So, since moving out of Texas, where the rest of my gaming group is located, gaming has gotten pretty sparse for me. Other than getting to play Scrabble with the wife, or some other board game every few months with some local friends, I don’t get to game much. Certainly not anything in the way of tabletop role-playing games.
The DM for our Texas group, Matt, invested in a Kickstarter campaign a while back for a gaming table. This thing has plenty of room to spread out maps and terrain, every player has their own little cubby hole for their gear and dice, and even cup holders to hold their drinks. But the really nice feature is that it has a computer system built into it, so the DM ca run a virtual tabletop to display the environment the characters are playing in. It can also connect to the Internet.
All of which brings me to this – I can play with my old group virtually now. Matt can run the game for the ‘local’ group while I can connect to the virtual tabletop server, plus Discord, so I can play my character in the game. Ultimately, it isn’t quite the same as being there face-to-face with everyone else, but it is better than not getting to play at all.
I joined the current campaign in the middle of things. My character was introduced to the rest of the group when they found him trapped in a stasis field inside the dungeon they were exploring. He’d been there for ten years (in game time) so was out of synch with the rest of the world. My character and his companions had been exploring the same dungeon when he got stuck. The problem with this is my character should know things about the dungeon but I have no clue. Matt, didn’t inform me of what his group had been up to in the dungeon before bringing me into the campaign so I’ve felt a little lost and like I’m always trying to catch up.
Yesterday we were playing and about middle of the game session, Discord went on the fritz. I couldn’t hear anything Matt or the other players were saying, nor could they hear me. I tried several things to get it working again, even going so far as to reboot my computer. No luck.
I sent a text message to Matt to let him know I couldn’t get back on and that I’d rejoin the next game session. We have a running joke when tech issues like this happen. We say that no one properly sacrificed a live pizza to the Internet Gods so they got angry and cut off our access.
Matt usually sends a recap of the session after we play. He sent one out last night. It turns out that my character had all sorts of things happen to him after I got kicked out of the session. He ended up with some kind of sickness, probably a curse, and must be taken to the Summer Court in the Few Wildlands to be cured. Well, there’s a strange turn of events for you! If you’ve ever read any fairy tale, you’ll know dealing with the Fey can be problematic at best, and downright deadly at worst. The cure might be worse than the disease, but we’ll deal with it as need be.
This is one of the few reasons why virtual gaming doesn’t quite measure up to face-to-face gaming. Another is that you don’t get to share in the snacks. Sometimes it is hard to hear if several people are talking at the same time. That’s a difficult enough task when you are in the same room with folks, but over an Internet connection with a set of headphones it gets trickier.
As I said, virtual gaming is better than no gaming. Maybe I can find a local group. My other option is solo gaming, which is not quite the same as having a group, but at least I don’t get any arguments if I want to play a genre that no one else wants to play.
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