Playing RPGs virtually
During the COVID-19 pandemic, everyone’s stuck inside. While Erica and I can play as many ironic rounds of Pandemic as we like, I needs me my RPGs! I’m a role-playing junkie and I had three games in 2020… So we scrambled to keep them — any of them — going.
The Mage: The Ascension game that we’ve been playing was almost over, and our group was small. So it was easy enough to get together online and finish out the last few sessions. It took some more work to get our larger Vampire: The Masquerade group together online… But we managed that, too, so I can keep my campaign going.
Tydalus, our homegrown game in our homegrown system, Snake Eyes, ended up being a casualty. Unfortunately, both of our Tydalus players have pretty unreliable phones and laptops, so we didn’t even manage to get to the issues around setting up meetings or dealing with the issues of actually connecting and gaming virtually. We agreed that they’re not in a position to game online — and besides, the new Animal Crossing game just came out and I knew I couldn’t compete with that — so we put Tydalus on hiatus.
The vast and maddening Tekeli shall remain poised in the Ryllic Ocean, waiting to flow over all of Korvath if Rhysa, Alianora, and Ikenna can’t find some ancient magic to banish it once again… After this real-life pandemic is over.
Not knowing how long we’ll all be sheltering in place, we have no idea when we’ll be able to continue or if we can resurrect the game. During a long break, people get busy, and the spot in my players’ schedules occupied by Tydalus might not be open again. They’re enthusiastic about the game, though, so hopefully we’ll all make the effort to get together again.
Anyone who has had to game after a long hiatus knows how difficult it can be to remember what’s happening, who your character is, how they talk or what they care about, or even how the stats on your character sheet work. I’m sure that we’ll all have some rust to brush off when we start running with Snake Eyes again. And since it was our first real play-test, we were already paying close attention to the rules, so no big deal there. But fortunately for our gaming group and the prospects of remembering what’s going on, Erica and I are novelists.
We’ve written a bunch of books in a wild range of genres over a couple of decades. Erica and I love to write. So after each game session, if I have time, I like to novelize the campaign. Slowly, chapter by chapter as we play, Erica and I turn the game into a book so that we never forget the crazy shit that we all came up with.
What this means is that no matter how long we might have to practice social distancing, when we pick back up, we can all read back over the story so far to reacquaint ourselves with the NPCs and what’s happened so far.
Keep on keeping on
Fortunately, Tydalus was the only victim of the pandemic! My friend Jason’s Mage game kept going and finished his story. Our Vampire group met virtually and played. We’re planning to keep the campaign up online until we can meet in person again — and because this is a vampire game, these plots aren’t gonna be over with quickly. Immortal creatures of inhuman patience and all.
So for the games that continued, we had to move to the next challenge — making a video call work.
Everyone recommends Zoom, our friends’ kids’ schools use it to keep class going, our friends in college use it, too, but it’s a paid service. The free version cuts you off after 40 minutes. That doesn’t work for an RPG. Getting kicked out and starting a new Zoom meeting every hour would have some impact on momentum, and will interrupt important rolls or scenes.
So screw that.
We’ve used Google Hangouts for video calls in the past — my brother lives in Colorado and I want to see my baby nephew more than twice a year. So we’re familiar with the program, and it worked for most of our gaming. But it’s not perfect. Our friend Jim just couldn’t get his audio to work one night and after 30 minutes of switching things on and off, trying a headset or the laptop in-built mic, then logging in and out of the call, we had to give up and switch to something else.
We’ve also had issues with sound quality on Hangouts. Distortion and echoes can make it really hard to hear what anyone’s saying and gives us all a headache. It seems like it doesn’t work very well on tablets and sometimes phones, but that’s just anecdotal issues. Maybe next session will be fine.
But for the most part, Hangouts was a viable way to get people in four different homes together to game.
The other platform we’ve tried is Roll20. We were using it for Tydalus during our in-person gaming. It’s got all our Tydalus battle maps, everyone’s character and all the NPCs, but it also has a chat/video feature. When we just couldn’t get Hangouts working with our devices, we tried Roll20 audio-only, and it worked pretty easily. It might take a little more experimentation to get the video working, but hopefully we’ll get the chance to try it out some more.
Experience points
Gaming virtually is a different experience, though, and not all the technical issues were just about seeing and hearing each other. For our Vampire group, I keep everyone’s character sheets, but then suddenly couldn’t hand them out anymore. Erica and I have long been using digital character sheets of one kind or another. It wasn’t too hard to make shared Google docs in the space of an afternoon, almost everyone could see their stats.
One of our players isn’t very technically savvy, though. Not everyone spends all day on their phone or laptop, and sometimes working with totally new tech can be hard. But I had her character sheet and in the name of just getting to play, I told her what her dice pools were so that she could do the rolling. It was clunky as hell, but worked out alright. She trusts me to be honest about her stats — and why would I screw with her?
Trust goes both ways. Everyone was rolling at home and I didn’t ask that anyone show their dice to the camera. I joked that everyone might suddenly start rolling suspiciously well, but you know what? There were good rolls and bad rolls and botched rolls. I trust my players and rolling in private just didn’t turn out to be an issue.
So somehow we got people together, found various ways to see and hear each other, and everyone got their hands on their characters sheets and dice. We made it work.
I still prefer role-playing in person. In my tiny camera field of vision, so many of my gestures were cut off, and I lose a little of the player facial expressions that I key off. My accents and character voices just go over better in person than crapily compressed audio.
But the whole world’s ground to a halt, and thankfully we live in a time where we have these tools to join in making RP stories. Playing a game together and having some fun goes a long way toward helping us get through all of this.
