RPGs As Apps
Let’s take as read that we’ve already had a discussion of the iPad and the relative allure of its initial feature set. I don’t pretend to know whether it in particular or the multi-touch tablet in particular will rise to ubiquity.
But let’s say, to weave a scenario, that it will achieve a penetration similar to the iPhone/iTouch. What does that do for tabletop game design?
A page-sized screen that you can pass around the table makes possible a number of accessory-style apps. We’re used to a D&D tactical map being an inch a square, but it could go page-sized for an app that allows you to drag virtual counters through a battle space, allow the map to scroll with the combatants, figure blast radii and so forth. Like the virtual game table we’ve seen in proof of concept form, but smaller, and not so far in the future.
For GUMSHOE and other investigative games, scenario hand-outs could come as an app package, in gorgeous color. Some documents might be sound files or videos.
For HeroQuest, you could plot a pass/fail map in real time to see your narrative and get appropriate Resistances.
The real paradigm shift comes, however, when the game book becomes, through its transformation into an app, the game itself. I’m not just talking robust hyperlinks within and between rule books, although those alone could be worth the price of the port.
Instead of a rules book telling you what the resolution system is, the app is the resolution system. The app version of Time & Temp would present Epi’s brilliant Sudoku-like paradox grid as a touchable form. Instead of giving you a description of how it works, it just works and gives you the results. 3:16 would, instead of showing you how to arrange figures on the range diagram, include a range diagram you’d move your virtual figures on.
For D&D you’d go to the monster screen, punch in your search parameters, and drag the desired stat blocks onto the battle grid. The app would keep track of power recharges, hits and misses, lost hit points, ad infinitum. It becomes your co-DM, doing all the grunt work for you.
Resolution mechanics, handled by the app, would become invisible, freeing designers from concerns of complexity or the limitations of polyhedral dice. Wickedly involved math could underlie a 21st century answer to The Morrow Project, so long as the app was required to do all of it.
Ultimately the designer might be entirely liberated from numerical resolution systems, what with their rolls and target numbers and modifiers. App RPGs might adjudicate action attempts with the manipulation of shapes, or other abstract or purely visual mechanisms.