12th
Feb10
By Sebastian Hickey
This post is obsolete. Since Java RE was updated in March 2010, Gametable is broken and no one’s fixing it.
Every Friday, as part of a new weekly segment, I’ll be talking about play. Specifically, I’ll be drawing ideas and advice from my week of fun. This week: remote roleplaying (playing games with VOIP).
Every Tuesday I get online and try to play Dark Heresy with two of my old gaming amigos. We use Skype. It’s the type of desperate manoeuvre you dabble in when good friends drift. Problem is, fun + networking = troubleshooting (to help, I’ve posted some How To at the end of this post).
Assuming you get the game rigged up, you’re going to notice something pretty quick: Remote roleplaying is different…and maybe worth thinking about in a different way. Today, I’d like to discuss the vernacular of remote roleplaying, what I call talky writing.
Talky Writing
In remote roleplaying, importantly, you don’t see your amigos. Even if you use video, which I disdain (until they can make a camera that records from the centre of my screen), it will probably be laggy. That means you’re not going to be able to rely on non-verbal communication during play. Everything you say, do and think will have to be exposed differently (assuming we’re talking about running a traditional roleplaying game).
Some folk, the actors among us, will try to lend intention to their words with rhythm, poise and intonation. Good for them. However, it’s not for everyone, and even the best can be misinterpreted. The sensible choice, I would offer, is for remote gamers to get into the habit of writing, real-time. That means explaining what a character says, how he says it and what he’s doing while he says it. Like a MUSH.
Now, it’s not always easy, nor is it high art, but it is fun. You provide a better infrastructure for the exposition of “non-verbal” cues, to establish visual motifs for your characters and to open narrative tropes that were closed to you at the traditional gaming table. By talking in the third person, or just verbosely in the first, you can tap that storytelling resource that’s been educated from stacks of digested fiction. Furthermore, you also open a window for your Game Master. He’s no mind reader, and unless he can hear how you scale and invest in your narrative, he may not know when you are having fun. So if this is your first time behind the mic, stop chatting and try out this talky writing.
Configuring the Talky Game
If you get past the hooking up of the proverbial cables, it’s actually a pleasant ride. You’ll need some stuff for talky, and some other stuff for looky. For the former, I use Skype. It’s pretty ubiquitous. No hassle: Free conference calling, easy to install, blah blah blah. For the latter, I use Gametable. It has dice, networking, maps, a whiteboard feature, private chatting, etc. You can even load character sheets into the background. It’s as if it was designed for this kind of shit.
The configuration of Gametable might be trixy. You’ll want to make sure that one of you can open up a port in your router (to host a game). Plus, everyone will need a stable version of the Java Runtime Environment. That’s a chunky download. Best to arrange that before you start the session.
Check-list:
1) Install Skype (Here) and create a Skype account.
2) In Skype you can add a new contact. Do that. My username is bobacino.
3) Install JRE (Here). Choose the ‘Windows XP/Vista/2000/2003/2008 Online’ option.
4) Download and extract Gametable (Here)
Back when I ran my IRC (text chat only) RPG session, there was no fancy schmancy Gametable thing. We had to use my bot for rolling dice, and I had to write the dice rolling procedure from SCRATCH! In TCL! Uphill in the snow both ways!
I did add more and more shit onto that poor little bot. In the end it did skill and inventory management (for AD&D 2nd because I’m old-skool) and a LOT of automation in combats. It also gave witty replies. Actually most of my coding time went into the witty replies.
What I loved about text chat rpging was that I could multitask pretty well and I pulled a number of sneaky stunts on my players that just wouldn’t have worked in any other type of rpging. Things like slipping a single player additional info, “relaying” messages written on paper from character to character (making ever so slight changes if an NPC got his dirty paws on them en route), and my piece de la resistance, a full on “character has been replaced by illusion” bit where I was telling the player what to make the “illusion” say in private even while playing through his actual character’s actual fate in parallel.
That said, those were all gimmicks. Something else I did that I’m still not sure about was preparing those “soundbite” descriptions of stuff in ready to paste format. On the one hand, it did allow me to go all prosey on my players and dish up some horribly pretentious artsy text I’d written to introduce an NPC or describe a new location, on the other hand it did feel a little cold and disconnected. I think I only used it to good effect once, where my players were stuck in a failed author’s nightmare (the party had DIED and, pretending to start a whole new session, I made them roll disembodied beings hired to perform janitorial services in dreams; in the end it turned out the last dream they had to go in and fix stuff in was a dream dreamt by the original fantasy world’s prime god dude, and in that dream he was following their original characters’ progress through the adventure, only without dying where the real chars died. They had to yank their old chars out of the big god dude’s dream and reinsert them in the world. Their dream-janitor characters then became stranded in that world too and developed into villains for the campaign. Different story ;P) … uh where was I? Right, so they were in a failed author’s nightmare, and one of the houses had stairs in it where stepping on each step revealed a thought-flash of the author’s life, little 50-60 word vignettes detailing his descent into madness and failure, with little clues hidden in them and so on. I’m sure I could have improv’ed this live too, but I may have forgotten stuff, and they did have to go back to those vignettes to pick up on the clues a few times (I just told them to scroll back and reread, which was much easier and less time consuming than reading to them again.)
And yeah, this was wordy talk too, but in text chat it came naturally.
You guys and your acronyms. MUSH? IRC? VOIP? Anyway as one of the two gaming amigos mentioned above I definitely agree in terms of the problem but I’m not sure about the solution. The main problem with it for me is my typing – it’s slow and inaccurate. I’m also one of those annoying types who finds it hard to write anything without thinking about it first and then changing everything around a couple of billion times before getting it back to exactly the way it was before. In short, I think it would get in the way of my roleplaying rather than enhance it. But that’s just me. What I’m going to try to do more of tomorrow is talky talking. I’ll be trying to make more of a point of describing what my character is doing non-verbally, how he stands, when and why and how he nods etc. I really noticed how much of my roleplaying was communicated through jestures around the tabletop when the tabletop wasn’t there. It’s interesting. So we’ll soon see if it works. If not I’ll need to brush up on my typing skills quick.
Also, as I’ve not commented for a while I just wanted to say I really enjoyed all your posts on the playtests. Not only how you approached them and set them up but also how and what you learned from them. It was all really ace stuff, well done.
Daniel, I’d expect nothing less of you than a complex post-modern assault! Good job. And it sounds like a nice hack.
Roger, I think explained myself badly. I actually meant narration. Think of it like a Frank Miller film, or the wrong version of Bladerunner. All I was insinuating was that we need to narrate more than roleplay. It’s rather obvious when you put it like that. I redden that I wasted a post on the subject. Sorry readers!
More likely I understood you badly. Either way there’s no need for apologies. It may seem obvious to both of us now, and it is, but only because we’ve gone through a session first I think. There I was nodding my head at my computer in silent acceptance of the drink just offered to me – and I don’t even have a webcam to disdain. I knew nobody could see me and I’m pretty embarrassed now but the way I was playing the character and my natural instinct made me nod my head to somebody in a room with no one else there. It took me a moment before I thought to say ‘I nod my head and slide my glass over the table’, something I would rarely have to do around a tabletop. And so, stunningly and blindingly obvious as it is, it’s going to take some real concentration for me to remember that you guys can’t see me and I’ll need to narrate a hell of a lot more. Then again, maybe I just shouldn’t have admitted any of this…