Second Life - Viable as a Virtual Tabletop?

[Zuki]

I am planning to try and get a group of players together to try playing PTA or some other indie games on Second Life - second life is a fully customisable 3d chat/MMORPG/Modelling/Social Networking system and provides some of the requirements for virtual gaming which may well work well.

http://www.secondlife.com

Chat interface - Public Text and Private Text available, Emotes, animations. Also allows posing as 3rd parties via scripting.

Voice - Public and private voice conferencing. Very good at handling reasonable sized groups.

Mapping - Full 3d customisable Avatar and Environment. Map making In SL can be a slow process, but there is also tons of pre-created content available. Whats doable here is really inspiring you take the time or find the right places to play.

DIce - Many possibilities here, but I have a virtual dicing script thats nice and simple to use. Maybe even cards if the right scripting is done...

What Second Life DOESNT do very well..

Character sheets - Well not really...the best we have is note cards which can be shared between players but not a central shared store...tho possibly this could be scripted too.

NPC entities - Again movable NPCs could be done via either a GM character changing AVs or by putting out static or animated objects - so its not such a major drawback.

Privacy - Unless you buy a private sim for doing this on, finding a quiet place and hoping noone turns up to disrupt it is the best you can hope for.

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So what do people think of this as an idea for running a virtual game? Any SL players out there?

And any players interested in trying gaming on this platform?

[Brennen Reece]

Funny. Last night, I actually logged into SL for the first time in months with exactly the same thing in mind.

Also, you didn't mention that it's free...it you want it to be.

I'm not sure how it would work for crunchy games, which I'm really not into anyway, but for narrative games with a bunch of us sitting around a table, so to speak, it would be great.

I'm willing to set something up in SL if there are enough interested folks.

I think it would work very well for virtual LARPs, which it kind of already does.

[Zuki]

I am very interested in this as an idea...I think for narrative style games like PTA it would be alot of fun. I tried setting up a wushu group there once too but didnt get enough players.

There is a slight learning curve with SL but again with people to help its not hard at all.

Another limiting factor is that you need a reasonably good machine and net connection to run it on!

[Brennen Reece]

http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2006/10/scripted_dice_r.html

[Matt Strickling]

It doesn't really sound to me like this would be any better for a virtual game than a MUSH of some sort, assuming you didn't want to try and go to the trouble of making a map for it. Speaking of using a MUSH for gaming, I just recently remembered The Foundry, a MUSH for indie gamers, with a bunch of game objects already created, like dice, oracles, playing cards, a DitV object, etc. We've been considering getting a IAWA game going with the Tom Waits oracle.

[Zuki]

Second Life has lots of prefab avatars and structures built into it, so actually building somewhere or just doing some Guerilla RPing in a place someone else has designed is extremely easy.

Ive frequently done some impromptu RPing with friends just cos some of the locations are just that evocative.

I dont really go along with the article above about using a real tabletop inside the game, if your in SL you should go and use the immersive qualities of it to create the situation.

Most RP on second life right now is based around automated combat systems and so on, so its pretty much the MUD style paradigm. Im really interested in seeing some indie style gaming going on there tho.

Guerilla RPing sound like the way ahead.

[Auly]

Hey;

I've used second life (without voice) for RP games before. both LARP style (cant remember the system was years go) and for good ole fashion paper and pencil DnD 3.5. In the first it took
a bit of time to get my avatar looking the way I wanted it but was fun.

For paper and pencil games it was nice being able to create minitures and such with varying
success between people.