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Online Gaming Tips

JohnnFour

Game Master
Staff member
Adamantium WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Gamer Lifestyle
Demonplague Author
Borderland Explorer
From RPT GM Joe:

Hey Johnn,

I ran a weekly Star Wars game online for almost 5 years and learned a lot. Last week I had to transition my in person game to virtual.

Like you, I wanted something simple (also needed to be cheap). When I really thought about it, I wanted to be able to show the players where things were relative to each other, and I wanted to be able to draw it in real time. Colors would be nice, not essential. It would be nice if the players could draw too. A grid could help, but I could do without. We need conference call, but we don't need to see each other. It would help me to see the players, but I'm not sure my wifi can handle it. I also wanted to be able to share pictures & files if needed. I usually have a computer at the table, so I had to for all of this on my existing hardware without adding too much.

That's my first piece of advice: really look at what you NEED to do. Make a wish list of wants and necessities. Also, envision what managing the system would actually look like. You don't want to be playing IT & sound engineer while you're trying to run.

When it turned into run online or cancel game last week I had to find something quick. My wish list pointed me to virtual whiteboards for meetings. I landed on Invision because it's free and it connects well with slack (which I was using for chat and file sharing and images). Slack also integrated well with Hangouts, so it made a nice base station for the game.

Invision's phone app is a little buggy, but I got it to work well in browser on my phone. The touchscreen is really the essential part of that program. It lets you import pictures, so I had player counters too. That was the only extra piece I had: my phone. Slack was open on my desktop and Hangouts ran in the background.

The last thing is etiquette. To make sure I don't forget people, I put a diagram of a table at the top of my sheet and write everyone's character name around the table. When I'm asking for actions, I make sure I hit all the names. I talked with all my players about the differences in virtual tabletop games: it's easier to get distracted or tune out, so work extra hard to be mentally present. Background noise, breathing, and talking over one another is hard to tune out, so mute your mic if you aren't talking. Use the chat for cross chatter or to declare actions if you have a lot going on in the BG. The drawing is for reference, I won't be running tactical battles on it.

It takes a little more facilitating, but the more you can automate and keep your flow the same as at the table, the easier the transition will be.
 
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ELF

Generator Sage
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Last week I experimented with a couple of other virtual whiteboard tools:
  • Flinga: very simple to use, the users do not even have to login. But the maximum image file size is only 10 MB.
  • Google Jamboard: a crossbreed of a whiteboard and a presentation. I haven't put this to a real test yet, but it seems to be full of promise.
 

ELF

Generator Sage
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
gTove is an open source, lightweight VTT solution that works directly in the browser and utilizes assets stored on your Google Drive:
This project is a lightweight web application to simulate a virtual tabletop. Multiple maps and standee-style miniatures can be placed on the tabletop, and everyone connected to the same tabletop can see them and move the miniatures around. Google Drive is used to store shared resources such as the images for miniatures and maps, and data for scenarios.
https://illuminantgames.com/gtove/

Click the Work Offline button to see a neat demonstration of the capabilities.

Since the tool is permissively MIT-licensed, a modification supporting CL log entries is an intriguing thought...
 
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CoryG

Portfolio Importer & World Map Maintainer
Platinum WoA
Wizard of Story
gTove is an open source, lightweight VTT solution that works directly in the browser and utilizes assets stored on your Google Drive:

https://illuminantgames.com/gtove/

Click the Work Offline button to see a neat demonstration of the capabilities.

Since the tool is permissively MIT-licensed, a modification supporting CL log entries is an intriguing thought...
That is really incredible. Yes, it would be great to integrate CL into/with something like this.
 
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JohnnFour

Game Master
Staff member
Adamantium WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Gamer Lifestyle
Demonplague Author
Borderland Explorer
Very cool @ELF I will check this out!
 
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JochenL

CL Byte Sprite
Staff member
Adamantium WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Gamer Lifestyle
Borderland Explorer
It looks quite amazing and usage is intuitive to me. I feel very tempted...
 
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