A Day Full of Gaming

Up early and eager to game!

Wow!

I am sitting here exhausted after a long day of gaming goodness!  This morning I woke up at seven so I could attend the first ever online tabletop RPG game via Google+ hangouts.  I grabbed a shower, a bite to eat, the URL for the pre-gen characters and chose my character and got ready to play.  It was a play-test of the super hero mod for the Barebones RPG.  I of course played in it to help out with the play-test but also to get a feel for these games so that I can run one myself.

Well, now I am no longer a hangout virgin I can say I loved the game!  +Christopher Hardy was clear about it being a play-test but made things easy to do and joined in the roleplaying fun even though he was after a test of the numbers in his game.  Things ran relatively smoothly, though there were some glitches with the tool being used (Roll20).  I found them to be relatively minor for the impact on my game, and the biggest problem I had was my network connection that dumped me three times in the final 15 minutes of the game (but was perfect until then).

An image from the Roll20 website that is similar to the view I had this morning.

The final gripe, screen space is at a premium in this style game.  I found myself immediately wishing that I had a second screen to work with.  I use a macbook pro with a 15″ screen and I found things to be, well, squishy.  Now it is true I was a virgin at this so I spent the first 15 minutes of the hangout wrestling with the interface of the hangout and the Roll20 interface also.  After a short amount of wrestling though I had managed to manipulate the map into a size that suited me.

One thing that did surprise me is that there was very little video of our faces.  It was mainly a voice driven thing though you could select web cams to look at them.  But to do this you lose focus on the maps and the settings so it was not worth it.  This did not matter though and if anything helped the suspension of disbelief.  In fact there were some nice touches too!  Like you could set your screen name to your character and the GM could assign you the ability to move your own tokens (and as it turned out other tokens as I reprogrammed a few robots to help out).  Also, the fog of war ability seemed to work really seamlessly with the maps!

An afternoon of Magic…

In some down time for one of the other players +Larry Moore ordered pizza the GM talked to me about the other options for running the game that Google offers native to their hangouts.  So in other words I got a nice idea of the contrast of options, although there do seem to be many 3rd party options for use with the hangouts to try.  So, I like what I used today but I will try some alternatives with a couple of friends before my own game kicks off within the month.

So, hangout down and I am really excited about the online game that I am now organising.  I signed off, grabbed the kids and we went to a Magic the Gathering Gatecrash draft tournament which is something else I have never done before as well.  It was good fun but I did not do so well.  My son was also unlucky though my daughter made the finals but got knocked out in the first round of the finals.

The online campaigns first module…

I came home, sent a message to the people that have already signed up to the online game about starting to look at character generation over the next week.  I picked up a new player today also, from Japan which is kind of cool so welcome +Eric M  to the party with +Cam Mcloughlin, +libby furr and +Dennis Laffey  to the game.  Get used to me blogging about it too!  I love to share.

So, there you go.  I have had a fantastic day of role playing and Magic.  Not to mention all the thinking that I have been doing about the specifics of the game that I will be running online!  It will be hard to go back to work tomorrow with the myriad of possibilities still swimming around in my head.  I have my first meeting regarding the character generation tomorrow night so I do have a little preparation to do tomorrow also.

I hope all of you had similarly great days!