I want to prepare an adventure that works really well for playing over the internet.
What kind of challenge is fun to play through chat?
What kind of riddles, NPC constellations, and things to figure out work best when the players can just hear one another, and sometimes can't tell the others' voices apart?
What has been problematic in internet games you've been in?
Which game was the best, and why?
>>44199294
These are all terrific questions. You're lucky that roll20 has mapping ability, because I've played over IRC and had to post imgur links to MS Paint maps.
I don't have any good advice at the moment.
>>44199294
I've only played Black Crusade over Roll20, but it worked out quite well.
Most challenges that work on the tabletop work well on roll20, and things like riddles or other puzzles that involve secret information that one player has and others don't are perfect for this system, as it is possible to send private messages to one player without any of the others knowing.
Nothing particularly problematic except for a couple random crashes, but that was a while ago, so maybe the problem is fixed.
>>44199415
>>44199488
So nothing specific to online games?
Okay, what are some things you can't do?
Like do you have to allow meta talk? I know most DMs do, but some don't. And I imagine it would be an issue.
>>44199294
What is a really good idea for roll 20
Is shadowrun, 4e especially, at a time I can make.
That's probably your best bet,
Real talk, problematic is not agreeing on communication. Skype's, mumble and TS are alright, don't use their voice chat, though you should always stress push to talk. Most of those will come up with a highlighted name or picture to show you who's talking, even 2 second delay steam chat has this.
Very easy for the GM to collude with certain players, or while GM is busy with one person voice, others can text chat to each other, and with macros post imgs straight into chat, or even create an in game time feature.
>>44199747
It's like a table but online, everyone sees the same things and hears the same things. I always talk meta but don't let the players let their characters act off meta knowledge. You can put a music playlist on that works well.
Meta talk isn't actually an issue, like, at all. Unless your players are total faggots. In which case say "stop acting meta". There's hordes of applicants waiting for a place in your game, remind them.
>>44199294
Real talk: every week I run my game. Just like irl gaming the first 30 min~ is small talk. And people will always find excuses to be late. And sometimes roll20 shits the bed and connection isn't there for everyone. Three sessions ago we spent 4 hours troubleshooting. But to be honest that's 1 session out of 4 months that I've had issues with.
It all depends on how much you want to put into the game. I've mapped my roll20 games into 3 parts: writing the session, mapping the session, and making the session.
Writing the session is self explanatory.
Mapping the session is figuring out what you want it to look like. Roll20 has tokens, fog of war, layers, maps, etc. I on the other hand use pictures I find on google to frame what the players are looking and interacting with. I plan on having a picture with every important location and interaction the players will have. You also have to figure out what handouts you want the players to see and have. The handouts are cool and you can set them to certain players, but god forbid you use copy and paste in there. No me gusta.
Making the session may be the easy part or it may be the hard part. It takes me a day to go through google to find the pictures that I like and resize the page to fit the image. But if you want to use all of roll20, the maps, tokens, music, etc its a lot of work, especially if you need multiple maps. Not only are you writing the session, you have to make it. Don't get burned out.
>>44201301
Can you play games without a map? Or would that make little sense?
>>44201364
You get a grid, you get tools, you can do shit in advance, you can place tokens that represent PC's or enemies or w/e.
You can draw your shit before game, or during game while we people talk/you explain the story. I just did this in two minutes. People will also draw weird shit on the map i've found. Fun though.
Or you could find a universities floor plan and scale it and use it.
i mean you could just sit there not touching anything and audio only since a lot of tabletop actually doesn't use visual aids, but why not ya know.
>>44201744
Yes, I understand how it works. I'm asking about the game dynamic.
>>44201744
Game dynamic's just fine
Visual aids make it that much better in every way, makes combat easier aswell, though with a descriptive enough GM and depending what you're running, you may or may not need it.
Cool topic, but hard to approach. I guess it's lots of little things.
I´ve used Roll20 quite a lot over the last few years owning to living in the rats-ass of nowhere and the closest LFGS is a two hour drive away. Some general advise I can offer:
>Chat/Voice?
The chat VS Voice is going to be something you´ll run into when doing online games, there are rabid people in favor of both - make sure you clearly label your game as being one or the other before joining in - I´d suggest against using both (as in having some that only type while other use voice to communicate most of their actions) as it tends to clash rather badly. Using both when all players have access to both however is a great tool to further RP - a thing to take into consideration is that multiple people talking is harder over voice-chat then it is in an actual physical room where multiple conversations between characters can be made and the DM can listen in to several at once and fill in with NPC´s as necessary. As such I´d suggest encouraging the players to write regularly when someone else is "hogging" the voice chat at any given moment.
Descriptions of character actions while the DM narrates/talks to another PC are also great due to the fact that you can´t actually animate with your body language what you are doing
>Riddles & Voice Concerns.
Roll20 is hardly the perfect medium for using the voice-chat, they´ve got a sort-of-good system for video conferences but I´ve had it crash on me and my groups to the point where I`ve given up using it, I´d suggest getting either Skype - or some other external system, preferably some where you can edit individual peoples sound-levels and have push-to-talk. Some things to also take into consideration is that players have access to the Internet at all times for better and worse, riddles typically can get an easy answer and information regarding rules/etc are easier to come by. In the same motion however you can use the online medium to link videos, music or set up wikis/handouts that are easily searchable for the players
>>44207268
I´d suggest you encourage players to differenciate between IC-OOC either by attempting to establish a in-character voice or by trying to keep side-talk and small-talk to the chat.
>What has been problematic in internet games you've been in?
When you establish a game I´d strongly advise for a session Zero more so then when doing RL meetups, you don´t know most of the people you´ll meet, and the internet is nothing but a cess-pool when it comes to anti-social dickwads. Meet people on the session date, before any game actually happen to see if they are even capable of basic time-zones and keeping a schedual - talk to people over chat/voice before you invite them and ensure you are all on the same page. Online games are easily dropped at the slightest hint, expect people to drop like flies for the first session or so and act accordingly (Make sure your story have easy spots early for new characters to join in.) if you talk to them beforehand and check out what sort of game they are expecting and what sort of game you are doing its a lot easier to make sure people don´t fucking drop out as soon as something they don´t like happens to find the next game in the list. Don´t be disheartened and just keep going and you´ll usually find a group that actually works togheter, its both a blessing and a curse really.
There are the typical issues you´ll find online as well - DC´s, lag - Roll20 crashing for some people, someones mom crashing through the door demanding their attention (run 18+ games for your sanity Anon) but Roll20 is fairly stable, I´d say I´ve got issues with it max once a month and I run 2-3 games a week depending.
>>44201364
>>44207364
>Can you play games without a map?
Roll20 have a lot of visual aid ranging from the ability to have handouts with character portraits readily available to push into players faces when they meet a new character, to actual battle-maps with grid-specific ranges and dynamic lightning that follows tokens vision around (it’s great for horror campaigns) none of it is strictly necessary but I´d strongly suggest you make use of it, a lot of art is readily available with just the search function in roll20 to be inserted and resized on demand, there are premade maps you can get for free, since the tools are there you might as well use them - same goes for the built-in jukebox, its linked to soundcloud and RPGsounds which does make it somewhat limited but there is plenty of sound-effects available - something which is quite good for setting the tone of the campaign, think Radio-drama.
In Roll20 you have the advantage of easily being able to switch to images, make handouts pop up, whisper to players, make hidden rolls and aid combat with the various map functions.
Personally I don't like battlemaps that much as I prefer head-cinema,
but if you're playing a very tactical combat-heavy game it helps a lot.
The map functions however also allow you to make puzzles interactive if you're creative enough to get it to work.
Roll20 is an excellent tool for running games.
Roll20 is a terrible tool for finding games.
I'm assuming you've discovered the former, and are simply asking advice. If you've used their game-finder, though, you're going to end up having a bad time.
Play to the strengths of roll20, but don't overuse them. Yes, you can use fog of war and it's really cool but DON'T reveal it sequentially as the players go. It takes fucking ages and it's pointless. Use it to hide things you want hidden only.
Music is really cool and a great addition but do not stress about playing loads of different types. It's perfectly fine to have a limited selection and only break out unique musics on special occasions.
It's easy to make maps from images but don't worry about making super detailed maps like you see in a lot of roll20 demo shots. They're demo shots, they're supposed to be pretty shit someone spent hours on. Most of the time, simply drawing things out of boxes/stealing a map works just as well if you describe things properly.
Character sheets are nice but don't force your players to use them, because very often they're a pain in the ass to use compared to simply rolling things manually.
Voice chat is ideal, but text chat's cool too. Advertise which you want before the game and understand you cannot have quite as many players online as you can at a table. Reading body language is impossible (or hard if you're video chatting) so you quite often end up with players speaking over each other. I consider 4 players to be the absolute upper limit, from experience anything over that and people start having a bad time.
That's my advice anyway
>>44207618
why is it terrible for finding games? I've found one mediocre game and one amazing game so far. And that's in like 3 weeks or so. Took me 1 week and a half to find the first one(the better one).
>>44209030
It's the same with all game finder type things, you very often end up with some bad players since people that look there are often ones that have been booted for badness.
>>44199294
>What kind of challenge is fun to play through chat?
Anything that runs off of the ability for players to collect information since the fact that they're using the PC to play means they're likelier to make notes. Roll20 also has various internal note function and I encourage you to use PMs at critical points.
>What has been problematic in internet games you've been in?
One issue is the lack of body language. Even in a video call you don't actually have a reference of who is looking at whom how, which makes them - in my opinion - fairly useless. One easy hotfix is calling up players by handle each round in order to avoid having someone get lost. Also train your players to never ask a general question. Instead, train them to address it to someone in particular.
In the same vein, what would you recommend for pbp?
>>44199294
>when the players can just hear one another, and sometimes can't tell the others' voices apart?
You could try using voice for OOC char and text for IC stuff. This is how my group plays and it's really fun as long as everyone is alright at text RP. It lets you do a wider range of characters that you might not be able to act out so well through voice, while also leaving voice open to help you resolve mechanical things faster and generally just be open for banter as the game goes on. Of course, as the GM you'll have to put your foot down every now and then and tell everyone to shut the fuck up and concentrate on the game, but that's only an issue when you're playing with randoms. If it's a group of bros you'll rarely ever have that issue slowing things down.
One thing to consider is using another client for the voice chat instead of roll20's built in one. I've never actually used the roll20 one, but I've heard it's not very good. I always just have a skype call going when I play with my group.
>>44201364
My current game is narrative based and thus we don't use the map. I just put a neat background image or title screen and leave it at that. The only roll20 functions we use are the chatlog, handouts/character sheets, music player, and of course the dice roller. We could technically just play on skype with another dice roller but roll20 has a lot of neat features that make it more convenient to use.
Overall I'm not really sure what to tell you. It's just a virtual tabletop system, not really that different from playing in person except for the ability to RP through text instead if you choose to do that.
>>44209129
i'm tempted to try as no-mates. Scottish accent though anahcannaebefuctwiweebawbagssayintheycannaeunnerstanmeangonnaenospeaksofastaswereawslowasshitetalers, ken.
Thanks guys, this is helpful.
What interests me most is that the 'head cinema' playing style seems to work fine. I'm not against a tactical game, but atmosphere seems more of a challenge.
>>44199294
Am I the only one that thins Carrie Fisher is ugly as shit?
>>44212537
An icon of its time no longer holds up in a current context. Color be unsurprised.
I wonder how they'll put her in the movie. I really like her, but the role? She could play Jabba nowadays. Is space obesity a thing a long time ago in a galaxy far far away?
>>44201364
Surprised to see this thread still up. Yes it is possible to run a game without a map. When I roll initiative I write them down on paper and note positions next to their names. Its easier to track than you think it is and my players don't go out of their way to confuse combat so I'm going to guess yours wouldn't either.
Maps help but as long as you are vocal about the positions and have notes to back it up, players have to take your word on it.
>>44213609
Something like Fate could work. You'd have to write all active aspects down somewhere where all players can see them. Basically a shared document would do the trick.
>>44213609
>Surprised to see this thread still up.
Yeah, I bumped it from page 10; >>44211634
