Electric Dice

04/12/20

By Will Hindmarch

Let’s say it started around a fire, maybe in a cave, maybe at the feet of great tall stones, maybe when names were new and all history was oral history. We told stories. Maybe we all chipped in. Whether you call it art or play or anything else, it’s human. It’s a human thing to do.

Back when I did leave the house, it was often to play or play-test roleplaying games (RPGs) like Dungeons & Dragons, or to prep events like Level Eater. Staying home can meant missing out on the communal storytelling of those games. But it doesn’t have to.

You know about D&D, right? It’s a cooperative, social, narrative game about wizards and monsters—part conversation and part fantasy game. You play by talking, but instead of taking turns telling stories, we take turns adding to a shared story we shape together through play. It taps into some deep, ‘round-the-campfire,’ oral-history, storytelling type of shit. I love these kinds of games.

Except now, instead of sitting in the light of a campfire, we sit at our monitors, talking to each other through glass and pixels, seeing friendly faces made out of light. There’s something comforting about it, about our imaginations getting to play while we’re so far apart. It’s what we’ve got right now.

A few years ago, to address this kind of play, I worked with wonderful engineers to build the foundation of a game called Storium, which is a creative-writing and roleplaying game you can play asynchronously online. I think it’s a lot of fun, especially if you find yourself on a different schedule than other players and are looking for a creative outlet.

Want to play online in real time? You live in a sort of golden age of online RPG play—and learning these kinds of games has never been easier, online or offline.

You have a lot of options and expertise available to you from sources such as D&D Beyond to books like Your Best Game Ever. (That book’s chapter about playing online is now part of its free preview PDF, too.) You can play a wide catalog of games through online venues like Roll20 and Astral. A bunch of Astral’s subscription features are free through April. 

Those venues are for games where you want detailed maps and board-game elements. A lot of roleplaying and story games don’t call for that sort of thing and are more like conversations with some dice-rolling. To mixed media and chat features, a lot of people play through Discord. I’m on Slack, coupled with its DiceBot app, and a variety of video-chat outfits like Whereby (until I find one I really love). We talk to each other face-to-face and roll electric dice in some shared chat channel, so everyone can see and gasp together at dramatic results.

You can also roll dice using Google (search for “roll a die”) or sites like AnyDice and Roll For Your Party, depending on what kind of user interface you like (and how deep down the random rabbit hole you want to go).

Want to play at home with a person you’re already with? Pelgrane Press produces some great “One-2-One” games and scenarios for two players—one as the protagonist and one as everyone else. Cthulhu Confidential offers hard-boiled occult detective yarns set in the 1930s from great writers like Robin D. Laws, Chris Spivey, and Ruth Tillman. Night’s Black Agents: Solo Ops pits your rogue secret agent against a conspiracy of vampires, from author Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan.

Whatever you play, however you fuel and fulfill the conversations you have through the luxury of the internet, giving your imagination this workout can be invigorating. Your imagination can roam, wherever your body is. That light in your monitor is us—and you.