The Wave’s the Thing: Google Wave, 4e D&D, and You

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You may have heard of this new protocol/webapp thingamajiggy…it’s called uh…wave, I think? If you’ve wondered where I’ve been, blame google and this wave…thing.

I’m not here to tell you that it will change everything (it will) or that you should get on immediately (you should).  I’m here to tell you that wave can let you play the most incredible play by post style games you can think of.  Unable to keep a schedule for face to face games, or having difficulties with getting people together in the first place?  Wave is your friend.  Like the thought of a play-by-post or play-by-email 4e game, but can’t reconcile the implementation of such games?  Wave is also your friend in this.  It’s going to change everything (didn’t I say I wasn’t going to say that?)including the way we play.

What’s a Wave?

Let’s start with the most fundamental bit.  What’s a wave?  Is it chat? Is it e-mail?  Is it a wiki?  Is it a forum?

Yes.

Really, if you’re not tuned into the exact nature of what a wave is, do yourself a favor and check this out. I’ll wait.

This is a gaming blog, so let’s fast forward and talk about what a wave can do for your game.  Why is it better than doing a play-by-post game?  What makes it so special?  Why is gamefiend frothing at the mouth?

I’ve no answers for you on the frothing, though last I checked it was some sort of condition.  What makes wave so damn special? That, I can tackle.

I’m running one wave game now (“Revenge of the Waves” if you’re on wave), and looking to start another soon.  Here is what I’ve learned from a few weeks of pretty heavy immersion.

A Wave is Non-Linear, but Sequential

You know how a play-by-post (PbP) runs.  The GM posts something, then players post,  the GM responds, players post.  Even though stories are sequential, a linear medium like a forum or an e-mail or even a chatroom fits like a poorly-tailored jacket on your story’s sequence.  It works, but the shoulders droop, the sleeves are a little too long.  The logistics always involve some basic form of time travel unless you are stalking your thread/game with utmost vigilance. You either have to write in micro clips to let other people hop in, or write large blocks of text to cover every. fricken. contingency.  It makes the process of telling the story a non-fluid affair.  I’m not saying that PbP is bad –I’ve done it and enjoyed it — but it does have its limitations.

Now imagine that when the GM posts, you can post a comment from your character within the scene.  Or when your character talks, the GM can interleave the NPC’s response in shape to your dialog.  The shape of the game is completely different.  You’re no longer looking at call and response.  You have a persistent yet fluid gaming experience.  GMs and PCs can put their responses and actions where it is appropriate instead of where it has to be by the nature of the medium.

It looks something like this:

The blue text is the GM.  The players wrote their posts earlier that day, and I came in and inserting my posts in later.  Imagine that in a play by post.  I would have to do some wrangling of text just to reply, and I could never really get that naturalistic flow that wave allows me so easily to have.

When you tear down the scaffolding and read it later, it reads just like the story you were trying to create.

A Wave is Story Scaffolding

As excited as I get about the non-linear nature of a wave, what really revs me up is this:  A wave is easy to edit. Wonderfully, spectacularly easy.  Double click in a post and select edit, and there you are.  Why is this important?  well, for starters, never forget that the prime goal (past having fun) for a game is to tell a story.  What gets in the way of a story? The rules.  What do we need often to tell a good story?   The rules. A typical PbP is littered with the artifacts of the rules, interspersed between otherwise compelling bits of character dialogue and storytelling.  Wouldn’t it be nice if that could just…disappear?

It can.  I’m going to cover conventions for running your own wave game later, but for now take a look at this:

Primus leaps astride the nearest giant and shifts back into his humanoid form. The warforged picks through the giant’s clothes with care, looking for any sign of anything strange or out of the ordinary. [Perception:26]

Standard example of what you might expect to see, correct? But ten seconds in google wave turns that into:

Primus leaps astride the nearest giant and shifts back into his humanoid form. The warforged picks through the giant’s clothes with care, looking for any sign of anything strange or out of the ordinary. He sees some unusual markings along the neck of the leader, a strange glyph branded into the flesh. Primus also makes note of the scraps of metal plate adorning his shoulder and intended to be armor of some kind. It is the same brand of metal that the blade is made of.

I saw the skill the character was trying to use (Hi Asmor) and transformed that into the results of the roll. As a GM, I can go back and interpolate the results of a skill check and transform it into narrative. With active pruning of your scenes, there is no trace of a game, even though you used a game to get to the story.

You can use this “scaffolding” around the structure of your story and tear it away so all that’s left is for people to witness the beauty of your story.

And it gets better.  “What if I want to see something that gets deleted later?”  Wave has a nifty playback feature that lets you examine the history of a wave from beginning to end.  Every wave is a miniature Wayback Machine.

I hate to mash metaphors together, but if you really want to make a strong use of waves, you also need to understand that a wave is a draft.

A Wave is a Draft

How self-referential is that?  Writing a wave is like the writing process itself?  It’s a touch strange but it’s really true. A wave is never “done”.  While you may go back and add an extra e-mail or post on a forum to clarify or add detail, you can’t change what you put out there.  What’s sent was sent, so you better do all your fact-checking and response totally up front, because you cannot change what you did once you hit “send” or “submit”.  If you’ve got a blip, you can change it at any time.  If you can change it at any time, why not make it the best it can be?  If you don’t make it perfect at first, go back and make it better.  If you have all this game rule jargon cluttering up your nice scene, chop it out.

The way that your wave starts is most certainly not the way your wave has to end.  The final product should be a fine piece of story that you and your players created.  You can expect to go through a revision process and strip what doesn’t need to be there.  My players and I refer to the process as pruning, and is basically a semi-regular maintenance.  Waves can get messy, so you must maintain a basic vigilance in making sure they are what you want.  Revise, revise, revise.

Running a Wave Game

“Blah blah blah, gamefiend.  How do I run a game in wave?”

First you have to be on wave. Once you’ve conquered that, it’s pretty easy…and also something I’m going to cover in Part 2.

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•      The Wave’s the Thing: Running a D&D Wave Game
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