19th Level

For me, possibly the most transformative experience was shifting from a physical to virtual table. It's something we did in stages, but the first stage was probably the most important - a simple webcam connecting us with a player who moved away but wanted to keep gaming. Over time we added bells and whistles - discovering tools like Fantasy Grounds and Roll20 but the actual act of managing a remote game for the first opened a doorway for me and my group - a group which has people scattered east of the Mississippi River now...

I submitted my first GitHub pull request for Roll20 this evening - an update to the Ghostbusters character sheet to support ghost characters (making this Ghostmaster's life easier). As I did so I reflected on how much remote tabletop RPGs have changed over the years. The first time I ever had to do remote gaming was after a player moved away but wanted to stay in the group. We wound up using a webcam that either pointed at us or at the physical tabletop and generally trusted him on his rolling. We tried a variety of early virtual tabletop tools but we found they suffered from problems like doing too little (why not just use Skype?), were too complicated (performing surgery on my router settings is not a fun activity), and too specialized for a given game or set of games. As my gaming group grew more dispersed the ability to use a virtual tabletop became more important. We had a lot of early success with Fantasy Grounds and I'd certainly have no objection to using i...

This is kind of weird for me since it's been several years since I've had a regular gaming group physically present. That's not to say that I've not been gaming, rather I've been doing my gaming online. So let's start with physical environment - really what I need for that is a reasonably big table with enough seats for all the players and some space for character sheets, maps, munchies, etc. Now that I have kids I've grown to appreciate being able to isolate that space a little bit to give the group some privacy (and since our humor would often not be suitable for kiddies). Gaming online has come a long way. Our first effort was when a player moved away and continued to game with us. We used a webcam, a video messaging app, and aiming the camera carefully at any maps we might be using. It worked reasonably well. Our next experiment was with Fantasy Grounds. It's worked well - it's a Windows Application designed to integrate character sheets, m...