Street View Roleplaying

I stumbled upon an amazing new tool for running roleplaying games in a modern setting – Google Street View.

To test some new roleplaying rules, I’ve been running a post-apocalypse adventure set in and around Washington D.C. Almost everyone in the world had been wiped out by a mysterious disease, and the players were among the few survivors trying to rebuild society in the Arlington suburbs. The players had a paper street map of the area, but I started using Google Maps on my laptop to figure out where their travels were taking them. When they asked where they could find a sporting goods store, I just asked Google, and when they went to a local 7-11 store to scavenge food, I went to Street View and showed them what the place looked like.

“I want to check out that van in the parking lot,” one of the players said. He was playing a homeless character named Skinny Pete who was very happy about the apocalypse because now he could have whatever home he wanted. Skinny Pete was also an alcoholic and had a habit of breaking into abandoned cars to see if there was any liquor in the trunk.

I let him break into the van, and we used the Internet to look up the “AM-Liner” name on the side. We found out it belonged to a local Virginia company that specialized in “quality full service sanitary sewer and manhole rehabilitation” – no liquor back there.

This started an unspoken rule that if it showed up in Street View it was actually there in the game. Over the next few sessions the players used Street View to design better defenses for their commandeered home, discover an “abandoned” Pepsi delivery truck at the gate to Fort Myer, and "rescue" two dogs from a kennel in the neighborhood. They even went on line to see what cars a local dealer had in stock and found a nice Black Jeep Grand Cherokee that his since taken quite a beating.

For me, as the gamemaster, Street View has become a great way to inject real detail, and in some cases new story lines, into the game – that is until my laptop battery dies.

The Liquorless AM-Liner Van in Post-apocalypse Arlington

It Came from Wisconsin

I was in High School in the late '70s when Dungeons and Dragons crawled from a dark corner of Wisconsin where it had slowly been molting and growing into an entirely new kind of game, unlike anything anyone had seen before. It had clawed its way into small hobby shops and onto college campuses, but the disappearance of Michigan State student James Dallas Egbert III drew it fully out into the open to spawn a multi-billion dollar gaming industry. Egbert's disappearance was erroneously blamed on a real life adaptation of the game acted out in the campus's steam tunnels, and it made national news.

Dungeons & Dragons was the creation of Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson - a complex game played with paper and pencil and lots of different dice. From the start it contained all the basic elements that still power role playing games like the massively multiplayer online game, World of Warcraft.

I met Gary in 1979 when I was writing a paper about Dungeons & Dragons for a high school composition class. I cornered him in the men's room at a small convention that winter in Lake Geneva, WI, and asked him a couple questions about the game. Somehow, between writing the paper and getting it back from the teacher, I had forgotten that my overall thesis was that Gary didn't deserve all the credit for the game (his was the only name on the advanced version books) and that many of the key ideas came from Dave Arneson. My teacher suggested I send a copy to Gary, and without rereading it, I did just that. He responded with a three page letter he had typed himself, explaining everything I'd gotten wrong. I think I made him mad.

Years later I met Gary again at Gen Con, a game convention he and his friends started in 1968 that now draws over 35,000 attendees every summer and fills up half of the hotel rooms in downtown Indianapolis. Later, through a strange twist, I also ended up subbing as Germany in an online game of Diplomacy in which Gary played Russia. I never mentioned the paper the stupid kid wrote back in 1979. I have since discovered that Dave Arneson filed suit against Gygax that same year and by 1981 was once again listed as the games co-creator.

If you've ever played a game where your chose a class for your character, had ability scores, hit points, received experience points, or gained levels, take a moment to silently thank Gygax and Arneson. Unfortunately, it's too late to thank them in person. Gary passed away in 2008, followed by Dave in 2009.

Cover of the First D&D Book I Owned. Still Gives me Chills.