Any Advice For Making the Transition to Virtual Tabletop GMing?

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Psychopomp

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So, by virtue of a series of coincidences, my gaming group of almost 20 years all moved out of town within the same year. Including myself. Thanks to finishing up grad school, the job search, and getting settled into a new city, it's been around two years since I last ran a game. I'm starting to feel the withdrawal.

I've researched the various VTT options, and it seems like what I want is Roll20 with Discord for audio/video. I run mostly systems more suited to theater of the mind play (Exalted, FFG Star Wars, Genesys, to name a few) but it seems that some good mood setting still images can occupy the screen during such scenes. I think I've got a handle on what I want to run and I've done my homework on the methodology.

But I'm still daunted. Something psychological seems to be holding me back, as this seems like a giant change in play style. Sometimes, the hardest part of eating an elephant is figuring out where to make that first bite, y'know?

Has anyone here gone through the same experience? Does anyone have any advice to share, maybe some pointers on what I could do to get over this hurdle? I'd appreciate insights from other game masters who had to make the same leap.
 
I'm interested in this question as well, as I'm hoping to get an old group together again online sometime soon-ish.
As for tools, I'm inclined to just go with Skype (or some other video conferencing tool) and rely on e-mail to send handouts, etc.
(I tried Roll20 a few years ago and found it to be too much trouble to learn and use.)
 
Have you been in a long group chat over the phone or using VOIP app (Discord, Skype)? Even if you haven't this is something people get a handle on quickly especially among friends. People been dealing with this tech since the 90s when conference calls became a standard feature of office system. And it only gotten better over the years.

The changes are in what you do to prep. Want to show something? It needs to be an image on the computer, phone phote, scan, google search, whatever. Somehow it has to be gotten into a digital form so people can see it. You could try holding it up to video but it kinda of sucks as when I found out in a session when Roll20 wasn't able to be used.

If you use miniatures then you need to setup your maps in the VTT. You may need to get some token like the one's offered by Devin Night. If you want to get fancy like with dynamic lighting on Roll20 then you need to do some more steps. You may want to use some digital tools like a character sheet or an on-line RPG utility. But like face to face and things like Dwarven Forge, do it because you like too. Otherwise it all good.

Other than it is tabletop roleplaying, my group played weekly using Roll20, get together once and a great while and do face to face, then switch back all without loosing a step.

You will do OK.
 
I want to see if I can get my old group going using online means as well. I’ve been eyeing Zoom which we use at my work for videoconferencing and is far more reliable/stable than Skype.
 
I am also interested in VTT solutions. I want to like it but it just hasn't worked for me on the player side so I am wary of using it as a DM. That said, I think running a good VTT game is useful skill to have.
  • I have a hard time staying engaged on the player side of VTT especially if it's theater of the mind.
  • I have noticed a tendency for VTT groups to be flaky (drop outs, no-shows, not paying attention etc). A lot of VTT games fizzle in a session or two- perhaps due to a lack of player engagement?.
  • I looked into Roll20 a couple years ago and it seemed like a massive time sink to make it do what I wanted (visually pleasing dungeon crawls with dynamic lighting).
 
Honestly my biggest problem with it is something that you don't expect when you first start: The sound of the players being all around me in my headset every time they speak is claustrophobic as hell.

In real life, everyone's voice would come from a specific place. Where as with discord it was like all of them were all around me. It feels smothering.

This is why when I do my next game, I'm probably going to run it using something like TeamSpeak which has 3d Sound where you can put people in places relative to you in your headphones.

I'll admit that some of this has to do with my own mental quirks, but I thought I'd mention it since it isn't something people talk about much.
 
I've been doing it for a little while, and I've gotten used to it. Even if it's still not quite as good as face-to-face, it's far easier to keep a game going with people spread out over the country and for people who don't play "The World's Most Popular Fantasy Role-playing Game" (or one of its close derivatives).

Making it work:
Voice
: I think Discord is pretty OK; there's some occasional lag spikes, and voices have gotten a little "tinny" here and there, but it's free and it's pretty flexible.
Handouts: Discord will let you drag and drop an image from your desktop, so that's pretty useful when you just want to present a visual, or some letter or whatever.
Dice Rolling: I've used Roll20, I've used a Discord bot (Dash Delta) and I even just let people roll real dice and tell me what they've got. I kind of like Roll20 because it's fairly easy to do hidden rolls for perception or insight checks that way.
VTT Software: I've used Fantasy Grounds and Roll20 primarily, and tinkered a little bit with MapTool, ScreenMonkey and even Sqwire. Bottom line? They all suck, but each in their own unique way. FG has a steep learning curve from the GM's side, and if you like to play stuff that isn't D&D or Pathfinder and a handful of other supported rulesets the experience is kind of janky. Roll20's main advantage is that it's all browser-based, which means platform independent, and no port-forwarding issues (which became a huge bitch for FG, after I moved and got an ISP that has me behind a double-NAT). MapTool has lots of levers to pull, and also has a steep learning curve (it also doesn't work for me because of my double-NAT issue), Sqwire is free but pretty simplistic at this stage of development, ScreenMonkey Lite is also free, but very janky. Currently the least annoying PITA of the bunch seems to be Roll20, but apparently Fantasy Grounds is getting a refresh in the fall, that's supposed to smooth out some of the hassles currently surrounding it from a hosting perspective. Who knows?

Other thoughts:
Gradually I think I've gotten better at simplifying prep for a VTT game. In the beginning I felt this weird compulsion to try and use all of the bells and whistles that comes with the various VTTs. In particular, I used to fall into the "map trap" all the time; where I felt like I needed to have a lot of pre-loaded fancy maps, and frankly it's just not worth the hassle 90% of the time. It's far easier to just sketch out something using Roll20's drawing tools on a blank hex map and call it good. I still feel a little uncomfortable with the format, and worry that I'm losing people when I can't look at their expressions and see if I'm glazing people's eyes over with whatever crap I'm spewing, but if you're gaming with people you like and can get over the weirdness at first, it's a pretty good substitute.
 
Make sure your connection is stable. People underestimate that, myself included.
 
I've dabbled with online tabletop on and off back from the early days of Webrpg (anyone remember that one?). I'm currently sticking with face to face games, so I'm not necessarily up to speed with the latest developments. Overall it works but:
  • You need to be really motivated as it's more challenging and less rewarding
  • Everything takes between 3 to 4 times longer... but you tend to have shorter sessions anyway because you burn out quicker.
  • If you ever had issues in face to face games with players' irregular attendance or getting distracted during play , you ain't seen nothing yet
  • But if you are organised and have committed players, it still gaming.
 
My perspective is more from being a player online than from being a GM, but here's a few tips I'd offer:
  1. Have a backup chat system ready. If you go with Discord, make sure to have Skype or Google Hangouts ready to run as well. There have been at least 3 occasions one of my groups had to switch from Discord due to technical issues. Same with Skype.
  2. Watch videos on YT, from both the player and GM perspective. There are tons of them out there.
  3. Keep it simple at first. You'l be tempted to jump in with all the bells and whistles, but it's going to be smoothest if you go with the bare minimum features to run, then add on more over time as you develop confidence and familiarity.
  4. Everyone should have headsets or at least mics, and use push-to-talk. One note on that is if you're using Discord for voice, PTT has about a half second lag when you first push the button, so what I do is push it, wait a beat, then start talking.
  5. If you have a player or two who like to talk over everyone else, that problem is going to be magnified playing online, so talk to them early on and try to nip that in the bud. You'll likely end up being the debate club referee and telling people whose turn it is to talk.
  6. This has been my experience, so take it with a grain of salt, but playing online can be really focused, with few of the tangents and side conversations that you get in person. So you might end up getting a lot further in a session than you anticipated.
 
Ask everyone to close all other applications. The benefits of being able to lookup something on the web are far outdone by the distractions.

Keep things moving. Encourage a side chat for game related chat so even if you are engaged with one player the others can talk about the game and stay engaged instead of drifting off.
 
I think the thing that helped our transition was that it was the whole group, and wasn't just me trying to find a new group online because I couldn't game in person. Plus, we were continuing existing campaigns, so we already had that investment.

Good move finding something for audio. Roll20 audio sucks. Video is even better if you have the bandwidth for it.

One thing I found is that that, in line with Rich's point # 5, I tended to go around the list at the bottom of Roll20 and call people out to make sure everyone stayed involved and no one got talked over.

We had times where we did accomplish a lot more (one of our players basically has ADD, but was laser focused when staring at a screen), and times where we accomplished shit because some piece of technology decided to stop working and we had to find a workaround. It wasn't frequent, though.
 
So now I'm thinking, short term game ran on Discord or some video conference thing like Skype. And by short term I mean, 6 sessions at the most and done.

Maybe when I get settled in the new house, that will be something to aim for.
 
The best sound quality I’ve seen is Mumble. If all you’re looking for is audio, I’d use that. Open source, cross-platform, no questionable privacy policy.
 
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