Yesterday I wrote a post about the ways in which online teaching and supervision can be superior to physical teaching and supervision, and today I want to follow up with a short post about what aspects of online gaming can be transferred to physical gaming. I finished my Coriolis campaign online, and we have started the Archipelago campaign online too. Gaming online at this time has been necessary to avoid a physical TPK[1], but it has had several advantages:
- We were able to include a former Coriolis player who moved overseas in the final part of that campaign, which was a good way to end the campaign and reconnect with an old player
- One of our players is managing a very young child and another is living a large part of their time outside of Tokyo, so we’ve been able to include them in sessions
- We’ve been able to meet more regularly because we can set weekday evenings without having to worry about commuting or finding a convenient venue
In Tokyo there are lots of venues you can hire on weekday evenings for gaming, so we can find a mutually agreeable location, but the physical meetings are short and interrupted by eating, commuting and so on. When we game online during the week we can start later – 8pm to enable children to settle – and have already eaten and relaxed after the day. I also don’t have to lug my gaming material through the summer heat, and if we finish at 11 with a solid 3 hours’ gaming done, we can still be to bed early without worrying about commuting. We usually start an hour earlier for socialization, and people just join when they can.
For Coriolis we used roll20, and for the Archipelago campaign we are using a system called RPG Sessions for characters and dice, run partly through discord, and roll20 for mapping[2]. As the number of coronavirus cases stabilizes in Tokyo and maybe begins to curve down, we’re thinking about returning to physical gaming sometime in September, but I think we are going to continue with some online sessions permanently, because it’s difficult to gather the whole group regularly on weekends and easy to gather them on a weekday night. Also I think when we do game physically we will retain a few aspects of online gaming.
In particular I aim to keep using roll20 for mapping. There is this constant problem with maps and tabletop RPGs that they have to be put in the centre of the table, where there is usually a huge pile of snacks, and some people always have to stand to look at them, and then also the map is oriented towards half the group and upside down to the rest. I think we can get around this by having each person see the map on their own tablet, and also have it on a big screen at the end of the table (I have a tv in my kitchen that I can share with chromecast). Thus we will all be able to see the map but have a shared map at the same time. Players can move their own PCs on the map, and we can maintain the sense of physical space without having to invest in horrific things like miniatures and the like[3].
Using roll20 for mapping also avoids the annoying situation where players are supposed to navigate their way around a physical map based entirely on my descriptions, when I can just use the fog of war on a map software to immediately reveal the rooms they can see, and the monsters they can see, when they see them. This is a vast improvement over physical maps or – worst of all – the horrible 1980s tradition of having a “mapper” who mapped out the dungeon as you explored it and always got it wrong. Having virtual maps also enables us to flick between them quickly, to have pictures of enemies and so on. Why go back to printed stuff?!
I think we will also continue to use RPG sessions for character sheets. It is very nicely integrated with the Genesys system so that for example it even records criticals, which is great. Instead of having my PCs note down the name of the critical and its details they just hit a button and roll one up and it gets added directly to their character sheet. I am using onenote to track campaign sessions, so now we just put the date of the crit into the character sheet and we know exactly when to attempt crit recovery, etc. There is also no risk anyone will ever forget a character sheet, since there’s zero chance they’ll leave home without a phone.
I have recently subscribed to the new Twilight 2000 kickstarter (and I suggest you do too!) which funded in 7 minutes, and is now up to its 9 billionth stretch goal. One of those stretch goals was the development of virtual tabletop tools for all the major applications, so that when you receive the game it is ready out of the box to be played online. I hope all new RPGs will do this in future, so that we can have a fully integrated virtual mapping, gaming and dice rolling system all in one. Of course some players like to roll dice (even though they’re shit at it[5]), which they will still be able to do, but the availability of ubiquitous online gaming platforms also opens the possibility of arbitrarily complex dice systems, since there’s no reason to physically assemble them or calculate the results. Who needs ideal polygonal forms for your dice when you can just roll d73? We could have dice systems based entirely on prime numbers! Or just go straight to arbitrary probability distributions … why go back?
This pandemic has forced the world to deal with the fact that the internet is no longer an ersatz reality. It’s no longer the case that things done online are not relevant to or close to real life. We should accept this, and instead of seeing online experiences as inferior to physical experiences, things we were forced to compromise on for our health, we should see them as ways to improve our past physical experiences to make them better. Rather than going back to how things used to be, let’s use the improvisations we had to make during this time to improve our physical lives when we are able to reconnect. I am trying to do this with my teaching, and I aim to do it for my gaming too!
fn1: Touch wood none of our players have got coronavirus, though two have been through some health scares, but some of us are older and some of us overweight, so we’re in the risk group for getting it badly if it does happen, and a gaming group is a perfect scenario for a cluster
fn2: Roll20 supposedly has an api for genesys dice but it is completely broken so I had to give up on using it. This was frustrating!
fn3: I’ve never been a great fan of miniatures for gaming, because I can’t paint them and they’re an absolute bastard to lug around, and for the first 15 or so years of my gaming experience they were only available in lead[4], which was heavy and ugly
fn4: Yes in the 1980s parents willingly allowed their still-developing children to participate in a hobby that involved casting lead, and playing with things made of lead. WTF
fn5: Jesus christ people, have some dice discipline will you!
Compromise and Conceit 
August 17, 2020 at 9:37 pm
Polyhedral.
August 18, 2020 at 11:34 am
Pedant! Polygonal forms sounds more Cthulhuesque, anyway!
August 19, 2020 at 11:44 am
Flattery will get you nowhere.
August 30, 2020 at 1:24 pm
I think RPG sessions is in itself a nice tool (way better looking and modern than roll20) but there are a few issues I’ve noticed:
1. Multiple tabs interfere with each other.
In roll20 you could open your character sheet and it would open in a new modal (a window like thing, just on the same webpage) which you could move around, resize and use to edit your character on the fly and that was used for pretty much everything. In RPG sessions, the character sheet is a different webpage, so you either need two tabs open and switch between them if you want to check if you have a skill or note some new items as well as looking up descriptions of spells or you have to reload the pages everytime you want to take a look. The problem with the two tabs approach is that the changes from one tab can be overwritten by the other. It happened to me multiple times that I’ve overwritten my wounds or strain because I changed something in my character sheet and saved it.
2. No way to add “talents” that are outside of the talent structure of genesys.
Genesys’ talents are structured in levels and you need to have more lvl 1 talents than lvl 2 and so on. RPG sessions supports this structure very well. But there are no places to add spells or racial talents or any other talents you might need.
3. Bad support for basic and advanced skills.
Skills can be sorted in any way possible but there is no way to mark them as advanced skills. You can categorize then, for example, into social, magic, combat etc but they can only have one category. But that hides advanced skills which can only be used if you have at least one point in them.
4. The discord integration doesn’t allow PCs to have multiple characters.
I’m at a point where I can control multiple characters, my actual PC and an animal companion. I’m currently trying to think of a way to get that character in there. I’ll probably create a new discord account that one and add my animals that way…
Of course, there are also things I like in RPG sessions besides what was already mentioned. For one, I like how character sheets are handled. You can switch characters on the fly which is good for my conjured animal companion (for example exchange a wolf for a spider) or for my transformations I want to get in future.