I Love Technology as Much as the Next Guy, But...

A lot of time with this blog, if you have not noticed it, I tend to ramble and wander all over the place. Most of the time I talk about what we are doing in game (my Lessons Learned series, talking about my 3d printing, the renewed interest in all things Cyberpunk, etc) or I jot down a quick note of something funny that I want to talk about. Like this one. A little over a year ago I posted about how technology was great, but it's not quite at a level that makes sense, at least at my table and at the level of hardware we can afford. You can read that post here.

That is not the funny part, the funny part is that, when I shared the post to a D&D group on Google Plus (which is now defunct... how much changes in a year), one of the replies I got was the following.

Tablets and phones are, for the most part, still too crappy for this. I DM from a monster gaming PC with three 4K monitors, and my players all use high-performance laptops. We track everything through the Fantasy Grounds software, which is all connected and updates in real-time for everyone. We use a combo of online and physical rule books, but the online rule lookups are quite snappy on decent hardware. Honestly, the completeness of the Fantasy Grounds character sheets greatly reduces the number of rules we need to look up.

What kills me is the level of hardware required to make playing a game acceptable - as fast and responsive as using the dead tree editions - is both expensive and heavy. Remember, that is according to their own standards, not my own. Maybe they are counting every time they have to lug a very heavy gaming laptop to and from a game as their workout - and I used to have an Alienware gaming laptop, those things are monsters and heavy as a small anvil, so I know that pain rather well - but if the requirements are so high just to play the game in person, would it not be easier to just play it online, from the comfort of everyone's gaming chairs?

As I talked about in the blog post, if you could make phones or tablets affordable enough and fast enough (hardware wise) to make them as fast and accessible as physical books, I would be all over them. Until then, I like having the .pdf digital copies for research purposes (it takes up a lot less room than the shelf o'books, and much more accessible from the gaming chair in front of the computer), but for the actual games, give me hardcopy.