The Highgate Club - online using Discord

In January 2021 I ran The Highgate Club, a freeform I co-wrote back in 2010 at Peaky. I’m fond of The Highgate Club—It’s a place where the people of hidden London (vampires, werewolves, sorcerers, immortals and more) gather. There are various plots involving Atlantis, a volcanic island up for auction, the return of King Arthur, Russian cyborgs, the last of the elves, and more.

Discord

I updated The Highgate Club a couple of years ago and Covid happened before I could run it in person. Given the success I’d had with other freeforms online, I thought I’d try it out using Discord.

The item bot

The Highgate Club uses items. A lot. Happily, one of my freeform pals was developing a Discord bot to manage items, and they got it ready in time for me to try. A week before we were due to run the game I had a crash course in installing Discord bots, and we tested it beforehand—it was a success and hopefully development will continue.

During play, I inadvertently installed it in the wrong channel, which I don’t think caused me any problems, but next time I’ll know better. We also found that the locations weren’t working properly, so we had to manually sort them out.

If the bot hadn’t worked, our fallback was for one of the GMs (probably Alan, my co-GM) to be dedicated to managing a huge spreadsheet.

Problem #1: Discord

While overall I think the game was a success, it wasn’t without a few issues. The first was that one player failed to join. We carried on without her, but it was frustrating. We’re not sure what happened—she struggled with Discord despite rebooting her laptop. (One thing we didn’t try was to check whether she could have used Discord on another device, or using it through a browser rather than the app. Or through a phone.)

I don’t know if the problem was her setup, or issues with her local internet connection. We had 16 people present, but nobody else had any difficulties.

Problem #2: The Decision

During the game there’s a joining ceremony and two characters apply join the club. Unfortunately, one of them was refused entry, and this upset her. I sympathised with her (I couldn’t quite see where the decision not to allow her entry had come from) and she carried on playing, albeit her game was spoiled as a result.

Mechanically, it didn’t make that much difference (as she wasn’t barred from the club) but it obviously affected her game emotionally. I’ve since tweaked the writing to make it less likely that either character will be blocked from being accepted.

As a side effect, I noted that it also affected me as well. It upsets me when players aren’t enjoying playing my games—I want everyone to have a good time. And I may have been more sensitive than usual, as it turns out I had Covid.

Problem #3: Covid

A few days after the game, I tested positive for Covid. While I didn’t have any of the classic symptoms I had been feeling below par—I thought I was fighting off a nasty cold—in hindsight I realised that I was suffering from Covid the weekend of the game.

Covid also affected my mood.

Normally after a game, I’m quick to write up my notes and reflect on how the game went. While I did sort out typos to sort out some of the smaller issues, I didn’t feel like reflecting on the session. It’s taken me over a month to write this up.

And my view of The Highgate Club was soured as a result.

Minor niggles

We had a few minor niggles.

Late starters: A couple of the players misread when the game was due, and thought it was the following day. So we started about 30 minutes late while we got in touch and waited for them. It didn’t occur to me to send reminders in advance, but maybe that was also Covid.

Discord rooms: I set up a few small (2 or 3 person) channels on Discord for people to have quiet conversations. Unfortunately, that made it hard for some people to get hold of others, as they were often in those rooms with other people and there was no way of getting them out. (Not everyone was paying attention to direct messages, which didn’t help.)

In future, I will have more channels but set the minimum number at four to make it easier for players to talk to each other.

Reading the room: From a GM’s perspective, watching the game being played is a lot less satisfactory on Discord than in person. It’s hard to “read the room” online, and I had little sense of how the game was going.

As a player, I find it distracting when you’re conversing with another player and a GM suddenly appears. All they’re doing is listening in, but it’s still distracting. So I tried not to do that—but that meant not seeing as much of the game as I would otherwise have.

Make it longer: A casualty of not reading the room is not knowing when to stop the game. I had originally planned to run from about 7:30 to 10pm, but we started late (as described above) and at 10:30pm I was flagging. I called the end of the game at 10:30, but I know that players were still busy and had I been able to read the room I would have let it carry on for a bit.

I think that’s an inevitable consequence of online play, but for The Highgate Club at least, I’ve added another 30 minutes to the run-time.

Once more with feeling

So my memory of The Highgate Club is tinged with Covid. It's probably time for me to run it again, but ideally face-to-face rather than Discord.