Long Distance Role Playing

[mindtoxin]

Just listened to ep 0006 and thought it was interesting. The same day I started listening I found out my roommate is going to have to start traveling for work. I have been running a one on one game for her (set in Eberron, hybrid True20) since our regular games dried up over a year ago. The campaign is lengthy and complex and has survived 15 months 4-5 nights a week in 3 hour sessions. I don't really want to have long gaps due to her travels that might break the flow.

I had started looking for ways to keep the game up when she is out of town. We have tested Skype and have ported all her character information over to Google Spreadsheets. Since we are more narrative then map based we don't really need a virtual tabletop but on occasion it would be nice but I can't find one that doesn't want to run your life so I can do without that. I have a virtual white board plugin for Skype loaded for quick and dirty sketches if I need to lay out a room.

Her first trip is this coming week so we will see how things go.

Wondering if anyone else actually games online successfully and/or has had good one on one (lone wolf) games before?

[Mark "Thayan" Reed]

I frequent several PbP Sites as well as just ran a successful Solo game on SKYPE this past weekend. I also host The Groovecast ( www.thegroovecast.com ) which is the podcast devoted to Online Gaming which includes PbP PbEm as well as other forms of Play over the Internet Gaming.

[Chris Miller]

A while back, we were trying to start a Serenity campaign over Skype. It fell apart, but not because of the medium...it was more about scheduling, which is the perennial problem.

[mindtoxin]

Update: Wow does this suck.

So we tried to play last night and it was not really very good. I think partly due to the fact that Skype video is too choppy for any subtle movements or expressions to come through. Oh well. I can see it might work OK for a lot of games but ours depends too much on conversation between her and whatever NPC i am playing.

At least it let us have our usual end of day vent about work, the news and the like. Its funny but we rarely talk except at the end of the day even through she is planted in the next row of our cube farm. Well we hung up early so she could do her homework (she is at a training) and I sat down and burned through a third of Market Forces.

[Mark "Thayan" Reed]

Oh I would not use Skype Video... No No NO... Just SKype as a way to "Talk"

I would use Open RPG or Screenmonkey or something else for transfering Rolls/Images etc...