The Glade 4.0

A number of months ago, I created a thread on the pitfalls of pbp gaming. I got to talking to Kaffis about one of the ideas I presented in the thread about running a game through a video conference. We talked about it for a bit and bounced some ideas back and forth. I brought it up to my Sunday night crew and one of the guys suggested we try a short D&D adventure since it was a system everyone was familiar with and would set a good control for the experiment.

Last night we had everything ready and tested the idea. We set up a webcam and a microphone in my brother's basement and had Kaffis join in via Google+. For the most part, stuff ran very smoothly. At one point we had two laptops, a desktop, and a Kaffis all connected to the video chat, so volume of people doesn't appear to be a problem.

For the most part, on our end it actually felt like Kaffis was in the room sitting over at my brother's computer. I generally found myself naturally looking over to the monitor whenever he was talking, which got a little strange when we put Google+ in the background and Kaffis' voice was coming out of d20SRD.org. Kaffis seemed like he had a pretty good view of the battle map once we put a stack of Magic cards under the camera.

The audio was surprisingly good. For the brief period of time I was using my laptop to run the microphone, we could all hear it loud and clear coming out of the speakers on the desktop. We ended up using a Rock Band microphone and just left it sitting in the middle of the table, and apparently that worked just fine. The pickup was far better than we'd anticipated.

There was a slight problem with my laptop dropping off the network every ten to fifteen minutes. Next time I'll want to try an ethernet connection rather than wireless, although the issue could have simply been my laptop overheating. The desktop never dropped, so we ended up hooking the microphone into that machine to provide a stable audio feed.

All things considered, it went very smooth for a first run. Having to frequently reconnect my machine to the chat in order to turn the webcam back on for Kaffis to see the table was only a minor hassle. The technology is very much in place to make this a feasible means of running a game.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I never felt it was that aspect that prompted the need for PBP--but rather the mishmash of schedules.

Timing and time zones would be an issue, although video game might be fun to try.

Well, scheduling is an issue with most real-life groups as well. This setup generally just increases the number of people you have to pull from for tabletop gaming.

I thought the experiment went well. There were a number of things that could be done on our end to make everything smoother and palatable on the other end, but they're nitpicky things that would likely get resolved as we attempt remote tabletop gaming again.

I'm glad your idea works. Open rpg was one of the best campaigns I'd been in. This sounds like an improvement in concept.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Certainly an improvement. My wit is lost in OpenRPG.

And by wit, I mean random obscene interjections.

I should point out that we weren't even using G+'s whiteboard feature (because I didn't realize at the time that you need to designate that you want to use it before starting up the video chat). Which puts it even more squarely into OpenRPG substitute territory.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades