With the progression and attention people are giving any advancement in virtual tech, do you think that it will cause an end to tabletop gaming? or do you think that it would open it up to such a degree that so many new worlds and characters will be created and allow people to experience their games on a new level?

I'd bet on the second; if anything, depending on how well it'd work, it'd probably give traditional RPGs a leg up over multiplayer video-games, since it'd remove the immersion advantage that superior graphics currently grants them.
This message was last edited by the user at 21:57, Mon 04 Sept 2017.

Has video killed the radio star again?

I swear I told it not to do that on the carpet. -sighs- I'll go get the mop.

Are you kidding? We're just a couple steps from holodeck territory. We're probably looking into a Great Tabletop Renaissance.

Unfortunately those couple of steps involve force fields and matter/energy conversion. I'm sure we'll have those licked in no time...:-D...not to mention the computing and memory requirements of a real holodeck.

I think simulated force-feedback is more likely to be the choice to replicate touch than force fields, etc. Regarding memory/computing requirements, my current phone has far more computing power than the phone I had four years ago, and that phone could put my old Gateway desktop to shame, so I doubt it's going to be a even a small hurdle once the other requirements are met.

The technical requirements to realize VR environments will leave plenty of room in the entertainment space for the theater of the mind.  VR is an incredible tool, but the technical barriers to content creation are so staggeringly high that the worthwhile experiences we'll have with it will probably be countable on all our digits.

The internet has not ended tabletop gaming, and in ways it has opened up new possibilities for people who would normally not be able to partake of roleplay.  Virtual reality will simply improve things further, once it becomes cheap enough for the average person.

Right now "Virtual Reality" technology is just an optical illusion. It's a pretty cheap gimmick and while it is 'cool' even if the current technology was perfect it wouldn't have the same other senses.

No smells, no touch, the fact that not everyone has access to "perfect" VR tech so you always will have that one friend who is kinda "meh" about technology or money and you'll have to see him anyways.

I can see it bumping up virtual gaming like on roll20 in the sense that you can "see" each other and that would be cool. A "perfect" virtual tabletop would allow those of us without a reliable tabletop group locally to get one virtually.

Will not replace the bulk of tabletop gaming though, even if the current optical illusion is perfected.

It's not real gaming unless the room smells of farts and stale doritos by the end of it!

There is a game on steam called virtual tabletop, it is amazing and although it doesn't require a vr headset, it lays a frame work for networked tabletop play in precisely the way I envision vr being just a tool that you could use to facilitate a "live" session. It comes with lots of games worth of assets already created and have a library of others available for a pittance.

Ah, yes...the "Will technology kill our favorite entertainment?" question...

No.  Movies didn't kill live theater.  Home video didn't kill movies.  MTV didn't kill radio.  Amazon didn't kill brick-and-mortar retail, and eBooks didn't kill print.  They did change as a result of new technology...but our social history has many cases of premature death knells being sounded for stuff that didn't die as expected.

Well let me put it this way. I cannot even play Minecraft on full screen without having motion sickness issues. So traditional gaming has some time left. Because I would rather not have to pop dromamine to play my games.

Just to add a minor point to Spectre's mention of the "virtual tabletop" game, it's called Tabletop Simulator and is exactly what it sounds like - a 3D virtual tabletop onto which you can spawn pretty much any tabletop-gaming-related object (dice, cards, tokens, counters, Chess pieces, marbles, even 3D animated figures of a few DnD monsters and generic "heroes" - people in armour and stuff). You can also spawn in a variety of other items such as an electronic counter, bag to put items in (which can be shaken to jumble them up), electronic tablet with the Internet on it so you don't have to minimise the game to look something up, a few game boards (eg for Chess and Backgammon) and a whole bunch of other stuff. There are also different shapes/sizes of table. And the ability to flip the table, which sends it and everything on it hurtling into the void. And everything has physics so you can bash stuff into other stuff and knock it over and all that.

And you can customise your own...erm...anything.

So it's pretty cool. But still not quite as good as an actual tabletop, even if tidying up at the end takes substantially less time than it does IRL ;).

Eh, many of my friends have this... and we pretty much use it for Cards Against Humanity, roleplaying we use mostly roll20 and a little of rpol.

People have been saying "Will [specific type of tech] kill roleplaying? Kids these days only want to play video games now" for the last 20 years, and it hasn't happened yet. And the number of no-electronic-tech-at-all board/card games has exploded.

The human mind is the best generator of virtual reality ever conceived.

Long after the big portobellos cause the electromagnetic pulse that brings about the fall of civilization and the long dark slide back into barbarism,  humanity's children will still play games of "Let's Pretend" to learn valuable life skills like hunting and killing the zombies that roam the radioactive western wastes.

Eventually, tribesmen will carve crude knucklebones and gamble again.  Their children will use those same knucklebones to play board games like Senet, Fox & Hounds, Backgammon, and Pachisi.  These will eventually give rise to a new generation of 6-sided and other polyhedral dice, and the cycle of game development will continue.

Roll them bones, folks!  Play with all your might while you still may!

With further development of Virtual Tech and AI, I look forward to the future of gaming being completely immersive, hopefully it happens within my lifetime.