2020-03-17 Play From Home

So, what do you use to play your role playing games online? I don’t need a battle map. I have experience with Skype from work but don’t know how that would work on my GNU/Linux laptop. I have used Teamspeak ages ago. Is Discord the way to go? I don’t like them, either!

I guess DM Peter is going to pick Roll 20 for our D&D 5E game.

I’m still not sure what I want to use for my own game. I feel that just IRC is not going to work.

​#RPG ​#Jitsi

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I’ve used Jitsi Meet for work meetings and it seems to work nicely enough, though the video feed can sometimes feel a little low-frame-rate. It also has screenshare, in the event that you want to share a map or picture or something.

– reed 2020-03-17 22:36 UTC

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Jitsi sounds great!

Jitsi

As for dice rolling, we could all join a dice room on rolz, “special chat rooms designed to facilitate pen&paper roleplaying online, in groups - here you can have joined sessions with other players.”

rolz

– Alex Schroeder 2020-03-18 07:00 UTC

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We nowadays use either TeamSpeak or Discord (dpeending on who’s present). We’re doing it voice only, though.

As for dice rolling, we very much trust each other, so we often just use our own (physical) dice. I sometimes roll on WotC’s dice roller (alternating between the one for D&D the one for Modern d20 based on perceived luck 😀) when I need HP for like 15 enemies or something. One of y players uses a “dice room” (don’t remember which one), so if he’s present we often just roll there as well.

– Ynas Midgard 2020-03-18 08:55 UTC

Ynas Midgard

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Rolz is nice for rolling, but roll20 also has dice, and the video works on GNU/Linux as well. Plus you get the “maps” which are nice. If I’m using a published map, I can just import it (usually screenshot pdf → png/jpg → drag/drop into roll20). Although that portion is a hassle (especially if I didn’t prepare... oops), roll20 also has a nice fog of war effect so I can progressively reveal the dungeon. You can also share other artwork or handouts this way. Although roll20 does support some character sheets as well as other forms of automation, I basically ignore all this and just track our groups stuff in a google spreadsheet. With this setup, I’m basically down to two panes (at least for player facing material), which I think is quite manageable.

– Smitty 2020-03-18 12:37 UTC

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Thanks for the input. I just created a Roll20 account and it looked a bit weird; not sure why, though. Could be ad blockers, could be my use of Firefox. I’ll be using it as a player, soon. As for my own game, however, I wanted something simpler. Jitsi doesn’t even have accounts. That sounds like the right amount of complexity to me. It’ll be interesting to see how DM Peter handles our game on Roll20...

– Alex Schroeder 2020-03-18 12:44 UTC

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We use Google Hangouts still. I’ve tried Roll20, but it always seem like more than we need.

– Derik 2020-03-18 15:10 UTC

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Yeah, we’ll see how it goes.

– Alex Schroeder 2020-03-18 21:57 UTC

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@wandererbill just suggested Aggie.io for collaborative drawing. Very cool.

@wandererbill

Aggie.io

– Alex Schroeder 2020-03-19 11:27 UTC

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Please do report about your experiences!

– Björn Buckwalter 2020-03-19 19:22 UTC

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I will. 😀

The only thing I ever played online was simply using Skype. It was a short game of Burning Wheel, one session zero and six sessions for the small campaign (session reports).

session reports

– Alex Schroeder 2020-03-19 19:33 UTC

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Dominic also likes a simple setup and uses Google Hangouts. I’m surprised it still exists. 😅

uses Google Hangouts

– Alex Schroeder 2020-03-20 11:09 UTC

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Had my first virtual tea via Jitsi with my wife in another room and a friend in the neighbourhood. Got to experiment with phone and laptop, camera and external microphone.

And in three hours then, Skype and Roll20 for DM Peter.

– Alex Schroeder 2020-03-20 16:03 UTC

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2020-03-20 Skype and Roll20.

2020-03-20 Skype and Roll20

– Alex Schroeder 2020-03-21 05:45 UTC

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Potentially overkill, but has all the bells/whistles if you ever want them: https://www.astraltabletop.com/

https://www.astraltabletop.com/

– Kristopher Browne 2020-03-25 22:23 UTC

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Gonna advocate for Discord here. Good for video chats, but also you can make you own chat servers and store info, character sheets, general chatter there. Also there’s a whole bunch of RPG discords like the OSR discord that generate some interesting discussion and inspiration. Really cool stuff.

– Will 2020-03-28 06:42 UTC

Will