Successful methods for play-by-videochat RPG

[RogerBW]

Depends on which interface you use. On the phone I use OSMAnd, so I can trivially search for restaurants or Chinese restaurants or bus stops or garages or whatever. (Also, I have the map database downloaded, a gig or so for all of England, so I don’t have to tell anyone my location to find things near me.) openstreetmap.org doesn’t do this quite as obviously but it exists primarily as a demo for the database.

Google usually just lists businesses from some directory that’s a few years out of date. When it doesn’t have real data, it lists them by centroid of postcode, which meant my house was the listed location for about ten businesses for a while.

[BigJackBrass]

@RogerBW

@MichaelCule

Hangouts (yes, I’m the one who forced Roger to hold his nose)

You’re not, actually - it was Whartson Hall

Far be it from us to claim credit for your rhinal compressions.

[Gwathdring]

Communication

Headphones are really important in most environments. If you can get your microphone and speakers working together without feedback for the other players? Great, you can skip the headphones. Otherwise, they’re more or less essential. As for software, so far I’ve had a lot of success with:

• Discord – My top pick. Fairly painless to onboard newcomers, good audio and video. Inconsistent connection performance for some users. Doesn’t affect me much, but affects quite a few people I’ve played with. Video quality is good and seems pretty similar in consistency to audio quality. Seamless integration of a full chat client with the video/audio is really important here, and the channel system when using a full server setup is lovely. It’s great to be able to shove images in particular right into the chat, and being able to organize things a bit is quite helpful in busier games.

• Google Hangouts – This is the software I’ve had the least connection consistency with lately. It used to be my go-to. For audio it still mostly works great, but I’ve really struggled to get consistency out of it over video for about the past two and a half years. I have these issues on multiple setups so while I’ve no doubt they’re idiosyncratic, they aren’t hardware specific. The integration between chat and video here is less appealing, with two separate chat features each with their own disadvantages.

• Skype – My second pick. I’ve had a lot more success hosting multi-member video chat over Skype than Hangouts and the chat integration is a lot smoother. When I have had issues, it’s usually due to version syncing and while this can be weirdly sneaky for such an obvious issue, a quick update or reboot of the software seems to solve most issues.

• Google Meet – A new piece of software separate from the G-mail/Hangouts ecosystem. It has very limited chat functionality last I used it a few weeks back (no image or video embeds), but the video seems much more stable than Hangouts.

That’s everything I use for audio, video, and chat. I have a dedicated webcam I really like, and before that I always had a nice microphone handy as I’m an amateur recording artist–I’m not the right person to ask for specific suggestions on gear, than, but I can definitely say microphone quality makes a big difference. When I play on my laptop without a dedicate mic, my players tend to notice a big reduction in quality or at least in background noise from the fans and the keyboard. I highly recommend a headset, standalone microphone, or external webcam if you use a laptop–all of those decrease noise from shifting, typing, and internal fans.

Other Stuff

For software, I have a few other things I like to use depending on who I play with and what game I’m playing. First, the big one.

• Roll20 – This is the best virtual tabletop option. There are others with slightly better features for this or that if you play D&D, but very little out there supports arbitrary play quite so well. There are two reasons for this. The first is that it’s free. You can both play and run games for free without crucial features being locked away. Several options I might consider superior tend to more significantly hamstring free users in some way. The second reason is the map system. There are other virtual tabletops that meet or exceed Roll20’s standard for a heavily prepared miniatures-based D&D adventure, but nothing that I’ve found as useful for the wild shamble of different systems I use.

More on Roll20

Roll20’s map supports multiple layers, the uploading of arbitrary images (and a generous amount of space for them even as a free user), and the drawing of arbitrary shapes. This last point is something that’s surprisingly hard to find–other programs I’ve tried have much more limited line drawing tools. None of them also provide the same level of flexibility in automated dice macros, the same selection of custom character sheets made by the community, or the same flexibility in the mapping system for general use outside of miniatures context. And while others might have it beat here and there for D&D miniatures, Roll20 can handle tactical games just fine, too.

Roll20 chat has some limitations–again a lack of image embeds–so I really only use Roll20 for maps, drawings, and dice rolling.

General Coordination

I make heavy use of the Google Docs suite. I’ve used the calendar and forms to arrange meetups, I’ve used Drive, Docs and Sheets to collect useful resources, character sheets, and even used Sheets, Docs and/or Slides to replace Roll20 as our virtual tabletop. This has the advantage of being accessible to far more users as it doesn’t even require everyone to make an account. Slides works pretty well as a replacement of Roll20’s map (you lose the layering system that helps avoid accidental map-jostling, but keep the advanced arbitrary drawing and have much better text capability). Sheets can act as a dice roller and is great for character Sheets. For really simple games, the whole game can be played entirely in just one of the three tools.

Drawing

I’m not an artist. I still really like drawing for games, even if it’s just stick figures. It helps me and it often helps my players. I have a graphics tablet for this which I really enjoy using, but a mouse will do just fine for most things. Because I tend to do things on the fly, on-the-fly drawing is a lot more important to me than having pretty looking maps. When I do need something a little more robust, I’ve started looking to:

Maps

Inkarnate, Wonderdraft, and Dungeondraft. I’ve heard good things about Dungeon Fog, as well. All of these are best for varying flavors of fantasy maps with the former two focusing on large area maps and the latter two more focused on miniature-scale maps.

Inkarnate and Dungeon Fog are subscription-based, with subscribers gaining access to more simultaneous saved maps and a wider selection of map object–Inkarnate is much more generous with its assets for free users like myself.

Wonderdraft and Dungeondraft are paid software rather than subscription based–I prefer this, but it does mean there’s no free option. Dungeondraft is still fairly early in development and is missing a number of features like custom asset importing and assets for things other than dungeons, forests and caves–but it’s a pretty flexible tool in terms of quickly generating or drawing floors, walls, and dynamic lighting objects and it integrates very smoothly with Roll20.

Wonderdraft is quite lovely. If you try Inkarnate and you like it, I strongly suggest checking out Wonderdraft. Between custom assets made by the community and the flexibility of the tool itself, its easy to produce really impressive and nice looking maps at various scales–I wouldn’t use it for miniature-scale maps, though. It’s not as robust as something a skilled user could whip out of Photoshop or Gimp, but the things I make with it are an awful lot prettier than the things I make in GIMP and take a lot less time to make because a lot of the hardest work is already done in making the stamps and automating the tooling.

Editing

Speaking of, I find a good editing program really useful. I use GIMP because it’s free and I’ve been slowly learning more advanced tricks with it and I have trouble going back to MS Paint or Windows Photo Editor now. A lot of the stuff I use it for could be done in much simpler tools, though. Here’s me expressing a character’s scale:

Oh gosh that image embedded large

I really like having the flexibility to give that kind of visual feedback–hence why I made a point of which chat programs can embed images up there under communications. I want to be able to quickly paste images from the web, quickly draw things, and quickly edit images before posting them. So I can give my players the hats they’ve earned.

Whoops, big again

[Gwathdring]

Running the Game

Smaller is better in a digital environment. For games that require me to GM, I find in person I’m comfortable up to five players, need to work a bit for six players, and start to struggle with more. Online, I’m much more comfortable with three or four players. Five starts to become a bit of work and more than that feels a bit chaotic. Some of this is the talk-over problem, some of it is just that there’s more overhead. I’m flipping between multiple windows rather than multiple pieces of paper laid out in physical space. I’m flicking between chat, video, and sometimes a map in addition to my normal notes and such. Some of it’s just a brain thing–I don’t find it harder, I just find it scales differently.

For genre, I find things with less hang-paper work much better digitally. The fewer dice rolls you use and the fewer reference materials you need for the game itself, the more smoothly it runs digitally. There are some exceptions if you have a sufficiently slick automated setup for a given game, but in general I find it is harder to get everyone on the same page so the more fiddly details there are, the more time will be lost getting everyone on board even with automation.

Facilitating becomes more important in a digital environment, I find, so while I wouldn’t say games that require a GM run smoother, exactly, I think someone should probably be playing host and making sure everyone gets a chance to participate. Otherwise people will get lost under technical difficulties or issues with interruptions and it’s much harder to notice players staying quiet than around a table.

Software I Forgot

I forgot one piece of software I really rate for RPGs, and not even exclusively for digital ones: Microsoft Onenote. I actually recommend it less for digital games simply because there’s so much competing for my screen during a digital game so I tend to revert to scrap paper and index cards even when One Note is open.

Things One Note does I have struggled to replicate elsewhere:

• Searchable image text. Paste an image from a rulebook PDF without having to worry about the weird formatting issues that come with copying the actual text and you can still find text in the image:

Magic!

• You can type arbitrarily on the page. Even some dedicated note-taking software works more like a word processor or a graphics editor, relying either on explicit text boxes or linear typing. Reorganizing text and tables arbitrarily plopped around the page can get unfortunately clunky, but it still works pretty well.

• Hierarchical pagination and arbitrary linking of both pages and paragraphs. I can create an overview page for a bunch of characters that links to more detailed pages, or link to details about a character ability.

Links!

• Tags. The tag system is great. It’s not as arbitrarily customizable as I might like, but it does the job. Mostly because I can quickly pull up a list of every tag of a given type. So, for example, let’s say I have a ton of Clocks in Blades in the Dark and I want to look them over:

Tags!

Or I have a bunch of unanswered questions spread all over the document that I want to review:

Peerless.

[MichaelCule]

I shall not insist on having the credit for annoying Roger. I have too much of that resource already.

I’ll certainly say that as a GM I work harder when working remotely. I haven’t had to refuse anyone a place in an on-line game but we are stretching it a bit with one five and a GM and one six and a GM pre-existing group. The six is hard work to handle in person and I’m glad it hasn’t been my turn to GM it on line yet. My new group is four newbies and that’s fun though still a little hard.

Let me encourage you to remember to send out a link to where the game is happening a little before and to remember to give everyone (yourself included) a chance to break for five to ten minutes in about the middle of your on-line time.

Some people run to shorter games on-line: I’m certainly not getting through the material as fast as I would in the ‘real world’ ™ but I’m still playing for about three hours, normall from seven to ten.

[RogerBW]

Interesting; I’ve found that an on-line group gets through the material I’ve prepared much faster than a face-to-face group, perhaps because there’s less random chat.

Video chat is harder work than face-to-face and I think breaks are well worth having. (I know Michael is a proponent of “the GM works out what’s happening next while in the loo”.)

[whswhs]

@RogerBW

I know Michael is a proponent of “the GM works out what’s happening next while in the loo”

I use that one every few sessions, when a player comes up with something I hadn’t anticipated and I need to decide what the appropriate outcome is.

[RogerBW]

A technical note: on Tuesday night’s videoconference game, I had occasion to communicate privately with a player, and Signal worked very well. (People who do Facebook could presumably use WhatsApp.) In particular, having a desktop client made things simpler.

[RogerBW]

A really nifty trick I found last weekend needs a game set more or less in the modern world, and video chat that does screen sharing (I was using Jitsi, from a separate machine so that the players could still see my lovely face). It also needs Viking, free software which I think is intended mostly for GPS-based route planning. But you can mark up a zoomable scrollable world map (I use OpenStreetMap) with specific locations, plot routes (and work out their length), and use the very neat ruler tool to work out bearings and distances. All right, the players can’t poke at the map themselves at the same time, but that may be regarded as a virtue.

[Brian]

I’ve been using Photoshop and screen-sharing to reveal maps to my group, which seems to be working well. The primary limitation is that I need to draw all of my own maps - which I quite enjoy - and set them up with separate layers that I can reveal, room by room, as the explore. it also lets me do fun things like update the map with a click when an event causes a change, like an underground chamber flooding.

The party’s cartographer can take screenshots and mark them up with his notes, which has been a handy bonus. The downside is that I we no longer get to see his hastily- and crudely-drawn maps with scales that exaggerate further the deeper the dungeon delve goes.

I do sort of the opposite for the larger world, concealing a large map beneath a layer of white (and a hex grid). As they move about, I erase the white covering to reveal what’s underneath. I keep hard copies of everything handy, so I can review what’s hidden without tipping my hand.

They haven’t gone far off the beaten path yet…

…but I have loads of space to add new features and adventures as they do.

[whswhs]

How do you get the square or hex grids in Photoshop?

[Brian]

The square grid is adapted from an image I got from Dyson’s Dodecahedron, copied over and purged of its white pixels so it’s a transparent overlay. The hex grid I drew up in CAD. I have dotted-line square grids, too, but the hand-drawn tile look fits the bill for a D&D game so nicely.

I can make them available if anyone wants them. I use letter-size sheets because that’s convenient for printing, but you could modify them however suits you best. Just drop me a private message so we can figure out the right file types and such without filling up the thread.

[RogerBW]

More things to do with Viking - I’ve been marking up locations for the Monster Hunters (Weird Florida) game in it, and I’ve just written a converter that spits out the waypoints with openstreetmap and Google Street View links.

Campaign page

[Guvnor]

• Roll20 for me. Maps, lighting, music, handouts, tokens, scripts, excellent RPG system support, I had mentors; but
• AV just seems to vary so much between groups, for some games Roll20 is fine, with other people Discord is better, another GM swears by Google Meet.
• Smaller groups, 3 is best, or people drift away;
• Shorter games, 2.5-3 hours, but yes the material can go by nice and fast.

Videoconferencing etiquette takes a while to learn.
GMs need to be firm and in control.
Just cos Roll20 has all the maps and stuff doesn’t mean you can’t just sit back and use it as a Theatre of the Mind table, I do both.

[Guvnor]

Very useful drawing apps for online:

Perilous Shores by watabou

Medieval Fantasy City Generator by watabou

But the one that is just great for quick and easy dungeons that are VTT compliant and free:

Dungeon Scrawl by ProbableTrain

[DJCT]

This article on dicebreaker has a very negative take on lockdown roleplaying. I pretty much disagree - as noted above we have played twice a week since April - much more, and much more focused, D&D. Sure, some things are different, but that includes the players getting a better grasp of rules and character abilities than I have seen in a long time …

[pillbox]

@DJCT

This article on dicebreaker has a very negative take on lockdown roleplaying

I haven’t read the article. I cannot fathom why, even if it were true, this article would have any benefit to anyone. Yes, roleplaying in today’s COVID-19 world is different and is likely disappointing in many ways. What’s the alternative?

I’m so annoyed at the thought of saying “The one tabletop roleplaying outlet you have available to you is bad and here’s why” that I cannot bring myself to actually read the article. At best, it’s a ploy to drum up readership.

EDIT: Wait, what?

The odds of getting a natural 20 - that is, rolling a 20 on a 20-sided die - in a Dungeons & Dragons game is so low that doing so can only be said to be a result of improbable, ludicrous luck.

Apparently a 1-in-20 chance is improbable.

[RogerBW]

So how many times are you rolling a d20 in a session? (In my games there have been sessions with no rolls at all, but they’re unusual.)

From a skim of the article I feel that the message is “I expected roleplaying to solve my isolation depression, but it doesn’t”. Also, I’m fortunate in that most of the gamers I play with are quite committed to the game, rather than turning up just because it’s there or their friends are going or whatever.

[Guvnor]

I had to explain to my consultant why I viewed a 1% chance of complications as being a risk I wasn’t willing to take.
I think she kind of knew but had assumed I didn’t.
This article is quite clickbaiting.
Some of the stuff on dicebreaker is quite good tho’

[DJCT]

Indeed I eye-rolled at that. One player gets a critical every second roll, another a Fumble. This is the way …

And I agree Dicebreaker has some good stuff, but there is a range of quality. On a similar theme I think the UKs Tabletop Gaming mag has evolved from regurgitated press releases (why I dismissed it initially) to having a more critical focus now, so worth picking up once in a while.