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Since many of us are now Quarantined, let's talk about our experiences using online tools to RPG? I have only done this a few times since I vastly prefer in person gaming.

I played a Monster of the Week game using voice only and it worked out fine. The rules lite approach worked well as we did not need as many detailed maps and the like.

I also did a D&D 5E game, where the digital aspects were much more cumbersome. We also used video to share screens, dice rolling bots, and a grid based map app. This was much more complicated to run and the early stages were bogged down by technical issues. However, once we got going it was fine.

Advantages:
- Only one person can really effectively talk at a time which led to a more disciplined session
- Got to play a game!

Disadvantages:
- A lot less banter and joking around
- Mechanically D&D was much harder to run, and I was constantly switching my focus, this was less immersive.

I look forward to switching back to regular face-to-face play.

Have you transitioned, and what was your experience?

Due to my career I am constantly on the move and had to transition to online tools(Skype) to RPG with my group several years ago. I agree with you that in person gaming is preferred based on the social interactions that really drive the session.

Advantages:
- Cut out personal distractions and able to focus on the problems and the story
- I can play with my group no matter where I am

Disadvantages:
- Feel left out of the group when they're all there(in person) and I'm on a screen. Certain things are done off screen that I can't see or hear and it definitely can wear on a session.
- There is a risk that since I'm not there I can come up with the occasional excuse to not call in. So the story continues and I'm a little behind.

due to distance we have long skyped our D&D games, as the DM having a camera and 3d terrain/miniatures helps a lot. Obsidian portal is great tool as well.

Our bi-weekly D&D group is going to play by Discord this weekend. If we don't like it then going to buy the needed modules for the DM for Roll20 and try that.

Edit: Just went to Roll 20 and it is quite down. Wonder if they are being overloaded and with people rushing to online services or something like that.

My weekly RPG group switched to DnD on Fantasy Grounds, with Discord for voice.
Last week, Discord went down though overload, but stayed stable this week.
Fantasy Grounds was free for the players, as the DM had grabbed the Ultimate version when it was on offer a while ago.

Pros:
Drinks choice is opened up, as no-one had to drive to the host's house.
Gaming material was all digital, and shared.
Travel time didn't happen, so more gaming time.

Cons:
We all have to make our own drinks.
Banter was down a bit, but still lively enough.

There was no change to the drinking levels in the games I played! My wife is a firm believer that all RPGs are better with two glasses of wine down. Some of the others agree, but substitute different drinks of choice.

Edit: i have always been a bit more old-school 'If I wanted a map I had to make it myself" and "Theater of the mind" type player, so I found all the maps and digital add-ons more of a distraction than a help. I know I am the outlier with this opinion.

I think my group is going to try it this weekend. Just going to figure out how we do it and if were going to continue our campaign or do something new while we are on lockdown.

Been doing it for a few weeks now with my Rogue Trader campaign, even before the quarantine as I had to travel to Coromandel from my normal haunt down in Wellington to help my father with working on the section (mostly wood splitting, a fething lot of wood splitting lol) Also had to do it back in December for the first time having been in Coromandel back then. I like it, prefer doing it in person, though but finding it hard to think of too many cons, in all honesty.

Pros:
Don't have to set up the table for the game.
Don't have to buy snacks on my meagre budget.

Cons.
Finding I always have to describe NPCs actions/quirks instead of just 'acting' them (we do it over audio as I find it strange to do it with footage)
Again, have to put more effort into describing things to at least feel I have to, as describing scenes, isn't my strong suit as a writer and GM. So that could be a pro as it might make me learn to do that better lol

Been doing some random Dungeon World via Discord...and it's worked out fine. It's a theatre of the mind style game though, so there's no need for maps or grids, etc.

My gaming group are playing the next chapter of our custom 40K RPG over email / WhatsApp. It's going well so far. The idea is there's a disaster onboard our ship en route to our next destination, and we're trying to find out what's going on and sort it out while all being locked down and confined to quarters on the ship. Fitting

The campaign revolves around an inquisitor and her retinue. We the players are all members of the retinue - although since the demise of the inquisitor, the character playing her second in command acolyte has stepped up. The over-arching story involves fighting against the incursion of hive fleet behemoth, but we've since been side-tracked and are trying to get back on course to address this.

Following a hint from the GM, I (Techmagos Pentium) have been querying the memory banks of our two ancient Rhino transports, Blessed Hammer Of Dawn and Flaming Sword Of Ruin. I've found additional non-standard memory units walled in to the internal bulkheads of both Rhinos, apparently housing pre-Imperium AI units. They've gone apeshit at being discovered and have taken over all computer systems, locked down the ship and are directly attempting to hack into my own systems... Woops.

My weekly game of 5E DnD switched from in person to over Facetime.

It affected the role playing badly at first, but we've been doing it for four weeks now so have gotten used to it.
Combat went from maps to mind without any issue.

Honestly the biggest problem was technology, finding devices with cameras and microphones that didn't cause feedback and all talked to each other etc.!

We've been playing on Roll20 and honestly I was blown away by just how much you can do with the free software. Anything that isn't given to you for free, you can easily find on a wiki site for officially released DND content and just copy/paste the rules paragraphs over. It's great, tbh.

I have some good friends that have moved out of area and we started using online tools to play 5th ed for a weekly session a little over a year go and I love it. We started with just Discord voice and type chat, but moved on to also include DnDBeyond for tracking characters and roll20.net for mapping combat. Roll20 has a lot of features we don't even use, like we normally just roll physical dice and announce the results over voice chat, but you can easily use the roll20 diceroller if you play with anyone prone to cheating

It's not as great as being there in person, but it's considerably better than I ever thought it would be, I was HIGHLY skeptical before we started and it only took a session or 2 before I was completely sold. I'm a minis guy, so I really miss painting characters and having a physical board, but it's worth it since I can play with old friends every week that I'd normally only see once or twice a year

I spent about a week fully stocking Undermountain with colour maps and vision blocking. I am running three groups through it now, we are having a blast. Dungeon exploration with dynamic vision is really fun when you put the effort in to set it up (I could have just bought the adventure in roll20 with the maps pre-done, but I had nothing better to do...)

Use Roll20, it is simply perfect. I discovered it before the quarantine, and it offers really a lot.

We have been using Zoom for talking with each other, while using Roll20 for maps. I could easily see using Zoom for theatre of the mind-style games.

I'd avoid Zoom until the hacks die down.
There are so many other options, most more styled for gaming.

I just got up to speed with Discord and Roll 20, so I can play in the Saturday Pathfinder game, and I can resume running the Tuesday Shadowrun/Dark Heresy/D6 Star Wars game.

We use the Roll 20 dice rolling app of Saturday, because its easy to use for that, and we have one confirmed cheater at the table. The dice roller makes cheating a lot harder than in real life.

For the Tuesday game, I'm allowing people to use their dice if they like, because its a different group and we don't have the cheater there.

Pros: I get to game again.

Cons: I miss the miniatures. I've bought so many models for Pathfinder, and now they sit unused and/or unassembled on my shelf.

yeah, i was doing 'theatre of the mind' (close encounters of the funkiest kind) already and the switch to online was easy.
the only issue is connection speed/bandwidth.

So i was planning on using roll20 or some such service, but the bandwidth requirements were not do-able from my connection. i usually get ~1.2Mb/s peak, and due to the infuriating way optical cable pathing is chosen, i do not have access to fibre broadband. The only way i can improve my connection is by paying for a second phone line and that will only be able to do the same speed as the current line for a maximum of 2.4Mb/s

so roll20 has great quality and features but it requires the streaming machine to output a ~512Kb/s signal to EACH USER - effectively using the host PC as a server and multiplying the bandwidth use by a factor of 'N' users, making it a non-viable option for me

Skype (and 'Zoom' for our american frens) uses roughly the same sort of data because they work in a similar way - all people in the video call stream their own video and audio to a server which amalgates them and re-streams the combined feed back to all contributors - the upshot is that a video confrence call won't use any more bandwidth than a one-to-one video call but you will get noticeable delays and dropped/missing data packets occasionally

To continue the "it wasn't plain sailing for me" lament, i found that despite using skype and having some bandwidth free when i was using the 'tabletop audio' soundboard problem arose; while having more than two tabs of that open, i would notice errors and dropped packets in the audio feed of the constantly playing sounds. Having more than 4 open at a time made continual sounds cut out intermittently from the dropped data and reduced the bandwidth so much skype started dropping the video quality and eventually the video feed entirely in some instances..
Even posting a picture file in the skype chat caused stuttering for the soundboard.


From a game-management standpoint i had to do things slightly differently - keeping a track of the order that people started speaking and then going through each in the correct order one at a time, prompting how much you were able to make out so far went down really well; after the first session and me getting that right, eventually the players started doing it themselves.
Having a dedicated rules-lawyer is a good idea so you can order them to find the full wording of something and keep everyone in the moment narrative-wise

I have more to say on combat and how the order of description in relation to the dice rolls started to matter a lot more but i think that belongs in the 'D&D combat is boring' thread

I migrated more than a decade ago when differing college and work schedules made it nearly impossible for my usual group to continue on meeting in person.

The biggest issue right now is getting people who aren't flakes that just seem to refuse to show up to the usual time that they agreed to show up on, always an hour late or not showing up at all to half the sessions.

Managed to run a single player RPG game using Divinity OS2 as a base. Worked alright once got the hang of it but coms not working so had to use text only

We have yad no problems with Zoom hacking in our games. Although we are a bunch of wierdos who would actually relish the thought of a random person trying to Zoom-bomb us, if it's what I think it is (I'm a luddite who barely uses more tech than forums and facebook). I spend half my between-turns time trying to find crazy stuff to put behind me as a background.

My best so far is a puppy who's eyes matched up with mine, and my crappy graphics card gave me it's eyes instead.

 Melissia wrote:
I migrated more than a decade ago when differing college and work schedules made it nearly impossible for my usual group to continue on meeting in person.

The biggest issue right now is getting people who aren't flakes that just seem to refuse to show up to the usual time that they agreed to show up on, always an hour late or not showing up at all to half the sessions.

Flakiness when it is an online session is really annoying. And rude. I have not dipped my toe into playing with people I do not know from IRL online. My group is still pretty much the same one from my university days. Been thinking about trying a LFG thing just to freshen things up, but the horror stories you hear...

I am currently in 5 weekly games and a bi-weekly game, all online, and all online before all this stuff went down. My only in-person game is on quarantine hold and didn't even try to migrate online. I do miss it a lot.

 streamdragon wrote:
I am currently in 5 weekly games and a bi-weekly game, all online, and all online before all this stuff went down. My only in-person game is on quarantine hold and didn't even try to migrate online. I do miss it a lot.

2 of the games I'm in were not able to move to an online format. One is weekly, the other was bi-weekly. We may be able to get the bi-weekly game up and running online, though. The only thing holding us back was several players' lack of familiarity with the various online formats, and those people have been gradually learning the ropes. The weekly game was my Pathfinder pirate campaign and we were literally on the last few pages of the final book in the adventure path. I think that makes not being able to play it even harder on me.

Running D&D on roll20 works smoothly.

 Generalstoner wrote:
Running D&D on roll20 works smoothly.

Yeah, I've been playing with complete novices, IMO the biggest barrier to entry is the work the GM has to put in to make a good roll20 game, but both myself and my partner have been able to do it. A quick google image search for maps, the Token Stamp online tool to create your NPCs and whatnot, and you're pretty much off to the races.

And if you prefer to just go for theater of the mind, there's great functionality for having just background images and background music that plays when you go to a certain map.

I'm playing Delta Green on discord. We never planned to use minis or much in the way of physical props (maps etc) so it's been pretty smooth sailing. We've just rolled dice ourselves and announced the result. It's not as good as playing face to face, but given we live a bit apart it wasn't really practical to meet up every week anyway. The Spire game I'm in has kind of died for the moment sadly. We enjoyed hanging out as well as playing, so that really isn't the same via computer screens.

So, has anyone migrated from Online back to physical gaming again at this point?

How did it go? Anything different? Did you decide to stay Online?

I had a promising meet up with an old friend yesterday. It looks like we will be starting a 4-5 person board game night/rpg night maybe bi monthly in the next couple weeks. So thats good.