It’s been about 4 weeks of lockdown, stuck at home and keeping ourselves away from everyone in case of Contagion. Between working at home, home improvements and minimal contact with the outside world in RealLife. We the gaming group decided that we “Gotta Game.”
I jumped in and said I’ll gm a CoC book adventure via online chat. After testing out the new popular app like House Party, which was still in beta, Facebook Messenger was kind of an option but we settled with Zoom as our chat programme and a Discord server for banter and game organisation. I ran Session 0 for player generation.
I had a few suggestions in the beginning to use a virtual tabletop, such as Roll20. But we are usually less tactical as a group when we play pen and paper, thus we draw things out on paper. Anyhow, I knew I had Photoshop in my back pocket if I really needed anything via screen share.
In fact, these online sessions have allowed us to meet more regularly with a weekly game rather than once in a wee while. We managed to go for around 3-4 hours real-time, with about “2 comic book issue” worth of game time. More on this in a future post.
Using my virtual background I was able to use different images to show where the characters when moving around and create an idea of the surrounding.
The sessions went well and I was calling maps in and out of the book adventure. Around session 3, I had used an overall map from the book, intended for gm via screen share, but didn’t contain too many spoilers. Even though the PC is running around in the dark, but there was enough ambient light ( ISO 3200 at f2.0, 1/200 ) that it ruled it was easier for the game and pace. People had colour dots and I was editing this on the fly in Photoshop on a “few layers”. It occurred to me there was a board game feel rather than RPG, but that something to consider later on.
Moving into session 4, where the PC’s ventured into dark tunnels, it didn’t make narrative sense for the PCs to see the whole map. So, with a few more adjustment layers later for Fog of Darkness and a game spoiling mistake for 5 seconds… I am now almost ready to dive into the virtual tabletop. Got a bunch of recommendations (Roll20 and Foundry virtual tabletop are on my list), and will see if I can manage to get something going on these before the next session in a few days time. Then again, I will probably be using Photoshop for the next session, who knows there may be a TPK it’s COC after all.