And with the release of 4th edition, we replaced some of the pen and paper and put in miniatures for all of our heroes, and specialized miniatures for the monsters you would encounter for your own epic journey, you have dungeon tiles to make more fantastic and elaborate maps instead of using your graph paper and the rules started becoming more user-friendly so you didn't need an actual college degree to play the game.

Anyway, what's that have to do with the MMOs that we're so tied into now? Well. To compete, Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop games have learned to evolve. Wizards of the Coast have made this game's fourth edition very similar to MMOs, so that it's easier to pick up and play, but at the same time you still have the flexibility and freedom of being part of a hand carved adventure with your friends, that you really can control. Instead of a game where you just have options, you choose where ever the game will take you, but I digress.

Yes, we get it. But it's still a table top game, and you can't have as many people for it. Ultimately, MMOs will always trump table top games in the aspect of having a persistent world that can house far more people. But table top will always win over with the massive amounts of flexibility. And the fact is, tabletop gaming can now start to move over to being part of desktop gaming. (Get it? Get it? Desktop, like, the computer! Oh never mind...) With Instant Messaging and Voice Over Internet Protocols, we can still play DnD wherever your friends are. Even now, WOTC is trying to make a client so that we can make 3-D representations of our stories. But while we wait for that, we can still craft our own worlds and play these games over Skype and AIM, or whatever you use, or you can log on and hang out with your friends at the local tavern and get ready to slay a dragon!