I sometimes wonder if the world wide web / online experience / social media / compu-whatever has been a net positive or net negative for our hobby.

I am unsure how to weigh the positives vs. the negatives to view the whole enchilada in total.

What do you think? Why?

Discuss...and shank anyone who disagrees with you!

Positive. Overwhelmingly positive. Especially in the last decade or so.

There's a shitload of RPG systems, hacks, scenarios,resources, and ideas online. Some of it's quite good, a little of it's fucking brilliant, and most of it's free or very low-cost.

Quote from: Just Another Snake Cult;808946Positive. Overwhelmingly positive. Especially in the last decade or so.

There's a shitload of RPG systems, hacks, scenarios,resources, and ideas online. Some of it's quite good, a little of it's fucking brilliant, and most of it's free or very low-cost.

This but even more so. When I wrote a modern game system in the 80s it took me weeks of effort to get the specs I wanted on various firearms, now all free online and 2mins away. The same is true from everything from religious observance in the pacific islands to floor plans of a medieval monestry to the newspaper headlines from October 15th 1923.

Information has been freed from the prison of encyclopedias updated every 10 years to being current, free and democratized. Yes there is a risk of inaccuracies but these are rapidly self healing from a factual perspective.

The internet truly is incredible as does even more than we thought it would when we we all hacking HTML back in the mid 90s

The Internet itself? Undoubtedly. Research is easier and that's good for verisimilitude, for the grasp of probability, for the sourcing of materials and inspiration, and for the sharing of best practice.

The Internet community? Possibly not. Linking up every game-store troglodyte with a PC of their own into a network of troglodytes has had... consequences.

It's like a library with twenty thousand people shouting inside it - but you can't blame the technology itself for the behaviour of its users.

This is such a breathtakingly obvious answer it's not worth posing the question.

Before the Web, give and take came from APAs and proprietary BBS forums.  For a few years, I was part of Alarums & Excursions, the most popular RPG APA there's ever been.  A lot of then-present and future pros contributed, and there was a good deal of give and take.  With two or three months lead time.  Something of yours I read you might have given to Lee Gold two months earlier; it'd be at minimum a month before you saw my response, and a minimum of a month for you to reply.  And at its absolute height, A&E reached fewer than 500 gamers.

The BBSes?  Well, they were influential, in their way.  I'm proud of the number of spells I contributed to GURPS and the give-and-take that happened on the run-up to GURPS Grimoire being published.  And for Grimoire alone, I blew $300 in connect charges to the old Illuminati BBS.  Few gamers knew about the forums -- the number of people who had a serious impact on Grimoire, for instance, were just a handful more than a dozen, most of whom were Austin-area gamers.

Or how about for writing games?  In writing GURPS Scarlet Pimpernel, it took months to get hold of all of the books in the series, almost all of which were long out of print.  A friend had to smuggle one out of the Yale University library.  My wife's high school librarian smuggled one out of the University of Pittsburgh library.  I spent nearly a tenth of what I made on the gamebook on rare book services.  One book I never did find (and had to admit it in the bibliography), and one book I didn't even know existed.  A couple things I had to make up, because in 1989, I just didn't have the sources ... and the library I was using for research was the largest public library in the Western Hemisphere.

Now?  Quite aside from the blizzard of free sites and material on the Net, the give-and-take is immediate.  I don't have to wait months for feedback -- I get that in moments.  I can, and get, feedback from the line editor of my favorite RPG, same day.  Untold thousands of gamers have access, from all over the world.  And it's all free.

Those out-of-print Scarlet Pimpernel books?  They're all online on Project Gutenberg, each and every one of them, and Wikipedia has all the information I lacked back then.

Quote from: Ravenswing;808962This is such a breathtakingly obvious answer it's not worth posing the question.

I disagree. Just because the Internet has been good for content creation and distribution of free content does NOT automatically mean the Internet has been good for the hobby community.

Also, I am unsure if the glut of free content is an overall good for the health of the hobby in the long term.

I also look at the quality of communication online and despair. I also wonder if the online RPG community has added, or detracted from the amount of actual play.

Maybe you are right and the web is an overall uber-positive for RPGs. I am just very unsure because of the volume of the "troglodytes".  Nasty and creepy non-gamers in the pre-internet age were a non-issue to the hobby, but now many of those fucks have become the self-styled RPG "thought leaders".

Absolutely positive, for all the reasons given above and more. I struggle really to think of any downsides.

Speaking only for myself and my group (because I can't speak for anyone else)...

Positives

• Things like Wikipedia and Google Maps make it very easy and quick to find out information about somewhere - even mid-session if necessary.
• Email is marginally more convenient than using the telephone to confirm that everyone can make it to a session.

Negatives

• The move to online sales has meant the closure of local game stores - meaning I can no longer browse a book in the store before buying it.
• Bloody smartphones distracting my players at the table!

Overall, I'd say it's a wash. Thirty years ago we were regularly getting together to play a pen and paper game. Now we're still regularly getting together to play a pen and paper game. The players have changed over the years, but not that much. The Internet hasn't really changed a thing.

Sure, I talk about role playing on the Internet - but that's just incidental. The "troglodytes" that people have mentioned don't play at my table and don't affect my game in the slightest, so who cares about them.

Overwhelmingly positive. The internet has added so much, good and bad, while the table experience remains just accessible and almost the same as before.

Looking back with nostalgic glasses, though, I do miss the mystery that limited information brought to the hobby. When game designers seemed remote and glamorous figures and new books arrived in the stores completely out of the blue, or teased only by some magazine information.

Give and take.

Alot of good. Stuff long lost can sometimes be found, ideas shared, people get together and share stories and design ideas. The ability to ask a question and eventually get a good answer alone is a boon. So many creative endeavors shared. Art, stories, games, expansions, modules, accessories, and more. Also there is now near direct access to designers and sometimes the ability to see the whole process of creation from start to finish.

Oh the fucking bad though. Sometimes it seems like every lunatic on earth is out to drag gaming into the gutter or outright destroy it. Disinformation is absolutely rampant and we now have some of the most vile and insane hate groups out there. Ignorance and closed-mindedness walk the gaming streets. And not since the 80s has design theft been at such an all time high.

Very positive.

From a player's point of view, there is so much out there in terms of scenarios, background, writeups and so on that I could never run all of them. There is support for many systems, some of which would probably have died without fan websites.

Publisher sites have a lot going for them, with information about supplements, free downloads, links to other sites. DTRPG is an excellent marketplace and the place where I buy most of my RPG supplements.

Various tools make it easy to write and publish new books, which is a good thing.

Forums are, on the whole, very useful. They provide a lot of information and are a good place to get questions answered. Sure, they are often opinionated, but nobody has to read all the posts in all the forums.

So, generally, a lot better with the interweb than without.

I think mostly positive, but like any technology, it is a tool and can magnify the bad as well as the good.

Overwhelmingly positive.  The internet has introduced me to hundreds of games, thousands of ideas, awesome new people - you get the picture:)

Online PDF RPG buying. That is a plus.

Not a great time to ask me because I've just been mincing words with an idiot over at reddit/r/rpg. :rolleyes:

Still, there would be no OSR without the Internet, and some of my favorite games have come from it. So I'll have to call it a net positive, albeit barely.