THE CRITICAL ROLE THAT ROLE PLAYS


Millions of tabletop gamers have transitioned from the dining room table to online, thanks to the growth of virtual tabletop tools like Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds. Richie Shoemaker spoke to Elle Dwight, the co-creator of Role, which aims to make online tabletop gaming as intuitive, inclusive and painless as possible


V


irtual tabletops (VTTs) have been a growing part of online gaming for some years now, as players have increasingly


sought to play traditional pen and paper RPGs with distant or locked down friends. Where once a rag-tag party of heroes might connect via Skype and track their progress through Google Docs, a number of dedicated applications have


increasingly taken over the administrative and comms elements of running an online tabletop game; providing ready access to rules and tables, updating stats and maps and, of course, rolling the bones. Alongside relative newcomers like Foundry,


Astral and TaleSpire, the most established VTT tools are Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds, both of which officially support dozens of roleplaying systems (D&D, Pathfinder, Vampire and Call of Cthulhu among others) and sell thousands of rulebooks, modules, tokens and maps within their own market spaces (2,368 DLCs and counting in the case of Fantasy Grounds), while claiming to service millions of distanced tabletop gaming fans.


SKYPE WITH BENEFITS The problem with many virtual tabletop solutions is that they have evolved much like computer role-playing games have, by focusing


42 | MCV/DEVELOP August 2022


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