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Friday, 20 March 2020

Life and death are only a dice roll away!



Only a dice roll away? That's never been truer than now for most of us, but while you're battening down the hatches there's no need to lose all contact with the outside world. My gaming group have been looking at Discord, Roll20 and Zoom for roleplaying and Vassal Engine for boardgames.

James Desborough ran a Dragon Warriors game the other night, and as you can see it's almost as good as playing face to face. Even better than face to face, perhaps, if your friends are scattered all over the country and find it hard to get along to an in-person session.

If you've been waiting for the right time to snap up all the Dragon Warriors books, Serpent King Games have them in a Bundle of Holding for the next couple of weeks. And I'm now talking to SKG about them publishing Jewelspider, which would mean wider distribution and more artwork -- which the proceeds of the Bundle of Holding sale will help pay for. See, there's always a silver lining.
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8 comments:

  1. Nigel23 March 2020 at 23:20

    Just saw the latest UK measures. Hope you’re all keeping safe and well. Sending you best wishes and virtual toilet paper from Australia.

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    1. Dave Morris24 March 2020 at 14:48

      Thanks, Nigel. We're not quite in World War Z yet. I just went for a walk in the country and, though it was quiet for such a sunny day, the people I did see were happy to stop for a brief chat. Truth be told, I think the British enjoy having a new social rule to add to their performance of politeness -- in this case, stepping off the footpath so that the other person can pass you more than 2 metres away.

      But then I got back to find that more than 50% of Americans approve of Donald Trump's handling of the coronavirus crisis, which almost makes me want to catch it now and get life over with.

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    2. Andy Fletcher25 March 2020 at 21:54

      And to think that less than two weeks ago, I was cheering home the 8th, 9th and 10th in the Gold Cup at Cheltenham. Slight change in methodology.

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  2. Nigel26 March 2020 at 05:26

    On the plus side I’ve joined an online DW campaign on RPoL and we’re just at the Inn of “Chang” (Ciarrn). Dave one of the great appeals of DW (even to my tween/teen Min-max powerfaming tastes) was the extraordinary richness and quality of the adventures in the DW rulebooks. So nice to revisit it all these years later and find the strong storyline still holds up.

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    1. Dave Morris27 March 2020 at 08:34

      Thanks, Nigel. I think Oliver has to take a lot of the credit for the story atmosphere. What do think about RPoL? We used Roll20 last night but their servers were overloading. Maybe Thursday is a popular night for gaming.

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  3. Nigel27 March 2020 at 14:55

    Um it’s my first experience role playing online so probably some newbie issues but RPoL seems essentially just a text based discussion forum repurposed with a neat dice rolling app so far as I can see. But it works fine. It’s early days and progress is a bit slow on the adventure but the dedication of some of thee players to their character and storyline makes it almost feel like we’re writing a collaborative novel... so it’s probably a good platform for this game and players...

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    1. Ray Holt27 March 2020 at 15:21

      Hi Nigel - I'm also in The Glissom campaign on RPoL, so good to see you here!

      But yeah, RPoL is Play-by-Email to all intents and purposes, so it inevitably has a slow pace. One combat can end up taking a couple of weeks. And it's asynchronous, for better or for worse (you don't need to be active at the same time, but some players can post several times a day, others maybe every couple of days). I can't imagine it would be great in real time, unless you had some strict turn-taking measures!

      I've used Zoom for our tabletop WFRP Campaign that has now had to go online, but that's one-on-one, so we can use the free version, and you have to take Dice Rolling on trust, since there is no built in dice roller (I mean, you could use screen sharing and the like to address that). It worked well.

      Does anyone here have experience of Discord?

      I imagine every streaming service is going to be struggling for bandwidth at the moment.

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    2. Dave Morris27 March 2020 at 17:40

      We use Discord for audio while running the game using Roll20. I'm not actually sure why, unless it's the lagginess we were getting with Roll20 even with audio and video disabled.

      Some of my friends have been reluctant to try realtime online gaming, so a play-by-email alternative might just tempt them back to the virtual table.

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