Done SinaiMUCK-style, yeah, with people taking 20 minutes to write pose-paragraphs, I'd be reluctant to bother with it. Mind-bogglingly, sanity-taxingly slow. I just can't keep up with that.
However, Digital_Rampage is trying an experiment (a pricey one) with doing an online game using Fantasy Grounds (instead of MapTools/RPTools) for the online mapping, and TeamSpeak for our communications (though we also have a chat-log for recording die-rolls and other details as necessary). We've used TeamSpeak a lot for our multiplayer Minecraft games. The OverWolf interface adds a nice little feature by tying it with the Fantasy Grounds interface so when a player is speaking, his or her PC icon gets a "speech-balloon" icon for a quick visual guide as to WHO is doing the speaking. (If there are enough people, that part can get confusing, and I can't always pick apart everyone by voice.)
Real-time communication has its pros and cons, but it's pretty close to the same limitations we'd have at a game table -- with the primary exception that in real life I could in theory take one of the players aside and into the front room to discuss something as an aside, or secondly that I can supplement my verbal communication with gestures (pointing, eye contact, expression, etc.).
No longer shall we be wondering whether a player is 5 minutes into typing up his 20-minute mini-essay that's going to let us know whether he's going to attack Minion A or B this combat round, or whether he's shouting orders to the others, or going Full Defense, or what-have-you -- and only by INTERRUPTING his process can he let us know he hasn't simply gone off to make a sandwich. You can ask, "Hey, you still there?" and reasonably expect the person on the other side to say, "Yep, still here!" or we've got a problem.
Also, Digital_Rampage isn't big on typing. He regularly mangles the spelling of my name (first or last or alternate or nickname).
Now, I may still avail myself of some typing in the course of the game. My plan is to play a bard, and as part of that, I'm likely to subject the other players to occasional bouts of bad punnery and even worse singing -- but there's no way I'm going to make people sit through an entire "epic poem" I've composed about the party's heroics. Life's too short for that. Instead, I'm likely to spam the log with one of my compositions, or submit a note window (I'm still familiarizing myself with the options available) that other players would be free to look at (at their leisure) or simply ignore. The ability to send text messages to each other also fills the role of virtual "note-passing," and since I'm a fairly fast typist, I'll certainly avail myself of that option when I can, but not at the cost of making people wait through many minutes of silence for me to resolve a round of combat action.
The end result won't be a "log" that can be posted for posterity to others to read. As the party bard, I MIGHT attempt to put together some sort of synopsis for the benefit of those players who can't make it any given session, but my own work schedule might hamper my own attendance. (We're doing this Sunday evenings, and sadly Sundays are NOT sacred to my workplace, as I often have to travel on Sunday in order to be ready for a project early Monday morning at a client's site. For whatever reason, Saturdays are far more likely to be spared.)
Now, I realize that isn't going to solve all problems. There's still the matter of, if I ever want to run a game with TuftEars again, we're going to need visual elements as a primary mode of communication. But I'm still looking at all the features of Fantasy Grounds and the suite of programs (TeamSpeak, OverWolf, etc.) that might be layered upon it, and what implications this might have for solving some of the problems that arose from running things exclusively through a single-channel text-based medium such as a MUCK. TuftEars might not be able to take advantage of an audio channel, for instance, but a major improvement would simply be if our text window had a Skype-like "so-and-so is typing..." indicator to simply LET ME KNOW that something is on its way. Or, by having multiple chat windows, one could be the primary "log" window where all the in-character action takes place, and another could be the parallel "OOC" window ... and in such a setup, even if we WERE still typing up half-page masterpiece poses, at least the GM could still "ping" you, and you could take a moment to click the "Yes I'm still here" button or perhaps even answer a question in another window without losing your place.
I don't know. It could be a big boon, or it could be a cumbersome nightmare. We've done nothing so far other than just to tinker around with some of the map features and write up characters, so there's a lot to be explored yet.
Another area Digital_Rampage is interested in is that of making an "electronic game table." Even though Digital_Rampage is the very one who introduced me to Hirst Arts block casting, and has been a major contributor to the bloat of my miniatures collection for the past decade and a half, he is a much tidier person than I am (he has a much easier time getting RID of stuff, it seems), and he has often voiced proposals about how we could replace the heavy, fragile 3D terrain with "virtual" terrain by various means. At first, the idea was to have a ceiling-mounted projector pointing straight down at a table, to PROTECT a battle map that would be managed on a computer, and we'd use physical miniatures to place on the table within that "terrain."
But more recently, with the improvements in flat screen TVs (wider range of vision, lower prices, bigger sizes), he's been floating the idea of building an electronic game table that is based around a big flat-screen TV with wide angle viewing. The idea would be that a laptop could be hooked up to it and could have a view that's scrolling across a battlemap that might very well be much larger than the table itself, but as the PCs explore this way or that, the GM could simply "scroll over," rather than asking players to take a 5-to-10-minute "screen loading" break for the GM to clear away all the scatter terrain and tiles, and set up new ones for the new area. Another interesting factor would be that the GM could even zoom in or out, making scale a bit more flexible (e.g., switching from hand-to-hand skirmish to vehicular action). I could therefore use Photoshop to create new maps and elements, and it would be a LOT easier to store that than an ever-expanding library of terrain pieces.
And anyway, Digital_Rampage has been more into building terrain pieces for miniatures wargames, or glorified boards for particular miniatures-focused board games, rather than pieces made expressly for RPGs. So for a wargame, it might be a castle here or a windmill there, or some sort of refinery or bunker -- whatever you feel like making that'll fit the scene and give some options for troops to hide behind or perch on top of -- but there's no Quixotic quest to have terrain to represent EVERY POSSIBLE SCENE where the action might take place in an RPG, say. Similarly for board games, his creations are typically a 3D recreation of whatever game board pieces were originally included in the game -- and out of necessity, that's going to be finite.
That, and he usually did this in cooperation with a game store, as he had friends running stores -- but all of those have since then closed down, or have moved on from miniatures gaming to focus on more lucrative markets such as for collectible card games. A lot of his creations have either ended up back in his hands (and he's had to figure out what to do with them), or got sold off in bulk with the sale of the store.
So, while the crafting part of making buildings can be fun, what's NOT so much fun is the feeling that you HAVE to keep making new scenery in time for next week's game, etc., or that you have to keep on devoting more and more space to storing everything. Therefore, I can greatly sympathize with his quest to find some sort of electronic solution.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2017-11-03 03:21 pm (UTC)However, Digital_Rampage is trying an experiment (a pricey one) with doing an online game using Fantasy Grounds (instead of MapTools/RPTools) for the online mapping, and TeamSpeak for our communications (though we also have a chat-log for recording die-rolls and other details as necessary). We've used TeamSpeak a lot for our multiplayer Minecraft games. The OverWolf interface adds a nice little feature by tying it with the Fantasy Grounds interface so when a player is speaking, his or her PC icon gets a "speech-balloon" icon for a quick visual guide as to WHO is doing the speaking. (If there are enough people, that part can get confusing, and I can't always pick apart everyone by voice.)
Real-time communication has its pros and cons, but it's pretty close to the same limitations we'd have at a game table -- with the primary exception that in real life I could in theory take one of the players aside and into the front room to discuss something as an aside, or secondly that I can supplement my verbal communication with gestures (pointing, eye contact, expression, etc.).
No longer shall we be wondering whether a player is 5 minutes into typing up his 20-minute mini-essay that's going to let us know whether he's going to attack Minion A or B this combat round, or whether he's shouting orders to the others, or going Full Defense, or what-have-you -- and only by INTERRUPTING his process can he let us know he hasn't simply gone off to make a sandwich. You can ask, "Hey, you still there?" and reasonably expect the person on the other side to say, "Yep, still here!" or we've got a problem.
Also, Digital_Rampage isn't big on typing. He regularly mangles the spelling of my name (first or last or alternate or nickname).
Now, I may still avail myself of some typing in the course of the game. My plan is to play a bard, and as part of that, I'm likely to subject the other players to occasional bouts of bad punnery and even worse singing -- but there's no way I'm going to make people sit through an entire "epic poem" I've composed about the party's heroics. Life's too short for that. Instead, I'm likely to spam the log with one of my compositions, or submit a note window (I'm still familiarizing myself with the options available) that other players would be free to look at (at their leisure) or simply ignore. The ability to send text messages to each other also fills the role of virtual "note-passing," and since I'm a fairly fast typist, I'll certainly avail myself of that option when I can, but not at the cost of making people wait through many minutes of silence for me to resolve a round of combat action.
The end result won't be a "log" that can be posted for posterity to others to read. As the party bard, I MIGHT attempt to put together some sort of synopsis for the benefit of those players who can't make it any given session, but my own work schedule might hamper my own attendance. (We're doing this Sunday evenings, and sadly Sundays are NOT sacred to my workplace, as I often have to travel on Sunday in order to be ready for a project early Monday morning at a client's site. For whatever reason, Saturdays are far more likely to be spared.)
Now, I realize that isn't going to solve all problems. There's still the matter of, if I ever want to run a game with TuftEars again, we're going to need visual elements as a primary mode of communication. But I'm still looking at all the features of Fantasy Grounds and the suite of programs (TeamSpeak, OverWolf, etc.) that might be layered upon it, and what implications this might have for solving some of the problems that arose from running things exclusively through a single-channel text-based medium such as a MUCK. TuftEars might not be able to take advantage of an audio channel, for instance, but a major improvement would simply be if our text window had a Skype-like "so-and-so is typing..." indicator to simply LET ME KNOW that something is on its way. Or, by having multiple chat windows, one could be the primary "log" window where all the in-character action takes place, and another could be the parallel "OOC" window ... and in such a setup, even if we WERE still typing up half-page masterpiece poses, at least the GM could still "ping" you, and you could take a moment to click the "Yes I'm still here" button or perhaps even answer a question in another window without losing your place.
I don't know. It could be a big boon, or it could be a cumbersome nightmare. We've done nothing so far other than just to tinker around with some of the map features and write up characters, so there's a lot to be explored yet.
Another area Digital_Rampage is interested in is that of making an "electronic game table." Even though Digital_Rampage is the very one who introduced me to Hirst Arts block casting, and has been a major contributor to the bloat of my miniatures collection for the past decade and a half, he is a much tidier person than I am (he has a much easier time getting RID of stuff, it seems), and he has often voiced proposals about how we could replace the heavy, fragile 3D terrain with "virtual" terrain by various means. At first, the idea was to have a ceiling-mounted projector pointing straight down at a table, to PROTECT a battle map that would be managed on a computer, and we'd use physical miniatures to place on the table within that "terrain."
But more recently, with the improvements in flat screen TVs (wider range of vision, lower prices, bigger sizes), he's been floating the idea of building an electronic game table that is based around a big flat-screen TV with wide angle viewing. The idea would be that a laptop could be hooked up to it and could have a view that's scrolling across a battlemap that might very well be much larger than the table itself, but as the PCs explore this way or that, the GM could simply "scroll over," rather than asking players to take a 5-to-10-minute "screen loading" break for the GM to clear away all the scatter terrain and tiles, and set up new ones for the new area. Another interesting factor would be that the GM could even zoom in or out, making scale a bit more flexible (e.g., switching from hand-to-hand skirmish to vehicular action). I could therefore use Photoshop to create new maps and elements, and it would be a LOT easier to store that than an ever-expanding library of terrain pieces.
And anyway, Digital_Rampage has been more into building terrain pieces for miniatures wargames, or glorified boards for particular miniatures-focused board games, rather than pieces made expressly for RPGs. So for a wargame, it might be a castle here or a windmill there, or some sort of refinery or bunker -- whatever you feel like making that'll fit the scene and give some options for troops to hide behind or perch on top of -- but there's no Quixotic quest to have terrain to represent EVERY POSSIBLE SCENE where the action might take place in an RPG, say. Similarly for board games, his creations are typically a 3D recreation of whatever game board pieces were originally included in the game -- and out of necessity, that's going to be finite.
That, and he usually did this in cooperation with a game store, as he had friends running stores -- but all of those have since then closed down, or have moved on from miniatures gaming to focus on more lucrative markets such as for collectible card games. A lot of his creations have either ended up back in his hands (and he's had to figure out what to do with them), or got sold off in bulk with the sale of the store.
So, while the crafting part of making buildings can be fun, what's NOT so much fun is the feeling that you HAVE to keep making new scenery in time for next week's game, etc., or that you have to keep on devoting more and more space to storing everything. Therefore, I can greatly sympathize with his quest to find some sort of electronic solution.