RPGaDay 2020 #11 Message

 This is as good a prompt as any to talk about my experiences with online gaming.

For a long time, playing a game online has been one of those "I'll get around to it one of these days" sort of things. I had a Roll20 account and had puttered around with it, but never seriously.

Then the pandemic hit.

I was stuck inside with nothing to do. An old gaming friend mentioned that he was organizing an online session via Facebook, so I responded. I needed something to do, and since we no longer lived in close proximity, this was a chance to reconnect more strongly.

The amusing thing about all of this was my setup. I actually filled out my character sheet by hand, so I had paper and dice in front of me. Voice chat was through the Discord app on my phone. I was accessing the website from a lunchbox laptop I had built around a Raspberry Pi single-board computer. I might have still had the Raspberry Pi Zero (the ultra-light version) installed, instead of the Model 3B that I upgraded to later.

I had only a modest amount of fun with that game (It was an established setting from a video game that I wasn't familiar with), but it did help me see how all of the pieces fit together. I started delving into Roll20 and actively figuring out how to import my overland map and all of my other maps.

I tried a direct import of the map images, but was only so successful. Getting the mapping tools to line up with the grid of the imported map was onerous. To the point that I just went ahead and used the Roll20 drawing tools to recreate the maps rather than keep trying to import them.

I was almost ready to try to run it when a small miracle occurred. My standard laptop decided to work again. So I was able to do everything on one machine. Voice chat on Discord, Roll20 for maps, die rolling and character sheet management. I was even able to get Twitch streaming into the mix, so I have a record of everything that happened in our sessions (except for the first 2. Oh well).

Now that things are reopening, I don't have players chomping at the bit to play anything to fill up their time. It's on a hiatus right now. But the material that I have accumulated is all there, so everything is still canon for the next time I'm able to get a group together.