I have just made it through the most intense week of roleplaying activities, excluding conventions of course. It was a complete accident, but somehow I ended up with many roleplaying related things all being planned for the same week. It started last Wednesday with my regular weekly game. On Thursday there was a lunch gathering of all the roleplayers in the office (man, there’s a lot of us now) to discuss potential future gaming. Friday was Veteran’s day, which I used to run a practice run of module A1, which I will run again at TotalCon. And Sunday some old friends and I experimented with playing a little D&D over google+. So basically I ran 3 games and discussed the potential for yet more over the course of 5 days. Phew.
Anyway, I want to talk about the g+ game I ran. First off, the tech is much better than I was expecting. We had one player that lost connection twice, but he solved that by switching to a different machine. There were 5 of us, and I toyed with having a 6th connection pointing a webcam at my dice. I was using one machine with two user accounts, each with their own google account, and each with their own webcam (an external usb one and the built-in one as the machine was a laptop). There was some weird echoing until I switched the ‘dice’ account to use line in/line out for audio, which meant it had no audio as nothing was plugged into those jacks. Ultimately it turned out to be more trouble than it was worth what with Google occasionally hitting it with the “are you still there” dialog, which I would have to use the Windows “switch user” mechanism to address, which takes too long to be worth it. Ultimately the one time we had a “pivotal” die roll I just switched my own camera to point at the dice which worked just fine.
I’ve had mixed success with virtual presence gaming in the past, and I’d say this quite exceeded my expectations. I think it was especially cool getting to play with a group of guys that I haven’t gotten to play with all together like that in a long time, as life has scattered us about. Fortunately we’re at least all still in the same time zone, even still scheduling a 4 hour window when we were all available was difficult. We made it work though.
So I’m little run down from all that gaming, and looking forward to a week of normal gaming level, which is to say just this Wednesday and then no gaming for a full week. Still, it’s hard to complain of having too much gaming. 🙂
