Analog Online Play: A Manifesto
The year is 2026.
The American beauty-pageant culture subconsciously wires us to despise our own faces and drives online TTRPG enjoyers to hide behind text games, or use voice if we feel particularly brave. Video remains largely out of the question.
Daily a new vibe-coded tool comes out promising better campaign tracking, prettier maps, shinier combat simulations.
The focus moves away from the human and onto the rules, the tools, the slick, high-polish experience of a video-game, and if our games lack that polish, they don't happen.
We don't know what our friends look like, where they work, what their laughter sounds like.
We hope they laugh.
But we have placed so many walls between one-another, things to focus on outside of the legend shared between friends, that we no longer understand what we are here for: we no longer see the human across the table.
Let's burn those walls down.
Analog Online Play
1. Valiente
Be brave.
Turn the camera on. Your humanity is beautiful, your smile brings out mine, that is enough.
We do not play to impress anyone or to prove anything. We play for fun and to participate in the ancient human tradition of group story-telling.
Your true, messy, unmasked self is welcome at this table.
2. Minima
Use as little tech as possible.
Discord for video, MS Paint for a map.
Keep your game notes in a 3-ring binder organized by dividers and sticky notes. Print out your most-referenced blog-posts, hole punch them, put them in the back of the binder. Hand-write everything possible.
Keep physical game books on hand if you're using them. Mark them up. Put sticky notes in your most-referenced sections.
Books are no more sacred than plows or pencils, they deserve to be useful, for it is in their use that they become sacred to us.
Roll real dice. Trust your players to do the same if they like.
3. Diversíon
Create fun.
The heart of fun in a TTRPG is interesting choice, but making this fun possible is a craft that uses our limited time and strength.
Interesting choices require information. What am I choosing between?
They require risk. What might I lose for following this path?
They require reward. If I choose this, what will I likely gain?
To do this well, the Referee should focus their attention on knowing their world and understanding the motivations of the player characters.
Undue focus on complex systems, advanced tech, and even extraneous art, eats the Referee's limited time to consider their world and the interesting choices they will offer their players within that world: factions to side with, routes to choose between, necessary evils to weigh, etc.
Systems create procedures for resolving uncertainty. Art illuminates the described world. Technology (at its best) enables human connection. But an elegant system, captivating art, and a stable internet connection will not make fun happen.
For that we need a playground, a world.
At a minimum, a Referee should choose a module to run. Read it. Mark it up. Interrogate it. Know it. The written work only describes a world. It comes to life in the Referee's mind.
But a Referee should also trust themselves to create a world known only at their own table. A legend shared between friends.
Anyone can do this, but it takes time.
To start, focus on conflicts large and small.
"X wants Y but Z so Q."
"The Republic of Cordania wants rule of the sea, but the Xandarian Empire's fleet is undefeatable, so they seek to tame the wild god of the waters by performing bloody rituals."
"Charlie the chimney sweep wants to marry Ms. Haddon, but he believes she could never love a man as grimy as he, so he sets out to get himself an education and career, despite the disdain of his fellow students."
Place the people of your conflicts on a stage. Where is all this happening? Name the important folks involved. Add sub-conflicts within factions, and conflicts with extremes of nature, and conflicts with terrible monsters, and conflicts with ancient curses, and internal conflicts against one's own personal morals.
Layer by layer, word by word, invest in the little world shared by the faces who will soon gather around your table.
That is your playground, and your friends are coming over to play.