Roger, tell me about Jitsi. Why is it the bee’s knees for RPG by internet videochat?
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Because you can self host it and it is open source software.
We are using it for our online chat for our video game sessions.
We have also used it for a remote BBQ party during the pandemic with at least 9 video participants.
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Self-hosting is very important for me. It may not be for you, that’s fair enough, in which case you can use the public instance of Jitsi. But other reasons why I favour it:
- no adverts, no upsell, no monitoring, no AI training. What you get is what you get. I don’t even have password protection on mine, just load the link and there you are.
- compared with Roll20 etc., very bare bones and thus not distracting.
- Character sheet? On paper or in a different window.
- Randomisers? We have dice, and if I didn’t trust my fellow players to roll their own dice I wouldn’t want to play with them.
- Handouts? Here’s a link to a PDF.
- Map? All right, not a huge part of my play. I grant I’d like a shared whiteboard, haven’t found one I like yet, but I’ve had a fair bit of success sharing in an Inkscape window and moving things around at the players’ request.
- Note passing? The text chat lets you address an individual or the whole group.
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It doesn’t have an inbuilt record function either but Roger manages to do it and he’ll explain it to you if you ask him nicely.
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Three approaches:
The medium difficulty cheap way
Set up one client machine, e.g. the one you’re using, to record both your microphone and the audio output of the web browser. Details very a lot. This usually means messing about close to the operating system level, because something like Audacity won’t record from two completely separate sources at once (though it will record a whole bunch of separate channels from the same source). I can give you a recipe for pulseaudio on Linux but I never got it working with straight alsa (even though it should be possible) and I have no clue about Windows or Mac.
In my experience this is the lowest quality.
The easy expensive way
Get a multichannel recorder; I use a TASCAM DR-40 (technically a DR-40X now, the old '40 stopped being able to write to SD card). Channels 1 and 2 are the built-in microphone, pointed at me; channels 3 and 4 come off the computer’s headphone output (I have a boring old analogue splitter which also feeds my actual headphones).
This is medium quality.
The hard cheap way
Get each individual player to record their own microphone. Windows used to have a useful Sound Recorder, but it’s been made useless of late, so the players I know use Audacity. Stand-alone recorders would also be possible Then they send me the recordings (encoded as flac, not the much bulkier Audacity native format) and I mix them together.
This is more work for them (everyone has to set up the recording and export the audio) and will be lost if someone’s machine crashes. And whoever edits them together has to get them all synchronised. I use a “chat” track from one of the previous two methods (which is also my backup in case things go wrong here) to verify that. But then I can denoise the tracks individually, clip out coughs and can openings, and put players into consistent stereo positions.
This is the highest quality I can get, and it’s what I do for sessions I’m planning to release. (It’s also how I put together the podcasts I’m involved with.)
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I think the lack of a “record” function would be an attraction for at least half of my prospective players. There seems to be a substantial population of on-line roleplaying gamers who are unwilling to share their e-mail addresses, whereabouts, real names, and sometimes even video likenesses (though the last is a bit much for me). I don’t think they will value being recorded.
I’d be fascinated by a transcribing function, though.
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Self-hosting sounds appealing, but I wonder whether it will be practical over my dodgy copper-pair internet connection, which affords me 26 Mbps download and at most 2.2 Mbps upload, and is vulnerable to rainy weather. I got a letter from the national broadband provider urging me to upgrade to fibre-to-the-premises for “up to” 2,000 Mbps bandwidth “from participating providers”.
The Jitsi Meet Handbook suggests that “For a friends/small organization server, 1 Gbits/s will often be enough but for a serious server 10 Gbits/s is advisable.”
Holy Dooley! 1 Gbits/s is ludicrous speed! The fastest connection I seem to be able to get is 820 Mb/s download and 85 Mb/s upload! I knew that Australia was a benighted backwater of internet sloth, but surely that can’t be right!
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Well I would be very reluctant to share an email address with Zoom or Teams or one of those other known bad actors. Recording doesn’t have to be for broadcast; it can be helpful for writing up the game later, or for feeding to a non-real-time transcription system. (Though in most places you do need the explicit permission of everyone involved, which is just good manners anyway.)
The Jitsi guide is talking about hosting multiple chats at once, on a dedicated server in a datacentre. You might well find the 2Mbit/s upload constraining, though it would certainly work for audio and ought to work for low-quality video. Or there’s meet.jit.si the free service that Jitsi hosts; the first person into a chat has to log on with Google/GitHub (ew) but the rest don’t.
Or you would be welcome to use mine (as I think we did for a few games), but not sending all your data half way round the planet and back might work better.
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Hmm. I’m looking into upgrading to either 50/17 or 500/42 (depending on which actually comes with free FTTP installation) just to get better resilience against wet weather. The price difference is only A$10 per month. 50/17 ought to be adequate for six players at HD quality, and 500/42 for four at 4k quality. But the prospect of having to faff about with security certificates is a bit off-putting.
I seem likely to have players in Chicago, Bulgaria, and New Zealand, so the data is going to circumnavigate the world anyway. God knows how circuitous the routing might be in practice. It seems to me that cutting the server latency between the GM and other players would be the larger performance boost, and I wouldn’t expect that to be particularly noticeable.
Most of my prospective players seem to trust Discord at least for text and video chatting. Which means that they ought to trust Jitsi Meet. But do they know that they ought to trust Jitsi Meet more than Discord? Would they trust me to run a secure server? Would they trust my mate Roger in England? I reckon that I’ll have to suck it and see.
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“You don’t need to sign up or provide any information, just load this link, enter a character name, and you’re in” may help.
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Discord is now experimenting with software with connections to Palantir (well, their founder anyway, paranoia made me scrub the name) for age verification checks.
Just saying… OSS hosted by Roger is by far more trustworthy. [link1 - de , link2 - en]
“Just because I am paranoid, that doesn’t mean they are not watching me.”
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These days they’re watching everyone, and mangling the results through genAI to produce the arrest quotas.
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I like Jitsi because it works with everybody’s browser, unlike Discord which is famously unfriendly to people using Microsoft browsers. I must say, I never noticed any change in my Discord but apparently I’ve been on the age-restricted default for teenagers (like everyone else in the UK) for months.
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I typically use Jitsi for video calls with friends. Like TomNowell, I’ve also not noticed any change in Discord - presumably due to the servers that I’m a part of. However, one server has started looking into the possibility of migrating to a different platform, due to e.g. the links Yashima posted and this one from Ars Technica.
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Isn’t Discord trying to spin up an IPO at the moment? In which case its days are numbered anyway.
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Apologies for ignorance - IPO?
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Initial Public Offering. I.e. the founders sell it for billions to a huge corp which will destroy it in the quest to make it profitable.
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I have the feeling Discord has been destroying itself for years … I last used it regularly when I was still playing World of Warcraft where it seemed initially to be an improvement over my selfhosted Teamspeak server.
Actually I hear Teamspeak still exists and has reacted with some sarcasm about Discord’s latest revelations…
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Well, Discord did some very aggressive early marketing to get people off Teamspeak, Mumble, etc.
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