roll on

[ironymaiden]

we had our first Saturday night session of D&D with our eight-person,* four-time-zone party. the DM and half the party are folks i played RPGs with in college and haven't seen since i moved to the west coast. it went surprisingly well both from a gaming standpoint and in terms of picking up like we never stopped hanging out.

it was interesting to see how other people use Roll20 + Discord.

this game (D&D): Discord video chat, Roll20 text chat and rolls.
Friday game (Savage Worlds): Discord audio, text chat, and rolls.
Tuesday game (D&D, same group as Friday): Discord audio and text chat, Roll20 rolls.

C and i have to train ourselves out of having side conversations in Discord chat, no one is looking at it. (and C has to figure out how to get Discord to recognize his camera.) the other thing is that in terms of using the character sheet, the Friday gamers are much more sophisticated, in terms of using the chat features and the GM tools the Saturday gamers know more. i'm really missing the money we put into the Friday game, where we have copies of all the sourcebooks for our GM and therefore available to everyone in the game. working with just the SRD (a limited free version of the rules) is limiting...but the Saturday gamers know tricks with having other players that own the books do character sheet updates. so it's hacky but workable.

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this afternoon (after i finished fussing with my character sheet for the evening game) i added Fate die rolling to my Discord bot, Chewie. it's very basic right now (like it shows your default username instead of your server nickname when it attributes the roll) but it works and in the process fixed an existing bug Chewie had with commands. i need to look at the rulebook to think about what other Fate features it needs after i get the name thing right.

i started by looking at another Fate roller project on GitHub, but it didn't work as written. i know the guy advertised the project on Reddit, but i had to change enough things that i'm not sure that it worked before it was apparently abandoned. or maybe the discord.py library changed drastically between when it was first written and now.**






*our DM asked eight, expecting 30% or so to say no, but no one did.
**i don't know, though. there was a math function that had nothing to do with discord.py that didn't work. and they didn't know how to format line breaks. still, they saved me a ton of time finding the right formatting for displaying emojis for the dice and had a folder of the dice art itself. i should try to contribute back my changes.

Comments

[annofowlshire]

The “invited a bunch of people assuming a lot of them wouldn’t show up and then they all show up and some of them brought friends too is what I call the Geek Social Gathering Curse XD

[ironymaiden]

It's a pretty great curse, though. Of course it feels like it's either that or more than the expected attrition rate bows out and it all collapses.

One geek social fallacy was not a fallacy this time; the DM's friends did all like each other.

[annofowlshire]

That’s the thing. Either you invite 10 people and 14 show up or a bunch drop at the last moment and you have 3 people. XD

I’m glad it went the good way for you!

[buhrger]

i ran a game with six players for some years. the toughest encounter was always with the calendar. what are your groups' practices with playing when people are missing? do you play anyway? cancel? does it depend on how many are missing?

[ironymaiden]

play anyway. IIRC we've played with as few as DM +2. it's how the Friday game has survived so long.

[buhrger]

that'd do it. are the missing PCs played by the party? assumed to be off-doing-that-thing? just not there?

[ironymaiden]

it depends on where we are in the campaign. usually missing folks are off doing something else, or we play on as if they were there but we don't mention them and they pick up next session as if they were alwasys with the party. sometimes we'll do a side quest or play a separate one-off or even a board game.

[varina8]

Gaming with old friends across the world has been such a gift. Have you used either Board Game Arena or Cardzmania? I've been playing both with friends once a week. We always say, why did we not do this earlier?