Phoning It In
By Cape Rust
Some of the biggest complaints I hear from my tabletop gaming brothers and sisters has to do with finding a good gaming group, keeping the group together, and finding the time to actually game. We live in a very transient society full of people coming and going; however, losing a gamer physically doesn’t mean losing them as a fellow gamer.
When I was in the Military, I had to move at least every three years. This meant that I had just enough time to find a good group, enjoy playing with them, and then move. I won’t lie, it sucked! A good solid gaming group is hard to find and leaving the group for whatever reason is even tougher. In comes modern technology to the rescue!
With all of the recent advances in technology, there is no reason that you can’t leverage these new fangled techno gizmos to keep gaming with your old group. There is some amazing stuff out there, if you are willing to use it. When you employ all of this amazing “Magical” stuff, you have to set some ground rules and adjust your play style to accommodate your “cyber” players. My current group (whom I mention often) has done a good job of integrating some of our long lost players via Skype. For the last few games, we only had one of our dearly departed members doing the “cyber” thing but have just picked up one of our former alums for our latest game.
I understand that there are virtual tabletop programs out there, but for us, Skype seems to be working well enough. We have a high level of trust in our current group, but it has been my experience that there is always one guy or girl in a group who goes into what I call “player defilade”. This is when a player sets up a pile of books or their own version of a GM screen and make all of their rolls behind it. This normally shouldn’t be an issue, but that player always seems to get wild dice or does maximum damage; surprise, surprise. This can be a big problem if you are phoning it in. There are a few ways to deal with this. The easiest thing to do is to find a dice roller that will display on the DM’s computer screen. If you can’t find a cheap or good roller, you can go old school! Have the Storyteller roll the dice for the offending player and ask for modifiers. I understand the satisfaction of rolling your own dice, but if you have caused some doubts about your dice rolls and still want to game, deal with it.
Our group likes to have our distant players on video, which is a good thing! This keeps people in mind and gives the entire table a feeling that the person is actually there. The only problem is by the time you have two or three virtual players you start to eat up quite a bit of bandwidth. The good news is between Facebook video chat, Skype, and all of the other messengers out there, it is easy to find a service that works for you.
Because of my recent vacation and my current job, I had to become a virtual player as well. Because my absence upped our virtual number to 3, the virtual players were reduced to voice only. I was happy to be able to game, but it just wasn’t the same. My DM was great at making sure I was included, but I did miss sitting across the table from my group. An adjustment that the person running the game has to make is to take a few seconds to ensure that every player at the table is being heard. Surprisingly, combat, due to its turn by turn nature, works in favor of your virtual player. However, combat with miniatures becomes much more difficult, especially with voice only.
Maps, handouts, and visual aids can be a problem unless you plan ahead. Have digital copies of these items ready to email to your player during the session, or pre-send them as attachments and ask the player to open them when they are needed. If you only have a hard copy of your map, you might have to hold it in front of your webcam so your virtual player can see what you are talking about.
Assigning one of the players to keep their ears open for a particular virtual player takes quite a bit of load off the Game Master and ensures your virtual players will be heard. It is important for the virtual players to be patient and to ask for clarification if you are not “getting” something. The GM has to be patient as well. A virtual player might not have the same situational understanding that the players at the table have. Let’s say one of your virtual players decides to charge the mutant cyber dog that is keeping the party trapped in the blown out basement of a former casino in a post-apocalyptic world. Well, it turns out that if that virtual player charges they will be attacked by three radioactive mutant armadillos and possibly fall in the hole in the floor 20 feet in front of the party. It is incumbent upon the DM to make sure the player understands the situation before they make their death charge. If you start running into quite a few of these situations, you will need to stop combat more often to reorient all of your players to their positions and the positions of their enemies. While this might seem like it will slow things down, it tends to do the exact opposite. It has the added bonus of making everyone feel like part of the action.
Phoning it in is a wonderful way to stay in touch with and continue to game with people over long distances. While it presents some unique problems that have to be taken into account before you even begin, if well thought out and well planned, phoning it in is quite rewarding! I always say that a bad day gaming is better than no gaming at all, and phoning it in is still better than nothing.
