The thing about Google Slides that makes it my favorite virtual tabletop is that everyone knows how to use it. No setting up accounts, no learning a new service, you just get right to playing. It’s easy to navigate and remember where things are. And if all you’re doing is dropping in jpgs of character sheets and putting text on top of them, maybe with a few extra slides for session recaps and notes, Slides is fully functional. You’re killing it even.
And that’s basically how I got started with slides in a two shot Orbital game:
Aside: throughout this post, I’ve done my best to source and credit artists, but given that many of these images were pulled from Pinterest for personal use, I haven’t always been successful. If you know who any of the artists are, please tell me so I can edit them into the post.
Art possibly from fightpunch.
I embellished my sheet with a character portrait I pulled up on Pinterest in about 30 seconds, but there’s not a lot of bells and whistles here, and it’s still really effective.
It’s worth noting that you can change the dimensions of slides, so if you want your slides to exactly match the size of a character sheet, you’re one google away from how to do that.
You can also throw other pages from books up there for ease of reference. I often do that with rules references, but here’s also a map from a one shot of the incredible Picket Line Tango by Emily Weiss (writer), Roque Romero (art), Ian Yusem (editing/publishing), and Eric K. Hill (layout).
But beyond ease of use, you can make some great looking stuff in Slides. This is the slide that sold me on Slides forever.
Left: unknown Pinterest pin. Top right: cover art for In Event of Moone Disaster by Andrew Thompson. Bottom right: art for Epoch on the My Hero Academia fan wiki.
This was created by my friend Sophie the Librarian (that’s how she insisted I credit her in exchange for me using her work here). This one in particular is a character slide for a playtest campaign of Mars Watch, a second edition / sequel to The Watch by Ash Kreider in which you’re fighting space zombies aka the patriarchy on Mars. The playbooks are standard PBTA affair, which is to say fairly large (I believe two pages long). I’m sure there’s a ton of rules info being kept in Sophie the Librarian’s personal notes.
But look at that. It’s Bug. I know so much about this lil guy looking at this, even without reading the text of it. Who cares about the numbers? That’s for nerds. If anyone needs them, they can ask Sophie the Librarian. What us other players needs to see are the vibes, and holy shit.
This campaign also made copious use of NPC slides. Here’s a recreation of what one of those looked like using art from Magic: the Gathering cards that I can properly credit:
From left to right, art by Mike Bierek, Denman Rooke, Caroline Gariba, Tatiana Kirgetova
Boom. Easy. You might not get the exact personalities right for these characters from these portraits, but that’s fine. You get that visual ref plus full, easy to access dramatis personae within reach at all times. We had 3-4 slides like this, and I’ve never tracked the NPCs in a campaign better.
All of this got kicked up to 11 when I played a pair of campaigns of Wanderhome by Jay Dragon.
Left and lower right images by Ovopack / Ryota Murayama. Upper right by unknown.
Another of Sophie the Librarian’s character slides. Note the little bucket to track tokens, which actually came from another group’s playthrough.
Peacock by olga.angelloz (stock photo on shutterstock).
This one was my own doing - Perry always had a bunch of tickets in his pockets from back when he worked at the circus and a bag of gold coins that doubled as my tracker for his tokens. I’ve got a bit more mechanics on here with the “I can always…” stuff. Wanderhome is rules light enough that you can basically fit everything in there.
Here’s a location:
Image is a screenshot from The Rings of Power.
And a whatever this is:
Bird up stuff from The Eric Andre Show.
I missed session 0 for this campaign and was told I was under no circumstances to change this slide. I felt compelled to include it here.
Let’s close off with final pair of characters from Space Fam, a game I’m still playtesting, god forgive me. It’s a Firebrands / Our Traveling Home hack about found families on small spaceships.
Here’s Benvolio, who definitely made the above slide and was again created by Sophie the Librarian:
Top left by Diberkato. Right background by unknown. Right portrait by normanduenas. Background by unknown.
As I recall, Benvolio’s portrait changed every week to something else in this vein.
Compare to my character, Rowan:
Top right is a screenshot from American Gods. Bottom right is by Stella Berkofsky and of unknown.
I designed the character sheet to be transparent and come in both white and black versions specifically for Slides. It’s not done, but I like that aspect of it at least. You’ve can fit the rules you need on the slide while also leaving plenty of space for personal flair and vibes.
In Conclusion
Slides is definitely at its best for rules light games where you can fit most of the reference material you need directly onto your slide(s). But I think there is a lot to be said for a public, vibes-based shared play space in Slides and keeping a more detailed and mechanics-forward document for yourself in a separate private space, whether that’s a .txt, a google sheets, pen and paper, or whatever else you’re comfortable with.
The main takeaway for me here is that Slides makes it easy to throw a bunch of vibes at each other. It’s a shared scrapbook, a mood board, a meme factory, a place to trade creative energy with each other. It’s easy to use, and I recommend it for whatever you’re playing next.