Howdy folks, while we’re making the jump to playing games online —I wrote a piece on Medium to share my approach to give you a headstart! There are plenty of options to run your roleplaying sessions online. You’ll run across free options and some paid options. Some live-stream friendly and others are down right hostile. Going in knowing what you want to do, ie; live streaming vs just playing with friends in private, along with how much effort you want to put into setting up sessions will help you narrow down options. Here’s how I do it. Maybe it’ll help you find your method. YMMV.
4 responses to “The Mad Jay tech stack for roleplaying games online”
Yay Jay!
Help for us all!
I've added an image for fun.
Awesome, thanks! I failed at
Awesome, thanks! I failed at getting an image loaded up! What are you currently playing? online?
Recently I’ve been topped up
Recently I've been topped up with local in-person play, although the latest corona-news has shifted my regular group to the screen as of this week. But since you and I and Mark played 3rd edition Champions a couple of years ago, I've been playing over Discord for hundreds of hours, with many different people and a couple of dozen games.
You can see technical details in my comments to the post I linked to below, but I'll say here that I'm even more of a low-techie than you – no interface software at all, so the screen is nothing more than the way we see and hear each other. We just roll dice and use ordinary pencils and papers on our own. Any shared objects are placed in one person's management and they might, for instance, "draw a card for you," or similar.
There are a few items I can think of that would be pretty hard to do this way, but most can be adapted – even the krater for The Clay That Woke could be managed this way. And if you can believe it, we even played grid-style combat with 4E without a formal grid, and I don't think we messed it up through plenty of fights. You might remember how we played "hexes" in Champions the same way.
The very small how-to archive
So far, this is what we've compiled here: How to record and edit actual play. Seems like a sidebar item with these posts might beome a good idea.