Networking for RPG's
I’m a first-time RPG player – I started playing a campaign a couple of weeks ago, with a group of friends. It’s a bit of an odd system, but I think that’s worth a full explanation in another post.
The only problem we’ve encountered so far is laziness (well, and timings, but laziness is probably the root cause). Finding a time when we can all meet up in person, then finding a venue, then getting to that venue, all takes up time that we could otherwise be using for gaming. So instead of bothering with that, we decided to do the whole game networked – that is, using the Internet and tools like Skype.
It’s… interesting. I haven’t ever played an RPG with physical meetings, so I can’t really comment on the differences, but I can extol the virtues of this networked method of play. From the (admittedly small) amount we’ve done so far, having the game networked seems to work pretty well – we don’t seem to be any worse off than any players I know who meet physically to play.
So how do we do it?
There’s a whole load of tools we’ve got. The primary one is Skype – that’s the one that supports communication, which is sort of essential. For each game session, we get together in a Skype group call, and run through the campaign like any physical meeting would.
Dice is another interesting issue. Of course, if you’re networked, you can’t roll physical dice on a physical table for everyone to see (well, unless your call includes video – but ours generally don’t). We saw two options available for dice – either everyone has to get their own dice and roll when they need to (yes, all those different kinds of dice), which seems a little overkill – or we trust one person to do the dice rolls. We ended up with the latter, though a number of our group have backup dice available for when that person isn’t around.
Personally, I went one further on the dice. I’ve got AutoHotKey available on my machine, so I made use of that to set up some keyboard macros to roll dice. I’ll post the script I used to do this and link to it here so that you can do the same if you want. It’s set up so that Ctrl-Alt-0 rolls a d10, C-A-2 a d20, C-A-4 d4, C-A-6 d6, and C-A-8 d8.
Now we’re left with all the play data. If you’ve played RPG’s, you’ll no doubt be familiar with the amount of character and game data that’s required to play. Character sheets, running totals of quantities, inventories, the lot. We use a number of files to do all this.
The system is documented using a read-only Google doc, written by our GM. The link is in our Skype chat, so we can get to it fairly easily. That defines a whole load of the basic setup for the game.
Then we have templates. Character sheets are templated, for one. We all got one copy at the start, filled in our details, and saved it locally. That gives us each a running copy of our character’s details, and our GM has a copy of everyone’s.
Then there’s an Excel sheet (which I designed – proud of myself for that one) that keeps track of stats and running totals. Gold, for example. There’s a transaction list, which feeds into a running total. Health modifiers and damage are done similarly – there’s a modifier list and a damage transaction list, both of which feed the total.
The interesting bit of that sheet is the stats – it keeps track of the character stats, and also implements a function that lets you know how you can use a weapon. Some weapons have required stats, which it’ll deal with, and some weapons have additional damage, which it deals with by multiplying or adding stats as necessary.
We’ve also had a number of tools recommended to us. Only yesterday, someone on Worldbuilding Stack Exchange told me about roll20.net, which I have yet to check out but sounds pretty useful.
And finally, there are more ideas that I’ve had on my own. There’s an idea that I’m floating around to set up some sort of webapp on my localhost, and use that to keep track of things going on in the game.
In short, if you’re short on time for playing RPG’s, you don’t need to quit entirely – network your games on Skype instead.
