Last Night's Online Game

I had three players for last night's online Labyrinth Lord game.

The problems:

I was nervous. One of my players was having only his second RPG experience ever (after a disastrous first attempt), and the other two players just know me from my blog. I kind of felt like my entire reputation as a blogger and writer was at stake... if I gave bad game, surely the one guy would swear off gaming forever and the others would spread the word around that I'm just all talk... yikes! The pressure!

This wasn't a campaign sandbox kind of thing where players were making a decision of where to go. We were playing a specific adventure, and I could have started things differently. I could have laid out the intro, given rumors, let everyone buy additional equipment based off of that, and then started the game at the first point of decision-making (Zeke's!). But doing that doesn't feel right, so they went through the motions of dithering around town, "deciding" to go up the mountain, and going through the beginning of the trip. Different circumstances demand different approaches. I don't mind presenting a situation that causes the players to delay while they discuss what to do, but in this case I caused the game to start slower than it needed to. And considering the front end of the adventure proper is just "creepy atmospheric locations to explore," it's not like things go into high gear, so the unnecessary lag at the beginning was made worse.

It is very odd to be talking to people I can't see. I've done it plenty in other contexts (I did telephone surveys and customer service for too many years), but this was awkward. Tied in to the above point, it's really hard to tell, without seeing people, if they are thinking and planning and concerned about the situation, or just bored out of their minds. I wasn't running what I think is considered a typical fantasy adventure (no combat in the four hours we played) so trying to gauge where their heads were at was important.

A lot of my refereeing tricks didn't work with this method. When I run games, I am usually standing up, and when describing locations I use gestures and body language to communicate sizes, distances, spatial relationships of objects, not to mention facial expressions and mannerisms of NPCs. I was still doing all that even though nobody could see me. The players didn't see me limp around like Zeke or do my Popeye impression scrunching half my face, nor did they see me spread my arms wide when describing the gigantic book they found at one point. Adjusting my style to the medium used is something I need to do if this kind of gaming is to become a habit for me.

I was also not letting completely loose verbally as it was a 2am-6am game and Maria was sleeping in the next room (or trying to... see below) and I was trying to be half-considerate. I suppose this is partially a good thing because when they got to the screaming faces, it would have really been obnoxious for me to just howl uncontrollably into people's ears (assuming they had headphones on).

Poor Maria. Not only does she put up with the apartment full of maniacs every Sunday, she bakes for us (one of the players last night asked, "Where are our scones?"), and just suffers not having her apartment to herself in general. Last night, she got home at 10pm from a full day's work... and at 2am had me in the next room blabbing on and on for hours. I set this up quick because I'm in such a hurry to get Death Frost Doom out the door, but perhaps that was a bit presumptuous. No reason to be in such a hurry. Future online gaming efforts shall only be done when Maria is at work. Luckily her shifts change often so the next overnight shift is never far away.

The good stuff:

Lots of valuable notes were taken. Playtesting is vital when planning to release something, even for background and "fluff" elements. What makes sense when writing often comes out a bit odd when real people are experiencing that situation. Death Frost Doom is intended to be a cohesive adventure location, not merely a resource for disparate ideas. It has to all make sense together, and all of the above-ground locations were newly written and had not been used in actual play before last night. I know in the rush to have something out I feel the temptation to cheat and skimp on such things under the rationalization that, "Well, all the real fighty encounter type things have already been seen in play!" I'm glad I showed a bit of patience, and dare I say professionalism, in doing this right and playing everything before releasing it because even though all of the big things seem to be fine, many small details will change due to actual play.

The technology worked very well. The Skype conference was free and I was able to hear everyone very clearly. It probably helped that it was the first time in five years that I'd gamed with people without accents (or as the Europeans would say, people with American accents). Skype gave us no problems other than a few seconds of distorted noise, and one guy got dropped once, and that was fixed in a minute or so. The Dragonsfoot chat room worked quite well, even though the die roller takes a few tries to get used to (especially since this wasn't a particularly heavy die-rolling session so nobody really got into the groove of using it). The Scriblink whiteboard worked well enough (even though my scribblings looked like they were done by a five year old) since I'd alerted everyone that this wasn't a mapping-intensive adventure where clues and deductions were to be had through exact and correct mapping. It was cool that anyone could draw on the same surface so people could ask about positioning when they were in oddly-shaped rooms or rooms with lots of different stuff in them.

I had feared that having four disembodied voices together might cause confusion, but it was no problem at all. Everyone seemed to recognize when it was me talking, and a few set conventions such as declaring actions in third person ("Zoltar will open the door..." instead of "I open the door...") made it easy to determine who was speaking.

Most importantly, despite my performance anxiety, it seems that everyone enjoyed themselves and experienced the adventure in the spirit it was written. The players were a bit cautious (... well how would you act if gaming with the Green Devil Face guy?), but I liked that because it showed at least a basic caring and respect for the in-game narrative. We didn't finish the adventure, but the guys all seemed eager to continue at a future time so that's probably the best indicator that it didn't all royally suck. :)

Conclusions:

This is a viable method for gaming, but there might be only so far down this road I'm willing to go. I wouldn't want to play a game entirely in a chat room (nevermind play-by-post), because speaking is much quicker than typing, and if you robbed me of my vocal inflections (and NPC voice acting!) I might be completely lost running a game! I don't know whether I'd want to set up webcams either, because I'm not sure how that would affect the smooth voice broadcasting, and as was pointed out, I would then have to wear pants (how did he know?). It's easy enough to not pick my nose or scratch my balls in front of actual people, but I fear I'd absentmindedly display all sorts of unpleasant behavior if there's a webcam there.

Poor Maria. From the day I met her I thought she was way out of my league (and I'm amazed I got a second date after spending our first date discussing the Carcosa controversy with her) and I just continue to foist an escalating amount of strangeness onto her. This morning after I woke up she was telling me that during the bits she was able to sleep (oops), she was dreaming about the game I was running. She says in her dream she came out and watched me running the game. In the dream version, we all did have webcams so she could see the players. She said they looked bizarre. Not just a little, but a lot. Inhuman, "alien," with claws instead of hands and things of that nature. "I didn't remember Matt looking that strange in the other pictures you've shown me," was a bit of in-dream dialogue.

Alrighty then.

Next online game is 7pm Eastern time Thursday, June 4. I still want to limit it to six players, and of course the people that played last night get automatic spots if they so choose. We will continue where we left off (after the death of half the party from a yellow mold trap in the dungeon, they retreated to town so it's a natural pickup point for new people) and it should be a quick trip back to the dungeon.