Gametable in Action!

I'll make sure to post a chronicle tomorrow, I've been slacking lately.

Earlier today we tried out the Gametable with Ventrilo. 3 of us were in The Green Hills, two at my place, and the other lives a few blocks away, while the 4th was in Connecticut. They had all made characters previously, and I had spent quite a few hours devising a dungeon for them to adventure in. This was meant to be a test run, and as I knew we would all be spending a lot of time learning how to work this new contraption, I was not going to delve too much into the plot.

When we were all settled down and ready to start, I had the players place and name their 'pogs'. Pog is the name they use in Gametable that basically represents a character or NPC or monster. I placed them all in the town hall, and gave them a short backstory as to how they met and started adventuring together. It was extremely brief, but had just enough detail to be believable. The first thing that happened when they got in the town, was they saw a bulletin board near the town fountain. The wanted poster basically sent them to the dungeon via instructions from the innkeeper. All of this played out fairly well, but still lacking in the fact that we were not able to look at each other and speak so openly as in person. Drawbacks aside, the postive aspects were still numerous though.

A lot has to be done ahead of time with this system, and it's important as the DM to understand exactly how everything is going to play out. You'll need to figure out how you're going to record initiative, how players will be able to take their movements, etc. Some parts are improved by this. For instance, even the town was mapped out, so players knew where they were in relation to other players when certain things were happening. It also made me realize how important a mapped town can be.

When the players finally showed up at the dungeon, it was slow moving at first. The first battle took a good while, and it was hard to tell if exploring the dungeon was faster or slower than in a face to face game. However, this didn't exactly matter, because the format that we were using allowed for little social time and fun things in between. They were still there, yet not as numerous as normal. Part of this might still have been due to learning how we work together to make this happen, and part is because of the lack of face to face interaction, and the fact that only person can talk at once on vent. Ironically, D&D is a game where most of the fun comes from the sarcastic side comments, or when you quietly interrupt someone with great wit.

All in all, Gametable works. It requires a lot of planning and preparation to make it work, but it does. All had fun, but it was clear that it was a different kind of fun than in a face-face session. Next week, we may try including our faraway friend via webcam!

Also, I'm going to ask Apples if she wants to write something on her thoughts of Gametable. She seems to have a different view of it than the rest of us thus far.

-Lance of the INTERTUBZ LOL DND ONZLINE People.