Is Digital the Future for Tabletop Games?

Is digital the future for tabletop games?

Back in the late 80s, I created rules for a G.I. Joe. A Real American Hero roleplaying game that we played amongst ourselves. You could start as either a raw recruit assigned to either G.I. Joe or Cobra Command or one of the established characters. Through various missions/adventures that your team roleplayed, you grew your attributes to become an elite member of your chosen team. Growing up, I had this amazing neighbor that loved tabletop games. From an early age, he introduced his own children and me to gaming. We played long sessions of various war-games. Harpoon (His favorite), AD&D (my favorite), Squad Leader (my friend’s favorite), Star Trek RPG, GURPS, Traveler, Wooden Ships & Iron Men, and so many more that I cannot recall their names. These games influenced my game building. Especially AD&D, Harpoon, and Squad Leader, because we played those the most. At first, I invented the game to be played with the 3 ¾” line of action figures that my friends and I had built a large collection. My neighbor had a ping-pong table covered with a sheet of HO railroad grass that we played on. We didn’t have any money, so we spraypainted styrofoam cups green to represent trees and cereal boxes painted green represented hills. But it quickly became obvious that at the 3 ¾” size even the large playing surface we had wasn’t massive enough, so I scanned in the cards for each team member and created small 1” cardboard cutouts. We enjoyed playtesting the game and creating/modifying the rules as we played. We discussed problems back then that still plague tabletop games to this day. Today, in 40k, a Space Marine is supposed to be worth 100 Imperial Guardsmen, but that would bore, so in actual gameplay, the marine is much weaker. We spent many late nights arguing over characters like Snake Eyes and Destro’s abilities. How could we balance the game so a player didn’t just choose these elite characters for every mission? Another unique factor that I discovered back then was sharing a universe and being a pre-created part of that universe. When I first began to create the rules late at night by myself, I envisioned a game where you were your own unique character that shared missions with the famous characters from the comic. T would just be NPCs that helped you accomplish your mission. But it quickly became apparent that my friends didn’t just want to share the world with those characters, but t actually wanted to be Roadblock or Scarlett or Zartan, etc. It hampered the game’s character-growth. Nevertheless, we had a lot of fun, but soon our hormones kicked in and late nights spent with the opposite sex meant a lot more than gaming. I never finished the game. We had just begun to play-test vehicles when we all began to feel urges to seek other types of entertainment.