Tabletop RPGs - Online

Dr Mitch has done it, Dom has done it, Guy has done it, and the Smart Party has podcasted about it. So never too late to jump on a bandwagon, it’s my turn to talk about playing tabletop RPGs over the Internet.

Way back when

I’ve been roleplaying online for five or six years now. My face-to-face games are usually at conventions (or occasionally when my nephews and nieces get together), but my semi-regular games (with people I’ve been playing with since the 80s) is online.

Initially, we had a lot of stability problems with people dropping out and losing connections. We tried Skype and Hangouts (back when it had an online dice roller mod) but we found that Facebook Messages was pretty reliable - and we still use it today.

For our tabletop, we use a Google doc that contains character info, game notes, maps and diagrams. I’ve been using Google Drive for years and it’s second nature to me, but the other players haven’t picked it up as quickly. I think that’s a message to remember - even if you’re very familiar with the technology and think it’s easy to use, people who are unfamiliar with it (even if you think them to be tech-savvy) may struggle.

Even when Google had a dice rolling app, I don’t remember using it much. We found it as simple just to roll the dice as normal and report our results. We’ve never worried about cheating.

Today

Today, stability is much better. This year we’ve been gaming once a week since January pretty consistently, and I don’t think we’ve had any of the old technology problems that used to plague us.

We still use FB Messages and Google Drive though - that’s enough for us.

Google does have some good tabletop-friendly tools aside from Docs. I’ve enjoyed using Jamboard, their interactive whiteboard. Dump a map on it and sketch away - just like using a sheet of paper (although it’s not as intuitive using a mouse compared to a pen or pencil).

This is taken from Jamboard from one of our sessions.

One thing that is essential, and that’s a microphone and headset. Using the computer’s mic and speakers runs a high risk of feedback, which is annoying for everyone. It doesn’t need to be anything fancy - one of the players in my group uses the earbuds that came with his phone and they’re fine.

To Roll20 or not to Roll20?

I do have a Roll20 account, but I’ve never used it. To the initiated it looks like there’s a huge learning curve required in setting up a game, which creates two barriers.

• First, the learning curve. If I don’t have to learn it I won’t.
• Second, I don’t want to do that sort of prep for my games. Normal prep is more than enough for me, without having to think about uploading stuff to Roll20.

(I’m sure some of you are thinking that I’m making too much of this. Remember the bit where I talked about even tech-savvy people struggling with the unfamiliar? That’s what’s going on here.)

Worse, I am yet to be convinced that Roll20 will improve my gaming experience. I can’t get excited about fog-of-war, and I’ve never run the type of game where it’s important to know exactly where your character is on the map. (As you’ll know if you follow my blog, I play a lot of Fate.) I don’t like crunchy games, so the fact that Roll20 automates some of that crunch isn’t a big selling point for me.

But I’m happy to be proven wrong - I’m sure one day soon I’ll sign up to play (not run) a game on Roll20.

To video or not to video?

Until recently, I did all my online gaming on my laptop. I didn’t have enough screen space to see the maps/character sheets and also everyone’s video, so I just ignored the video. It didn’t matter as far as I could tell.

Now I have a big screen (thanks to much more working from home) I have space to do both, so we’ll see how that works. (Although at the moment I’m struggling a bit with video, but hopefully I’ll get that fixed soon.)

My experience

I’ve never tried playing online with more than four other players and a GM. Normally it’s just two (so a total of three of us). I don’t really like playing normal tabletop games with more than four other players, unless the GM is really good at keeping everyone involved.

As a player, I find that I need an online game to be fairly pacey - even more so than a tabletop game. I’ve always found it easy to be distracted when it’s not my “turn” (hence preferring smaller player numbers), particularly if the game is taking a leisurely turn and I sense I can drop out without affecting anything.

Online gaming can make that worse because there’s less PC to PC chat. With my regular group (just the three of us - so two players and a GM) that’s less of an issue, but with larger numbers I’ve noticed that it’s not so easy to do PC to PC chat, which can mean that there’s a greater danger of players becoming spectators (and I’m not good at that).

Online, I find it easy to be distracted by the rest of the Internet when I find yourself spectating. So as a player I like the GM to keep things moving with everyone involved as much as possible. (And hopefully as a GM, I practice the behaviours I like to see! But I may not be the right person to judge.)

As a GM though, I find I’m entirely focused on the game with no time to be distracted.

Duration

I find that two hours is plenty. It’s fairly easy to find a two hour slot during a working week - any longer and it starts feeling that you’re taking up a full evening.

I haven’t tried playing for longer, but my experience of long conference calls at work is that two hours is enough. If you’re going to play for longer, take lots of breaks. (Even at two hours you should take a break - but we don’t always remember to do that.)

Online Tabletop Tips

So here are my tips for online play:

• Be aware of players not being familiar with the technology - what may be familiar to you will probably be difficult to someone else
• Use what you’re comfortable with - choose a setup that works for you. If that’s Roll20, great. If it’s something simpler, also great. There’s no wrong way to play.
• Keep it punchy - be aware that the whole of the internet is only a click away.
• Two hours is enough - longer isn’t necessarily better.

Operation Curious Warning

As promised last time, here's the link to Operation Curious Warning, my Achtung! Cthulhu D-Day scenario.

There are no statistics - the monsters are all in the book and I figure you can work out stats for the NPCs if you need to.

There are also no maps - but there are lots of links to maps and other resources that I found useful.

I also created a setting grid (for use with BackStory Cards).

This page has more RPG stuff by me.

Actung! Cthulhu - unplugged

I’ve just finished running a short scenario for Achtung! Cthulhu for my regular online group (Jon and Terry). I’ve got the Fate version of Achtung! Cthulhu, but we used Fate Accelerated because that’s what we’re used to.

Underprepared

I normally over-prepare and have maybe a bit too much material all prepared and ready to go. That’s because:

• I like writing my scenarios up. Some of them I make available online. I have no idea if anyone runs them, but I get a lot of satisfaction from writing them up.
• At some point I may want to run them at Furnace or Go Play Leeds, and when I’m running a con game for strangers, I like the security blanket that a properly prepared scenario gives me.

But this time I decided to run before I was ready. I had a few ideas, and the start of a clue-trail, but very little actually written down. So a break from tradition. Unplugged, even.

Timing

Although I’d planned it as a one-shot (and something that I may run at a con), it took us five two-hour sessions to work through. Making it shorter shouldn’t be a big problem though:

• We spent most of the first session on character creation. For a con game I’d pre-prepare the characters.
• We had lots of tangents. The game was set in the lead up to D-Day, and even though it didn’t make any difference to the game, with the Internet at our fingertips it was a lot of fun answering questions like “How many soldiers will a Horsa carry?” and “Who owned St Michael’s Mount in 1943?”
• I didn’t worry about pacing because I didn’t have to.

I will have to cut it down a bit to run it at a con, but probably not as much as the original run-time suggests.

Operation Curious Warning

The scenario itself was inspired by MR James’ ghost story A Warning to the Curious, in which three crowns are buried along the East Anglia coast to prevent invasion. I just transplanted the idea to Normandy, and gave the players the mission to disable the crowns in advance of the D-Day landings.
I located the three crowns in Dieppe (lost to the sea), Mont-Saint-Michel (previously dug up) and Saint-Aubin-Sur-Mer (still in place, working its insidious magic).

The tricky thing was that given that the characters now knew where the landings were due to take place, they were not allowed to go to France until the night of the attack itself. So research all had to be done from England, supported by messages from France.

My original plans

Originally, I thought about having a countdown clock where the players efficiency would have an impact on the final battle. However, I didn’t do this partly because I was making it up as I went, and partly because I couldn’t decide how to do it.

Having completed the scenario, I’m not convinced it would have added anything and I’ve dropped the idea.

Coincidences

My original plan was to locate the final crown in the village of Luc-sur-Mer. I couldn’t find a map though. Then Jon found online a 1943 map that included Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer. I checked and found that it was just along the coast from Luc-sur-Mer, so I decided to move the crown.

However, it turns out that there are two Saint-Aubin-sur-Mers – the one near Juno beach and another to the west of Dieppe. As we had the map of the one near Dieppe, that’s the map we used (but located to the East of Juno beach).

Genuine 1:50,000 1943 map of the
wrong seaside village

With the crown now in Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer, that created another coincidence as the family name of the owners of St. Michael’s Mount in Cornwall (linked to Mont-Saint-Michel, one of the resting places of the other crowns) is St. Aubyns. Spooky.

Fate and investigations

In another game (Call of Cthulhu, Cthulhu Dark) I would have asked for some kind of investigation roll when clue hunting. For Fate Accelerated, I generally asked what the players were doing, and asked for an Overcome roll at difficulty 2.

On a success, I gave them information. If they failed, I told them that they hadn’t found anything – but that just meant they would have to look elsewhere as they were always going to find the clue. Eventually.

Occasionally the players spent fate points. For example, they wanted to know if an author they were following up had ever visited St. Michael’s Mount and spent a fate point to make it so.

Fate and massed battles

While the final battle to deal with the Nachtwolfe menace was fine (I enjoyed running it and the players seemed to have a good time), I’m not sure I used Fate as well as I could have.
Fate characters are competent and super-tough, but in this case they were academics in the middle of a battlefield, supported by Section M’s commandos. Inevitably the players wanted to take the lead (place tripwires, attack the Tiger tank, throw grenades at the armoured mi-go) when it would have been more sensible for the commandos to take the lead on that.

I could have created a Section M’s elite commandos scene aspect with three free invokes (or maybe extra Fate points) to help them.

I could also have gone fractal, and turned the opposing forces into characters (see this brilliant translation of The Avengers’ climactic battle into Fate Accelerated for an example - but I don't think I could ever do it this spectacularly).

So maybe something like this:

• Section M Commandos: +5 fighting occult monsters, +4 elite commando training; -2 Behind enemy lines, Three stress, one mild and one moderate consequence
• German forces: +2 Inexperienced German soldiers, -2 confused by the attack and imminent invasion. Two stress, one mild consequence.
• Sinister Tiger tank: +4 Tiger tank, -2 close quarters awareness. Armour 2, Two stress, one mild consequence.

With the other monsters using their stats as per the Achtung! Cthulhu rulebook. (The monsters are really tough.)

But then I’m not very good at playing enemy forces in a battle, and forget to use them to their best advantage. So simply running the battle as I did was probably my best option.

What went well

From my perspective, the adventure went well. Some highlights:

The cluetrail: I departed from my usual “Gumshoe” approach of creating scenes with clues that lead to other scenes with more clues, and instead I simply had a list of clues. Then as the characters investigated (and I let them have free reign) I gave them clues from the list. Often I made up new clues to suit places that I hadn’t thought of (St Michael’s Mount, the College of Arms).

Karswell: The only real NPC I got to play was Anton Karswell, who had some information on the crowns and also had a copy of Dee’s Necronomicon. I based Karswell on the character of the same name from MR James’ Casting the Runes. We never did establish exactly why Section M considered him unfit for duty…

Planning the mission: I really enjoyed the section of the game where Jon and Terry planned their mission. We used a Google satellite map and used the Google Jamboard app to plan the mission. Of course, it didn’t quite go according to plan…

Mission planning using Google's Jamboard

The mausoleum: My original plan was to locate the crown in an old church in the village. However, Jon and Terry started getting interested in the chateau, so I moved the crown to a mausoleum in the grounds. I remember walking past a large pyramid mausoleum in a National Trust property last summer, but I really wanted something smaller. “Oh, like Mad Jack Fuller’s pyramid?” asked Jon. And there we had it.

OPERATION CURIOUS WARNING: The mission (codenamed OPERATION CURIOUS WARNING) was a lot of fun. The players landed safely in their glider, the commandos secured the wood while the von Schnopp (played by Jon) destroyed the crown with a nasty ritual from the Necronomicon (dooming him in the process).

They battled a mysterious Tiger tank before finding a Nachtwolfe lab and being driven off by a strange armoured creature. They destroyed the creature with plastic explosive, but that released the undead thing in the cellar.

The battle ended with von Schnopp being wounded by the undead thing which triggered him changing into a deep one before dying in a hail of explosive shells from the 20mm anti-aircraft cannons being manned by Kincaid (played by Terry)!

What didn’t go so well

I’m pretty happy with how the adventure worked, although there are a couple of things I could have done better:

Fate in a battle: I’m not very good at battles – I tend to be too easy on players. For instance, I almost never use all my fate points in a scene – I let players off far too easily. I probably need to be more ruthless, particularly at the end of a one shot. (I should note that von Schnopp didn’t die due to anything in the Fate Accelerated rules – he died because it was dramatically right and I’d discussed it with Jon beforehand.)

The coincidences: I think the players would have liked me to have made more of the coincidence between St Aubin and St Aubyn. But instead I stuck to my original plan.

The nightmare: I mentioned the nightmare in a previous post, but I could have done a bit more with it. I often find that I’m juggling so many other things that I don’t remember to include the things that arise during play.

Interestingly, the last two points are about reacting to things that arose during play. Maybe I need to be more flexible and hold my ideas less tightly?

So what of Achtung! Cthulhu itself?

A couple of years ago I wrote a not particularly complimentary review of Achtung! Cthulhu. In short, I felt it was overwritten with too much unnecessary history and not enough game.

Has my view changed now that I’ve run a game?

Not really. There were a few things I liked and used:

• Section M and Nachtwolfe.
• The stats for the monsters (although I didn’t actually use them much).
• The information on the Necronomicon (that chapter worked really well I thought).

But I still found it heavily overwritten. I wanted a top-level summary of the different organisations (for a player handout as a summary of what they knew) but found it really hard to quickly summarise the difference between Black Sun and Nachtwolfe. The book goes into great depth about minutiae, without providing the big picture.

I eventually figured out that Black Sun were evil Nazi sorcerers, while Nachtwolfe were evil Nazi scientists. (And it was the scientists I wanted.)

But if all I was working from was my knowledge of pop culture and the Nazi occult, I suspect the game wouldn’t have been all that different.

Overall

So overall I was really pleased with Operation Curious Warning. The players seemed to have a good time and I was happy without my usual safety net. I now want to see if I can condense it a bit so that I can run it in a normal 3-3.5 hour convention slot.

Oh, and I want to write it up in detail. When I do I’ll post the details here.