Compromise and Conceit

For the last year or so while living in Japan I have been running a role-playing campaign set in the Fourth Age of Middle Earth, a time ripe with possibilities for adventure. Unfortunately, my Japanese is not good enough to role-play in that language, and Japanese role-players are rare (especially in a country town). This is a shame, since I really wanted to try and do this while I was there  (both playing, and doing so in Japanese – which is beyond impossible).

So in order to continue role-playing I decided to do it over skype with the old players from Australia. The Delightful Miss E joined in for lack of anything better to do, and the good Dr. A joined from Amsterdam. So for 6 months to a year we had a campaign running with 2 Australians, 1 Australian in Amsterdam, and 2 Australians in Japan. The whole thing happened in Skype, for 3-4 hours every 2 -4 weeks on Thursday evenings (Thursday mornings in Amsterdam). 

Role-playing in skype is remarkably possible, though it has its limitations. The main limitation from the DM point of view is the inability to see people’s character sheets and dice rolls. Only one of my players was familiar with AD&D (the rest are complete role-playing amateurs) so they had to have things regularly explained to them, and this is hard to do over skype. One needs to reach over and point. I made Excel spreadsheets for character sheets, which were a big bonus, and I was in the process of redesigning them to incorporate automatic attack rolls, etc. so my players didn’t get so bogged down in detail, but then I moved to London and we haven’t got around to restarting yet (and I don’t have a reliable internet connection for another week or so). I was also kind of hoping that the July release of 4e would lead to an improvement in my online role-playing opportunities, but sadly they seem to have cocked up the release of the most innovative role-playing enhancement in the whole package. So it’s back to skype… 

Interestingly, playing online with beginners helps one to understand where the complexities are in the system. The noticeable problems one finds when one is unable to point at the physical part of the character sheet are:

• ability scores vs. adjustments/bonusses: this is just a ridiculous waste of time and complexity. Why bother?  Just give everyone an ability score roughly between -1 and -4, have it affect everything directly, halve the strength of all modifications to ability scores and make +1 magic items slightly rarer
• multiple attacks: we all know the Hit Point System is meant to be abstract – 20th level human beings don’t have the ability to sustain 20 times as many solid dagger blows as 1st level human beings, they have more luck, take more glancing blows etc. But multiple attacks make it seem as if the system is based on direct attacks and defenses. They are also fiendishly complex to administer and very tedious when people are typing in the numbers after they roll them (and bad at adding to start with, and drunk, somewhere in Sydney, on the other side of the world). Ideally the abstract nature of the combat system would be reflected in the multiple attacks, with higher level characters gaining a slight improvement to damage with every additional possible attack, perhaps not commensurate with the full base damage, so that essentially a 20th level fighter is better at squeezing damage out of a sword than is a 1st level fighter
• spell levels and character levels: you’re a 3rd level mage, so you can only use 1st level spells. Why? This is like the ability score/adjustment thing, it’s pointless. Since I can’t be bothered going through the entire spell list of every class and dividing it into 20 levels of spells, this has to stay – unless the actual spells go. This is particularly frustrating to explain and keep reminding people of when they are multi-classing and spell-using. Sheesh! At least I used power points, so the  issue of memorised spells was not relevant.
• spell casting: if you’re using a touch spell like <i>ray of enfeeblement</i> in combat you have to a) do concentration b) roll touch to hit c) possibly roll damage d) tell me the details of the spell so I can roll a save. This takes a long time under the drunk/remote/inexperienced/typing conditions alluded to above. If we could resolve all of this with one single roll (so spell-casting is no more time-consuming than combat), life would be so much easier…
• armour classes: this is unavoidable, i think, but it’s really hard to get the right AC from someone given all the possible conditions they can be in. Barkskinned, Wisdom-enhanced, mage-armoured monks who have been surprised, for example. I tried writing every possible situation in the aforementioned spreadsheets, but it got difficult. This problem would be eliminated by the 4e virtual tabletop, methinks, but sadly…