From the early days of the printing press to the dawn of the VHS era, it's been a clich? that the first thing humans do upon inventing a new medium is distribute pornography with it. While this clich? may hold true for most humans and most media, there is one conspicuous exception: the computer geek. From Nethack to play-by-post forums on the WWW, the first thing that computer geeks do upon inventing a new medium is play Dungeons and Dragons with it—the porn comes later, after the role-playing game itch is scratched.

Thus it was that when I finally got my Google Wave invite and did a bit of poking around, I wasn't the least bit surprised to quickly discover a handful of Wave-based roleplaying games already in progress, and many more in various stages of planning. In the past few days, I've watched games from the sideline and talked to some Game Masters and gamers—there seems to be an emerging consensus that Google Wave has as much RPG potential as any platform since the venerable and proverbial tabletop.

Getting oriented

If you're not familiar with the concept behind Wave, don't worry—it's hard to explain. You have to attempt to use it for something before you get any kind of handle on what it is, what it isn't, and what it probably should be. If I had to describe, the best I could do is this: Wave is a mash-up of email, IM, IRC, online forums, and wikis, all rolled into an experience that sort of resembles (to me, at least) a MOO.

In case you're curious, here's a shot of my Wave inbox, in three-pane format, with a Mouse Guard RPG wave on the right:

The GM Brian Ballsun-Stanton's Mouse Guard wave.

It's easy to see why many people who use it for the first time wonder what the big deal is—as I said above, you really need to try to accomplish something with it as part of a group before you understand what it's good for. And what better way to get your feet wet with Wave than trying to find a missing grain peddler, or solve a zombie murder mystery, or slay a band of bugbears.

Of course, before you can do those things, you have to find other gamers who are actually on Wave. This can be a bit of a challenge, because getting started with Wave is exactly like getting started with the Web: you need a few URLs in order to get going. A few people I know had added me to some small waves, but things didn't really take off until I got added to the Hello Ars Technica Nerds wave, a public wave with way too many random people in it. (It reminds me of the lobby of a MUD/MOO.) Someone posted a link to "Roleplaying on the Wave: an Index of Wave-Borne RPGs", and I was off. If you manage to get a Wave invite and you're interested in checking out the emerging RPG scene, this wave is your first stop.

The RPG Wave Index

There are currently 11 games listed here in various stages of planning and/or play. Most of these are indie games, but there is one 4th Edition D&D game and one Shadowrun game listed. For my first attempt at lurking a Wave-based RPG, I jumped into the Mouse Guard game and watched.

What Wave can and can't do for gamers

It turns out that Mouse Guard is fairly representative of the initial handful of Wave RPGs, in that it's an indie RPG that's focused on role-playing and dialogue, and not so much on tactical combat. This is because Wave is currently suited for games that are centered around either real-time chat or play-by-post, where everything can be done with (suitably formatted) text.

A Mouse Guard interaction

The few games I'm following typically have at least three waves: one for recruiting and general discussion, another for out-of-character interactions ("table talk"), and the main wave where the actual in-character gaming takes place. Individual players are also encouraged to start waves between themselves for any conversations that the GM shouldn't be privy to. Character sheets can be posted in a private wave between a player and the GM, and character biographies can go anywhere where the other players can get access to them.

The waves are persistent, accessible to anyone who's added to them, and include the ability to track changes, so they ultimately work quite well as a medium for the non-tactical parts of an RPG. A newcomer can jump right in and get up-to-speed on past interactions, and a GM or industrious player can constantly maintain the official record of play by going back and fixing errors, formatting text, adding and deleting material, and reorganizing posts. Character generation seems to work quite well in Wave, since players can develop the shared character sheet at their own pace with periodic feedback from the GM.

Unfortunately for those of us who are more into the tactical side of RPGs, it isn't yet well-suited to a game that involves either a lot of dice rolling or careful tracking of player and NPC positions. Right now, Wave bots are hard to get working reliably and widgets are scarce, which means that if you don't want to use the standard dice bot that Wave debuted with (dice bots are an old IRC favorite) then there isn't really another convenient option; rolls are either made with real dice and then posted on the honor system, or they're posted in batches and a GM then uses them in sequence.

A 4th Edition combat using a dice rolling bot. (GM Quinn Conklin's Wave, After The Blight War

But Wave does have support for bots and interactive widgets, so it won't be long before RPG-specific examples of both start cropping up. Widgets in particular will provide an ideal mechanism for reproducing most elements of the tabletop miniatures experience—mapping, tactical combat, and dice rolling. Until then, Wavers are stuck with hacks and workarounds, like combat maps that look like they were put together quickly in Microsoft Paint.

Aside from a library of RPG widgets, the main thing that Wave lacks is support for some type of robust moderator privileges. There is currently no way to enforce rules on who can edit what, so users who want a moderated conversation are forced to resort to clunky solutions like asking everyone to abide by an impractically large set of rules when replying. Wave needs moderation capabilities for more than just RPGs, and I hope this is something that Google is working on.

In the end, I concur with Wave RPG enthusiast Wyatt Salazar, who wrote a really good blog post on RPGing with Google Wave—Wave has enough potential that it may be the Internet's best chance yet for superseding the pen-and-paper RPG experience. But it still has a ways to go before it realizes that potential.