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A small guide to virtual tabletop gaming

When I moved, I left all my tabletop RPG buddies behind. These are good friends, some of whom I’ve gamed with since high school (well, junior high if you want to consider that inarticulate fumbling with dice and half-comprehended charts true gaming). I promised myself (and them) that we would continue to play — through the power of the Internet.

Six months later, I got around to looking into how to actually do this. Specifically, I explored the world of virtual tabletop RPG software. The point of such software is simulate the round-the-table, Cheeto-munching, Dew-swigging experience of an actual RPG session, but online. It doesn’t (usually) handle the rules for you; it’s just a tabletop. Our group tried out a couple different systems, but in hopes of passing our experience along and saving other gamers some time, here’s what we’ve found works best:

MapTool is our VT of choice. It’s free, easy to set up, and easy to use. It doesn’t have any audio, but it does have chat, and comes with enough playmats and tokens to get anyone up and playing a DnD game in minutes. The specifics of the playmat are based on the d20 system, but you can tweak them to accommodate whatever you’re doing. (While at their website, check out TokenTool, which turns any graphic on your hard drive into a DnD-style battle token. Yes, random guy from Google images, you’re now an NPC in my zombie apocalypse RPG.)
Skype is the obvious choice of software to let everyone talk to each other. The conference call option lets everyone talk at once, and it has built-in chat software, so the GM can privately chat with any of the players. The only thing we haven’t been able to force Skype to do is play music while we game.
For our most recent game, our GM figured out how to use Ventrilo to stream a soundtrack for the session. I suspect that with more fiddling, we might be able to condense our voice-chat and soundtrack both onto Ventrilo, but we haven’t figured it out yet. And maybe we won’t; I like the option of adjusting the soundtrack volume separate from the VOIP volume. I love Bear McCreary as much as the next guy, but sometimes you got to turn those drums down.

If you don’t have your gaming friends nearby, I recommend giving the virtual tabletop thing a try. If you, give ‘em a hug — a big, awkward, sweaty geek hug that says, “I’m glad I don’t have jump through a bunch of internet hoops just to toss dice with you, ya big lug.”

Dice of Creation

To help celebrate the release of The Bones, the new book from Gameplaywright about gamers and their dice, I’m firing up the calliope music and joining in their blog carnival.

Ever since discovering tabletop RPGs in junior high, I’ve been in awe of the amazing powers that dice can have, not only in determining the outcome of the story, but in the actual creation of the story’s world. I’m speaking here largely of random charts and their power to not only inspire, but to create reality on the fly.

In eighth grade, I created a solo dungeon-crawling game consisting of a sheet of graph paper, a fistful of dice, a pencil, and a half-dozen index cards with random charts on them. You enter the dungeon: roll to see if there’s a room or a hallway. If it’s a room, roll for number of exits and roll for contents. Is it is monster? Roll it. A trap? Roll it.

There was a system for combat and damage, of course, but the meat of the game was exploration. Only it wasn’t really exploration, it was creation. The world was created with every roll of the dice.

(During this time, one of my gaming friends made his own exceptionally-random system that perhaps took it a step too far. A classic line that lives to this day is, “You are attacked by a [clatter of dice] snake! It attacks you with its [clatter of dice] hooves!” That sort of old-school gonzo gaming would be a lot of fun today, but I was far too mature for it at the time.)

In college, I ran a year-long campaign of NightLife, which — since the players were running vampires and werewolves and other monsters with an insatiable appetite for disposable NPCs — inspired me to whip up another random table. With ten seconds and a single roll of a handful of dice, I could create a living, breathing person — at least, that person’s general appearance and personality. Before the players turned down that alley, that person didn’t exist — not even as a note on my Game Master’s idea pad. Most of them didn’t survive the encounter (“My, what bit teeth you have — oh no!”), but some had such a spark of life that they went on to become allies and recurring NPCs — a spark of life given them, like Frankenstein’s lightning, by the dice.

As I’ve grown older and my gaming time more limited, I find myself using dice to create the world before the game rather than on the fly. I made a number of charts myself (what’s that magic level? Roll it! The core theology? Roll it!) though I’ve found Animalball’s fantastic Instant Game provides far more exhaustive charts than I ever had the patience to put together.

While I might up just writing about these worlds rather than actually playing in them, the thrill from eighth grade is still there: I’m creating worlds, people, and stories with nothing more than a pencil, a chart… and a handful of dice.

Virtual Cheezy Poofs

I miss my old roleplaying group.

Granted, we hadn’t been gaming as much in the past few years, and often went months at a time between sessions, but it’s one thing to say, “Hey, we should do some gaming some day,” and another to say, “Next time we’re back in Minnesota, we should really do some gaming.”

The odds are against it.

So I’ve been looking into “virtual tabletop” software. For those who are unfamiliar with the idea, it’s communication software that lets remote players share a “tabletop” (usually a map or whiteboard) for moving playing pieces on, and usually includes some sort of text-based chat so everyone can communicate. The fancier programs even have voice and/or webcam support, to really give you that feeling that you’re all sitting around the same table, rolling dice and munching Cheezy Poofs.

I tried out a handful of different programs (see the link above if you’d like to do so too). We ended up going with MapTool, which lets you import any image as a map (or a token) simply by dragging it onto the window. When you need a quick map or image or NPC,Â even while playing, you can hit Google Images and have what you need on your “tabletop” in seconds.

I strongly recommend MapTool for all your VT needs. I found only two small drawbacks with the program:

1) You can’t dynamically resize the tokens. If you need to make something bigger or smaller, you have to right click on it and select the size from a drop-down menu.

2) You can’t have multiple maps loaded at once. And when you change maps, there’s no easy way to bring all the player tokens to the new map. (Actually, I suspect there are tricks and workarounds for this issue, but haven’t had the time to dig through the forums and see what people are working on.)

For communication, we all used Skype. It’s great for voice communication (of course) but also has a chat feature that also lets you pass documents to everyone on the conference call. There’s no easier way to remotely hand out the handouts.

And so it begins

My daughters have taken to playing games with me in the evenings this week. On Tuesday, we played Landlock. Last night, we played it again, this time using some of the rules. Tonight, they requested Candyland.

“Remember when I used to play with Candyland with the zombie dogs?” asked Thing One, who is six. I assured her I did.

“We should use a zombie dog,” she continued. “It can go down the path and try to eat the other players.”

House rules? With zombies? I was proud. With just a few questions from me, she worked out her own system for integrating a zombie dog into Candyland.Â And so it gives me great pleasure to present Thing One’s Zombie Dog Variant:

One player controls the dog.
The other players each receive three bullet tokens.
During the dog player’s turn, she moves the dog to the next purple space.
If that space is occupied by another player’s pawn (aka “gingerbread man”), that player can fight the dog off by spending a bullet. If that player has no bullets left, his pawn is removd from the game and he is elminated from the game.
If the dog player eliminates all the other players, she is the winner.

(After playing with these rules, I would suggesting modifying them so the dog doesn’t have to land exactly on the pawn, but can attack while “moving over” it, which will increase the quantity of zombie dog attacks.)

Yup. Pretty proud.

Great Brains Think Alike

It had to happen.

Instant Action, the new browser-based 3d action game portal from Garage Games, has started showing the games they’ll be running. One of the games features brains… in tanks. And it’s called, of course, “Think Tanks.”

Sigh.

Ah well. I knew the tank/brain concept wasn’t new or unique, but I’d kind of hoped I was the first to make the “think tank” title pun. Guess not.

On the up-side, it’s a fun action shooter game with cute little tanks, and probably the most popular game in the Instant Action beta. If you’d like to play, drop me a line, and I’ll send you a beta invite.

Christmas in Miniature

This year’s primary Christmas theme: driving. Driving north, driving west, driving south and east again, down snowy roads, and down highways slick with rain and bracketed with ditch-dwelling cars. We arrived safely at each of our many destinations — thank God and the new tires we purchased last week — but the hours on the road were many and stressful, so it’s good to be back.

Our secondary Christmas theme: Playing AT-43. I picked up a pair of starter sets for my two pairs of nephews, and spent some quality time playing / teaching them how to play the game. When I purchased the games, I was informed that the basic rules pretty much break down if you want to play anything beyond the starter units, and I saw this to be true.

The game runs on a Universal Resolution Table (or something like that) that comes with the starter set but, near as I can tell, is never actually mentioned in the rules. Instead, the starter rules direct the player to a series of tables on the back cover derived from the universal table. These tables could be slightly easier to explain to the newcomer, except that the rules never actually explain how to use the tables. Oh, any gamer worth his 2d6 can figure it out from context and the examples, but it does beg the question of why you’d bother with “training wheel” rules if you’re not going to properly explain how to use them.

Nevertheless, both sets of nephews were thrilled with the games. And why not? The figs are gorgeous. The game is fun. And with me to teach them the rules, they didn’t even have to deal with the minor complaints above.

Now I’m left to decide whether I want to get myself a starter set, or just pick up some unit boxes and a copy of the actual rulebook. I’m thinking of the second option (it’s cheaper), but man, that Gogloth is sweet.

The Cull

Like many gamers, I’m something of a packrat when it comes to games — especially roleplaying games. After all, they’re just books. Compared to, say, big-boxed board games, they take up practically no space at all.

Unless you have hundreds of them.

In the interests of maintaining some room to walk between the shelves, I’ve been culling my collection recently, and it’s hard. While there are some that I can honestly say I will never play, and can let go without tears, there are plenty more that I just can’t bear to part with.

Nostalgia is a big part of it. I haven’t played Star Wars (D6), Night Life, or DC Heroes in years, but have great memories of past campaigns, and truly believe that I will play them again some day. (And of course that means I can’t get rid of my campaign notes from 12 years ago either.)

Professional interest also stays my hand. I can’t get rid of that book – I have a playtest credit in it. And while I’ve never actually read these books, they’ve got genre-defining game mechanics in them, and I may need to reference them while working on my own games. (Such thinking was justified this spring, when I was able to finally use that copy of Ars Magica I picked up back in 1996.)

But the biggest reason I can’t clear my bookshelves is the reason I picked up the games in the first place: I want to play these things. No, I haven’t yet actually run a game of Etherscope, or Vampire: the Requiem, or even Werewolf: the Wild West (from what, ten years ago now?) but I intend to. Eventually.

Since I’ve been intending to play some of these games for… well, a decade, a more reasonable person might conclude that I will never actually do so, and should just cut my losses and move on. But I’m not a reasonable person. I’m a gamer. And these unplayed, skimmed-through books are an inspiration. Just looking at them again today gave me a little thrill of excitement, a tingle down in my geek-heart that reminded me that there are cool worlds to explore and games to play. They’re here. They’re just waiting for me.

And I can’t give that up.

A playtesting frenzy

Here’s my to-do list for the weekend:

1) Rake.

2) Go to church (on Sunday).

3) Prototype and playtest as many different games as possible.

The first game is a new horror RPG from my pal Brad McDevitt. It’s chock full of cults and conspiracies, with heavy themes like redemption, repentance, and how we define “good” and “evil” in our lives. Despite the manuscript being not quite ready for prime time (since I ripped it, still raw and bleeding and unfinished, from Brad’s protective hands) the system held up and everyone had a good time. (Of course, when I reported to Brad afterwards, I discovered that I’d completely messed up an important part of the background, but hey… raw and bleeding, whadya expect?)

On Sunday, I pulled out the latest version of my SKY TRADERS game: an adventure game with a heavy “pick-up and deliver” style economic system built in. This time out, I rejiggered the dice system, combat, the turn sequence, and the econ system — and was quite pleased with the results. It’s still not ready to show a publisher, but it’s a lot closer than it was last week.

After that, I dragged my lone playtester home from the game store so we could test my latest mad creation with my #1 playtester, my beautiful rock star wife. Together, we hacked through the very first playtest of what turned out to be a fun, light card game steeped in the Cthulhu mythos. After playing the game, my testers’ only complaints were that there weren’t enough cards — and there aren’t: there are only 50 cards in the deck, and we need at least 100. Luckily, I have a solution: print each card twice.

I’d like to give a shout of thanks to Brad for letting me dig around in his sandbox, and Ryan, Wade, and my wife for gleefully poking holes in my games all weekend.

Journey to Brightwood

My five year-old daughter (aka “Thing One”) has taken yet another step on the path to becoming a full-fledged gamer. Sheâ€™s touched on board games, miniatures (well, a stripped-down version of Heroscape), and now sheâ€™s tasted roleplaying games.

We played Faeryâ€™s Tale from Firefly Games. We didnâ€™t really use the system (itâ€™s too complicated for a kid whose just started kindergarten), but embraced most everything else: the fairy tale “Brightwood” setting, the different types of fairies, and the fairy social system (which I think is one of the coolest parts of the game).

Thing One chose to play a Brownie, which meant she worked in a peasantâ€™s cottage, could turn invisible, and work simple “household magic” (i.e., simple repairs and construction). She named her Brownie “Lena,” which is actually one of most normal names sheâ€™s made up. For our first outing, I kept it simple, so it was the two of us playing on a Saturday afternoon while everyone else was napping.

It turns out my daughter is like me in that she canâ€™t roleplay sitting down. We started at the dining room table, but she didnâ€™t really get into it until she got to feet and started essential LARPing the scene. Whenever the scene changed, sheâ€™d lead us into another room: the living room was the forest where she freed a fellow fairy from a spiderâ€™s web; the kitchen was a clearing outside the night-trollâ€™s cave; the basement, of course, was the trollâ€™s lair.

My proudest moment (in a session full of proud moments) was when Lena tricked the troll into walking into the sunlight (and turning to stone) by secretly moving his clock ahead. In true gamer fashion, after I described the scene of the trollâ€™s lair, Thing One asked, “Does he have a clock?” So yes, of course he did.

Overall, it was a fantastic experience for both of us. I was impressed with my daughterâ€™s creativity and imagination, and she had a blast with her fairy tale adventure. The game took a little over an hour, which seemed about right. Thing Oneâ€™s still a bit short on the attention span, and nap time runs two hours at the longest, so itâ€™s best to keep these things short.

Most importantly, sheâ€™s looking forward to playing again. And to tell you the truth, so am I.

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