Tag Archives: Roll20

A “Return” To Gaming

Last night, I re-join the group I played with in a four year AD&D [Affiliate Link] campaign, Graveyard of Empires, Wednesdays on Roll20. We transitioned to Stars Without Number [Affiliate Link], in the campaign A Plague of Angels, after the conclusion of the AD&D [Affiliate Link] campaign. I had too many life things going on and stepped away last year. I will pick up with the same character I had. I guess some other players who came and went either played him or the party used him and he leveled up. He also has a clone running around that is a level higher and with different physical stats. I look forward to getting back into the swing of things. [Companion podcast episode here.]

Sunday I resume my AD&D [Affiliate Link] campaign on Roll20 that went on hiatus 2 year ago this past December. The players are the GM and other players from the Wednesday night game. It is set in my campaign world in an area called The Broken Lands. Coincidentally, I’ve been playing in a B/X game in the official Mystara based Broken Lands setting, The Orcs of Thar [Affiliate Link] , on Mondays. I had no idea that TSR had its own setting called Broken Lands.

I’ve spent the past few days organizing the notes I have in various text files into a Wiki on CampaignWiki.org. This has made things much more organized and I am refreshed on many things.

My biggest struggle with my campaign is verifying the in game date we left off. If I made a note of it, I’m not finding it.

There will be 3 new players bringing the total players up to 7. One of the new players will have a monk, so I’m making some notes to fit him into the setting. Another has a ranger, and the third is playing a magic user subclass for which I’ve only got the basic outline and a few spells, the Vexillologist that I first posted about on my blog nearly four years ago. This will force me to finish it and refine it in play. I hope to share it.

I’ve also organized the player notes and GM notes in Roll20 with a Player’s TOC and GM TOC that I’ll discuss in my Friday Twitch stream on Roll20 For Beginners. [It’s related to my YouTube series, Roll20 For The Absolute Beginner.]

I recommend planning the TOCs to easily build them as you grow so you can make them look neat and organize information in a logical fashion to find it when you need it. My goal is to be able to play with minimal reference to physical notes & books.

One of my players wants me to stream my AD&D game to Twitch. If all the players agree, it is relatively easy to do. We use Discord for audio and I’d sign into the game as a player, or make a second acccount to sign that into and show the map, etc. I’m not sure how interesting it would be. I had planned on recording things for my own use, as I like to use it to improve my GMing.

Tonight was fun and now to wait and see what Sunday’s session brings.

I’m hoping to have something to talk about on the podcast more regularly. My time spent with a change of pace and backing off some things has been good.

I also need to get back on track with my monthly PDFs, as March’s didn’t get done, and April hasn’t been started. I foresee some changes to my Patreon when I get back on track with it.

The card game got interrupted big time with the pandemic situation. I wasn’t able to playtest the current test deck to ensure it works, as Gary Con went from live to virtual. Also I can’t get fulfillment of printing as some printers of cards are shut down due to lockdowns. I think I’ll just put it on DriveThru Cards with the free art and get the word out that way, and will do a Kickstarter for the version with the art I’m having made. I’ll revisit this and settle it once things return to a more “normal” state of commerce, etc.

Professional Online RPG Technology Training

I may not be the first person others have paid to train them how to use technology to allow them to play RPGs online, but it is a new concept and experience for me. [Listen to the companion Podcast here.]

The other day, I got an email out of the blue asking if I’d be interested in training someone how to use Roll20, and he was willing to pay me for it.

I was a bit shocked. I tried googling the name to see if it was a prank or something to be taken seriously. I couldn’t find any obvious prank or troll, so I replied asking all kinds of questions. Why me? What exactly do you want to know? Do you know how to play D&D already? and so forth. We had an exchange of questions, I proposed a fee, he agreed and we scheduled some time.

He had seen my YT series, Roll20 For the Absolute Beginner, and he wanted someone to get him started running a game for his group, as they are all interested, but none of them have experience in using Roll20. He thought, “Why not see if I can find someone and pay for training.”

He said I was the first person he asked. I found that very flattering.

Friday night we had our first two hour session. Creating a sample game and going over settings and the basics. There are a lot of little things that are hard to recall wihtout using them. So I suggested he just play around with what I’ve showed him so far, and that will help him become familiar with it.

We’ll do another session in a couple days, and maybe a follow up session later, if needed.

I’ve known about professional GMs for a few yeas, but this seems like something that might pan out for players who are not tech savvy who want to use technology to play D&D and other RPGs. There’s lots of different programs for different things, and some people want the answers of how to get started in a format they can absorb and put to use without having to wade through manuals, etc.

As someone who currently plays mostly online, excpet for cons, I love RPGs and if I can help people get over the hump of using a program to help them enjoy their favorite RPG with their friends, I’m glad to help. My YT series, Roll20 For the Absolute Beginner, is very popular and gets hundreds of views a month. I can go much more in-depth one on one than I can in a video that is best kept to 15 or at most 20 minutes.

Peronally, I don’t think it’s hard, but I love technology and have been using internet technology for over 20 years and using Roll20 for 6 years. I’m a dig in a figure it out kind of person. It’s why I’m so good at my day job. As with anything, once you know the answer, it’s easy.

Our first session went well, and he asked for another session, so I think I did well. I was up front about the features I’m not familiar with, like some brand new features, but mostly the paid features, as I still have a free account. So I’ve got some homework to do to help explain some paid features. I’ll probably get a paid account so I can use them and not just rely on the online documentation.

If this ends well, then I may make myself available on a regular basis for paid training. That’s not the way I thought I’d get fame and fortune in RPGs, but teaching how to use the tools is analogous to the merchants in the gold rush. There are lots of people of all ages who are not tech savvy or with the patience to figure it out, or want to start playing right away. Not everyone can luck into a group with a knowledgeable and helpful person to show them the ropes with Roll20.

Delvers Deep Campaign

I’ve been working on a new Delving Deeper [Rules Links, Hypertext, Lulu] campaign that will use Roll20. It’s first session will be Thursday, September 12, 2019.

I discussed it in my last podcast episode, Episode 152 – Thursday Thoughts – Arneson, Feedback, & New Campaign.

Background

I’ve liked Delving Deeper ever since I encountered it on G+ in 2015 or so. It makes for a good system for convention games for quick at the table character generation. I like it so much that when there is free shipping at Lulu, I buy 5 or 6 copies at once to take to conventions to sell at cost. Every con game I use Delving Deeper, every player eagerly grabs a copy.

Adam Muszkiewicz of Dispatches From Kickassistan and I gushed about it when we met at Marmalade Dog in 2015. Here’s my write up of that con.

The Campaign

My desire to run a sandbox hexcrawl & dungeon crawl with procedural generation for prep and at the table has finally borne fruit. I’m pulling out all the stops and using all the tables from RPG books (DMG, Dungeon Alphabet, d30 Sandbox & GM Companions, my own PDFs, Table Fables & Table Fables II, etc.) [Affiliate Links] and PDFs for as many ideas as possible. I have several card decks for wilderness generation, dungeon generation, Game Masters Apprentice, and many more. I’ll use my Inkwell Ideas Dungeon Dice and Village Dice, and Rory’s Story Cubes, etc. Plus I’ll toss in all the cool ideas I’ve always wanted to put in a game. Nothing is held back. It only remains for the characters to find them. Any new idea I have will be put closer to the starting point.

It is also a drop-in/drop out game so while many can only commit to bi-weekly, I have a weekly schedule for the first few sessions.

Danger abounds. Combat is deadly and encounters are not leveled. Awesome magic and powerful beings may be encountered at low level. Mucking about in the ruins of an ancient civilization can lead to discovering powerful items that are dangerous to all concerned.

Preparation

To prepare for the game I am focusing on building an organized framework to help me find information and various tables for ad hoc generation. I’ve put in 50 or so hours, mostly populating GM tools in Roll20, typing up ideas, and organizing various PDFs. (My PDFs are organized, but I made new shortcuts for the PDFs I most want to reference and put in a new folder on my desktop.)

I’m using a simple character sheet in Roll20. I made handouts with links to Delving Deeper information, and my YouTube series, Roll20 for the Absolute Beginner. Other handouts allow the players to keep notes about people and places, party loot, etc. I have created folders for any eventual maps, books, documents, or other things they might acquire.

For the GM I copied all the most relevant tables from Delving Deeper with a page number reference. I used a spreadsheet someone made. I lost the reference to who, but here’s the link. I much prefer copy & paste to typing something that exists in electronic form. In addition, all the player tables that are needed in play I put in the player section of handouts. I didn’t include all the ability related tables, as one doesn’t usually need them after character creation is finished.

I created a Campaign wiki at https://campaignwiki.org/. I offered players 100 XP per page of useful information they add.

I also made a spreadsheet to help calculate encumbrance and remaining gold from starting gold. I built it when I played in Cody Mazza’s Barromaze [Affiliate Link] game that uses Delving Deeper.

For campaign scheduling I made a Google Calendar with all of the dates the initial players indicated would work.

The first level of the dungeon starts with an interesting idea I had while working on the campaign. I used the Delorfano Protocols to generate some of the early rooms which had a fortuitous room generation that guided the bulk of the level. The 1e DMG random dungeon generation tables added some cool stuff too. Plus I let my imagination loose. I then used Delving Deeper to populate rooms/areas.

Currently I’m working on a carousing table and avoiding all the sexual innuendo and blatant sexual topics of so many tables I have found online. A discussion on the Audio Dungeon Discord, home to many RPG/OSR Anchor Podcasters, suggested downtime activities instead. That is, activities adventurers can pursue when they are in town instead of in the wilderness or dungeon. The general consensus was spending gp on a one for one basis for XP. I will keep the carousing table and add tables for warriors, wizards, and priests to do their non-carousing activities. I’m working out boons and detriments, I guess banes and boons is more alliterative, for the downtime tables.

I like the idea from Cody Mazza’s Barromaze [Affiliate Link] game where you don’t roll on the table if you save vs. poison. Fail your save and risk something on the table. Ray Otus’s elf got cursed and turned into a goblin. He is stuck until the curse is removed.

Elevator Pitch

Delvers’ Deep is a large complex of dungeons, tombs, ruins, pits, caverns, shafts, tunnels, and more.

Most just call it The Deep. It gets it’s name from the many deep natural and manufactured pits and shafts. 

Some are claimed to be bottomless, or to go to the end of the world.

The Deep lies several days west the town of Crossway. Crossway lies at the crossroads of The King’s Way and the ancient Dwarf Road. Both Crossway and Delvington are an eclectic mix of races as it is near a crossroads leading to a hilly and mountainous region that borders The Deep. There is a forested area nearby where lumber for the “mining” and other work of Delvers intent on finding the riches of The DeepLumberton is the lumber camp/town.

Near a relatively safe entrance to the dungeon is a small village with the feel of a boom town called Delvington.

East Gate Tavern is the last safe building inside the walls on the Eastern edge of Delvington. East Gate Tavern is a hangout for adventurers, commonly called DelversDelvington has walls, towers, gates, and guards. 

To the west are hills and mountains. The deep lies largely in the hills between Delvington and the mountains of the Dwarven Kingdom. The ancient Dwarf Road comes from the North Pass of the mountains and through The Deep

To the south is the great forest. The King’s Way passes through the forest, home of the elves, Verdant Vale, and it crosses the mountains at South Pass.

Glory and riches at the risk of life and limb await.

Conclusion

I’m so pumped about running a regular game, I haven’t run or played in a regular game in nearly a year. Life and work stuff derailed it. I can’t make my Wednesday night group for the foreseeable future.

I will do my best to document and share things.

I want to share many things about the campaign, but I don’t want to spoil anything for the players. I’ll share things as they encounter them. I’ll either talk about it on Saturday episodes of the podcast, or blog about it. One thing’s for sure, I’ll have to either record Thursday’s podcast episode the day before, or rapidly between the end of work and start of the game.

Flying Carpets & Powerful Spellcasters

In my Broken Lands online AD&D campaign that has been on hiatus over a year, I planned to talk about it in today’s podcast. I thought I had written an article about the mountaintop Temple of The Necromancer along with the isometric map I drew. Turns out, it’s a false memory. I did write about it… on G+. No wonderI couldn’t find the article I was looking for. I didn’t go into great detail on G+, just showed off what I managed to do with isometric graph paper.

Via Roll20 this map made it a lot easier to convey the layout. Both the players and I appreciated that.

The players had found The Tomb of The Necromancer and sealed him in and faced the minions who were trying to free him. The party used a portal that had been opened via powerful magics to open from the mountaintop temple to the far off underground tomb. The party dealt with a hoard of undead that filled the tomb and used some things they found in another underground area to seal him in. Up to this point is a scenario that I ran at Marmalade Dog a last year ago, after the players had done it.

They then went through the portal and faced more undead and some living guards. The party managed to defeat the undead. A successful turn undead had the undead fleeing at top speed away from the good cleric. This was hilarious as the skeletons, zombies, and ghouls ran over the edge of the mountaintop temple, climbing over the winch for the elevator that provided access and resupply to the human guards. The undead were killed in the 500 foot fall and caused death and destruction to the people and equipment they landed on. NOTE: It took more than one turn to get them all, and some they still had to fight.

Just as they had defeated the last of the foes on the mountaintop, a figure in plate mail and flowing robes with four crossbowmen attacked from a flying carpet. The party managed to kill a couple of the archers, and wound the robed figure. They were amazed that he seemed to cast both clerical and magic user spells. One comment was along the lines of, “Wait a minute that’s a magic user spell and he’s wearing plate mail.” “Yup!” was my answer.

The party did all they could to try and take out this spell caster, but couldn’t do it. I forget what spell they used that sent him away from them, but the carpet was too fast and out of their reach. One of the players said, “That flying carpet is mine!”

They were nearly out of spells and all of them hurt, so they decided to flee through the portal and seal it so that the bad guys could not access The Necromancer without waiting for the right conditions to open a new portal, or traveling the unknown distance from the mountaintop temple.

Last we played, the party was making plans to find the individual with the flying carpet who they believe carries the title, Son of The Necromancer. I gave them a foe with his own neat magic items and abilities they were not prepared for. Interesting times lie ahead. I’m hoping to pick up where we left off in the coming weeks.

You can find the companion podcast episode here.

DnD Sports

Yesterday, it was all over the RPG Twitter feeds of those involved that there will be a new spin on watching others play D&D, DnD Sports[EDIT: Name changed to RPG Sports]. While this might come as a surprise about this new thing, it all ties in with current trends in online RPGs. 

Why The Unexpected Should Not Surprise Us

A few months ago, the CEO of Hasbro, parent company of WOTC, the current makers of D&D, mentioned the rise of watching others play D&D online. Most figured it was Magic: The Gathering (MtG) card game that was getting the eSports treatment. Few expected it to be D&D. While D&D appears to have entered this new arena first, MtG will most likely follow soon. The CEO announced more crossovers of ideas, such as settings from MtG to D&D. That happened with the upcoming Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica.

Many video games are inspired by D&D and other RPGs, which led to competitive play of video games. This first foray into competitive D&D/RPGs is capitalizing on the abundance of well-watched online shows. It’s under the WOTC/D&D banner, so it is WOTC’s attempt to bring more of the audience who watch others play D&D to watch them do it competitively. [EDIT: DNDBeyond and Encounter Roleplay organized it.] There’s obviously money involved since Critical Role took their show and made a whole business out of it, in L.A. of all places. By that, I mean, California isn’t a cheap place to live, let alone run a business.

Competitive play isn’t new as their have been D&D and other RPG tournament modules, like the much maligned Tomb of Horrors [Affiliate Link], from back in the day. Few, if any, early RPG tournaments were recorded via audio or video, so we may have no record of how those went beyond written accounts. Also, tournament modules had a role playing aspect, and unlike the RPG Sports, was not directly player verses player.

Original RPG tournaments were teams of players going through the same module and competing to complete the core adventure, and as many side tasks as possible in the shortest amount of time, with the fewest character deaths.

A Different Light

RPG Sports is kicking off November 1st and is a combat elimination, basically gladiatorial combat in a dungeon setting. It will use the 5th edition rules and there will be rules of tournament play that have been play tested. According to this article, there will be four teams of four players that will pick from 16 pre-generated characters. The rules for tournament play will be released once play testing is complete.

Encounter Roleplay is a group of players that have been on Twitch for years and have been teamed up with DnDBeyond to make this happen.

Encounter Roleplay was started by DM Will Jones. Fellow DM & player, Sydney Shields is the Community Manager for RPGSports. Fellow player, Mytia Zimmer will be a caster for the first ever tournament on RPGSports.

It will use Roll20 for the Virtual Table Top (VTT). This may explain why the sudden change in Roll20 handing their subReddit over to non-employees to moderate after their customer relations nightmare a few weeks ago.

For more information and the November Schedule of games, see RPG Sports.

My Thoughts

While I find some of these shows entertaining to watch, and have friends who are a big part of it, I can’t watch regularly for a few reasons. First, I don’t get it. I know they’re really playing and having fun, it just isn’t as fun for me to watch, I’d rather play. Second, it’s a huge time sink and I’ve got too many things on my plate already.

However, no matter what you think of watching online play, the huge popularity of it has led to a great lifting of the stigma those in my generation endured. Grognards who don’t like it should keep their grumbling under their breath and be happy that those who love RPGs can make a living at it. While I’m not sure combat is the best way to do this, I haven’t seen the tournament rules as they haven’t been made public yet.

Much of this is a generational thing. And with all hobbies, there are those who would rather watch others have their fun than do it themselves. For many, this is also their gateway into RPGs. Converting more of them to customers is the smart thing for WoTC and any other RPG publisher to do. WoTC just had the best financial results for D&D ever, they want to continue that trend for as long as possible. Following the masses in this new market potential is only reasonable. 

I expect in years to come, we will see D&D experienced in ways we don’t expect. That or the technology to experience it in ways that are currently science fiction will become reality. 

I also expect that this is a strategy to ensure the longevity of 5e as they currently have the rules “right” as far as buy in and regaining their market share lost to Paizo. This will also hamper Paizo’s efforts to make a big splash with their second edition, now in the works. While the audience for RPGs is huge compared to ever before, it won’t enlarge the share of the pie for other companies if nearly all eyes are on D&D. For many newer fans of D&D, RPGs and D&D are the same thing. 

For this reason, gaming grognards should not complain. At some point tastes will change and gamers will want something else. Be open and accepting of that and welcome them. I have seen many younger gamers wanting lighter rules and checking out the styles of play loved by the OSR. I don’t have hard numbers on that, but I’ve ran old games for people in their 20’s and they had a blast.

As with everything in life, just wait, things will change.

End of a Campaign

Over the years, I have written about the Wednesday night AD&D game on Roll20. This past Wednesday, after 4.5 years, 1 year to the day in game time, and 221 Sessions we finally faced the big bad and won.

I shared some of my thoughts about this on the podcast here.

I find it only fitting to mention the ending here on the blog.

We started in mid-March, 2014, and ended Wednesday, October 3, 2018.

My first character of the campaign, Thorfus Ironhand, a dwarf who made it to 8th level fighter. He was on his way to 9th level when he died. Roll20 had terrible rolls for most of his HP after 1st level. He rolled several 1’s and 2’s. He ended up with 33 HP at 8th level.

My Ranger, Rallion of the Wode, who replaced him reached 7th level and 42 HP.

There were hundreds of named NPCs, dozens of businesses, ships, cities, towns, villages, and tribes. Custom pantheons and more.

My personal Roll20 hours are now at 1700.

The campaign is called Graveyard of Empires.

I’m the only player to attend every session. One of the other session one players attended and ran the character of an absent player, who unfortunately, had to work and missed the last session. 

Our only breaks from the every Wednesday schedule are when the DM took vacation, Also this past Spring, when I attended Gary Con X. The other players agreed to skip a week so I didn’t have to miss. Their generosity is the only reason I was able to attend every session.

None of the original session 1 characters survived to the end through play. While some session 1 characters may still live, they are now NPCs as the players who created them left.

We had one player from session 1 join for a few sessions as a new character.

Another session 1 player rejoined twice and created new characters each time, but soon dropped out. He was the youngest player. (I was the oldest player.)

This was the longest campaign I’ve played in outside of my brother’s 30+ year AD&D campaign that is ongoing today. I have advanced few characters to the levels of the two characters in this campaign. I’ve played lots of fighters over the years, most were human. I don’t recall ever playing a ranger before, and that is because of the difficulty of rolling the required stats. 

Now that it is over, I am looking forward to having Wednesday evenings free for a while. 

My understanding from something the DM mentioned more than once, was that we would be ending the campaign whether we one or lost. Once the final battle was over, and we won, he mentioned continuing. I mentioned that I may be up to volume two, but only 3 hours a session, and no later than 11:00 PM. I need time to unwind after each session so I can get to sleep. Work can be a dreary thing without adding sleep deprived to it. Perhaps bi-weekly, instead of every week. I’m undecided on the frequency.  

AUTOMATA RUN AMOK BY JOHN CARLSON – A module on OBS about our first adventure, illustrated by Luka Rejec of Wizard, Thief, Fighter. I did a mini-review of it on my blog, see below. Check out John’s blog, Dwarven Automata. John also contributed to The Black Isle.

John is working on the next adventure we undertook, and I very much look forward to it and more. We all encouraged John to do a setting guide. He has an interesting concept and I’m sure others will enjoy exploring that world. 

My AD&D Campaign on Roll20 – Session 1

I won’t do a full session recap here. One instance from the first session of my AD&D campaign on Roll20 stands out to me. I touched on it in my last post.

I have written about some of my ideas for building this new area of my game world, as I pointed to in my last article. So far we have 3 players, two from my Wednesday night game, and one who has played with one of the other two. In the first session, the “new guy” had a last minute emergency, so he had to miss. We decided to play on.

The setting is a low magic setting, where the past ages were of high magic. The players elected to have “evil” characters, which I agreed to. The setup is that they came to this village afflicted by a huge earthquake, and hordes of undead that appeared a day after the quake.  It is now several weeks later and the undead are mostly taken care of with patrols scouring the countryside for any that were missed. Merchants bring food and helpful items, and other wealth seekers show up. One of the merchants pays the party for their guard duty and offers to pay for quality information about the current state of things in town.

The party manages to find multiple people who each will pay for the same information, so they end up getting paid multiple times for each useful tidbit. They learn that this strange black tower that seems to grow periodically overnight, occupied by a wizard, Hanagan the Red, who showed up after the quake and is rarely seen. There is an obvious “buffer zone” where the inhabitants keep clear of this tower.

The merchant perks up at this news. and only gives them a small payment, as that is all they know. Gladly will he pay more if they can learn his name, what books are in his library, and what types of things he is looking to buy.

This is easy! The group agrees to take up this challenge. Before I proceed, I need to describe the characters: Gaul, a half-elf cleric/ranger whose human parent is from the nomad tribes. Dingkus, a gnome illusionist/thief, and Wenrick a halfling fighter.  They go to the tower and step up to the door. Dingkus the gnome points out that neither he nor the halfling can reach the knocker. Gaul asks what he should do with it, and in his interpretation of the gnome’s instructions, vigorously beats the door with the knocker.

An exasperated woman quickly opens the door, and asks what impertinent fools dare raise such a racket? She is a colleague/assistant of the wizard and he cannot be disturbed. they ask who she is, and she gives her name and Gaul detects that she is of the nomad tribes. This intrigues Gaul.

Rather than explain that they merely seek information, the gnome illusionist casts hypnotism. The gnome wins initiative and the female wizard failed her save. She invites them in, gives them her name, and the duration of the spell fades. This time she wins initiative, and the half-elf’s elven blood is not enough to resist the sleep she cast upon them.

The next thing they know they awake in a poorly lit room with bare walls, ceiling, and floor tied to chairs, with the half-elf and gnome gagged, as they both appear to be spell casting types. The player of the halfling is the one who had to miss, so the player who had played with him, ran the character. Standing before them is the woman and an older man with red hair and streaks of white/gray. He is fuming.

The wizard complains that his experiment was ruined. He wants to know which of his enemies sent them. When he learns that they are there for information for a merchant who wishes to do business with him, he demands the name of the merchant, promising to never do business with him. The halfling plays dumb about which merchant it was who sent them, reasoning that they might not get paid.

Once Hanagan is certain they are just bumbling greenhorns, he charges them to go west and find the source of the undead. If they find any magic, it is his. When they all nod agreement, they are again slept, even the half-elf.

Waking a short time later, they are sitting across the street with the gnome and halfling laying across each side of Gaul’s lap. They quickly look to see that they have all their stuff. I said, “You find that all of your money, gear, and other possessions are just as they should be. However, each of you finds a folded parchment on their person in the process of the search.”

They see everyone in town crowded about the now larger “zone of exclusion” around the tower. I let them know later that the wizard made an uncharacteristic display of power, and floated them out of his tower and across the street. This one was seen, whereas the tower only seems to grow at night when no one is looking. They also notice that the tower door no longer seems to be there.

Having been totally surprised that they would go inquire of a wizard and cast magic on his associate, I’m scrambling to make something interesting of this incident. Here is my recollection of what I said was on their parchments in the wizard’s flowery script.

Hanagan’s Writ

From: Hanagan The Red

To all who are friendly with me, know that the bearer of this parchment is bound to me and is on an errand at my behest.

Please aid them, if you are able.

To all who are not friendly with me, I expect you will deal with them as you would deal with me.

Hanigan The Red

Ray, who plays Gaul wonders if they are geased or now indentured servants.

The players also asked if he was evil. I said, “Well, he didn’t kill you and he is known to help the baron, from what you learned later. Maybe he decided to use you to gather information, and punish you with a terrible death in the wilds….”

I really like how this session played out and how the players did something that cried out for a railroad. I dropped clues before this that the chance for riches was said to be to the west. However, I have other locations and things seeded in the area, if they hadn’t chosen to go west. Had they not ticked off a wizard, they would have had free reign to go wherever they wanted. Well, free to attempt to go wherever they wanted. There is always some person of creature or obstacle to any path.

My world is an open world and what the players do changes the course of things I envisioned in my mind’s eye. I like how letting a group of players loose in a setting forces me to think of possibilities I hadn’t yet considered. They pushed and pulled on things in ways only this group of players with those specific characters could do. It has unleashed lots of mulling the possibilities.

We now have two sessions under our belts, and the third and fourth are scheduled. Lots of fun thought experiments for me to tweak how things pan out.

A NOTE ON THE TERM WIZARD

In this low magic setting, any magic user of any level is called a wizard.  So they don’t know if Hanagan would have the level title of wizard or not.

Roll20 For The Absolute Beginner No. 2 – The Player: Getting Started

I just posted the second episode of Roll20 For the Absolute Beginner – the Player: Getting Started.

My goal is to upload a new video each week. So far, this has worked out to be Friday.

The quality of this video is much better than the last, especially the audio. I find that I have a habit of long pauses as I present. I cut out the worst of the long pauses. That’s one thing about recording yourself, you quickly see all of your worst speaking habits.

Episode 3 will be The GM: Building Basic Character Sheets. It will focus on building character sheets for game systems that don’t have a built-in character sheet in Roll20.

I have lots of ideas, but haven’t settled on which will be episode 4. If you have suggestions for future videos, please include them in comments here, or better in comments on one of the videos in the series.

You can catch the playlist for the entire series here.

Roll20 For the Absolute Beginner No. 1 – The GM: Getting Started

On Sunday I posted a link to episode 0 that explains my first You Tube series, for the Absolute Beginner to Roll20.

Over the last couple of days, I have posted, re-posted, and tweaked the re-posted video for the first episode, The GM: Getting Started. I had sound issues, in addition to the final video being just over 30 minutes. See below for what I learned form this video.

My goal for future episodes is a time limit of 10-15 minutes, verified sound levels, cleaner edits, and more interesting manner of speaking.

My next episode will be The Player: Getting Started.

Episode 3 will be The GM: Building Basic Character Sheets. 

I have lots of ideas, but haven’t settled on which will be episode 4. If you have suggestions for future videos, please include them in comments here, or better in comments on one of the videos in the series.

You can catch the first episode here:

What I learned from recording and uploading this video:

This episode took three tries to get the video right, and I didn’t know the sound was bad until I uploaded it. I trimmed this thing down to just over 30 minutes from over 45 minutes. Now I know why movies take so long to edit.

I figured out what I did wrong with my microphone recording level in the software I used. The next episode will have much better sound. It depends on which setup I use for recording, which is different for shots with desktop and video of me vs. a simple video of me. I use different software for each, with different microphone settings. That’s a big tip right there, verify level settings for each microphone in each recording software you will use. Upload a small test video for each microphone scenario to YouTube to avoid the headaches of learning a major video has bad sound. Once you find the right setting for each, leave them alone!

The secret is to have much cleaner takes to reduce editing time. when sound and video is in one file. My main video editor can’t split audio from video. I managed to tweak the volume in YouTube, and avoid 2+ hours to re-upload, etc. (I have a shorter video that I managed to improve the audio with the free open source software programs Avidemux and Audacity . Avidemux let me save the audio and video separately, and Audacity let me improve the audio. The video would only save as AVI, so I have to then use VLC {another free and open source program} to convert it to MPG4. I then used Vegas Movie Studio to re-join the audio & video.)

YouTube Series – Roll20 For The Absolute Beginner

A few weeks ago, I was asked to help the friend of a friend get started on Roll20. He planned to run a game for which there is no character sheet for the system in Roll20.

We had technical issues so I could not share my screen, so I ended up talking him through from signing into Roll20 to go here and click this, or type that. It was very tedious, but we finally got him enough to get started. I made the comment to him that I wished there was a tutorial for the absolute beginner.

That was the kernel for the idea that I have been simmering since then. After a previous acquisition of a better camera, I have been working to tweak settings, and determine the best way to do things.

It isn’t as polished as I’d like, but with practice comes improvement. I may sound a bit stiff talking to the camera, but I am working on that too.

I have just posted the introduction to the series and have the first episode ready to edit, and ideas for the next two episodes.

Research, scripting, and multiple takes to help minimize the effort of editing takes a lot more time than one would think. Some finished products make it look like it was easy, because of how well they are done. I aspire to such levels.

If you know some absolute beginners to Roll20, please send them my way. Also, I’d appreciate any suggestions for topics for absolute beginners. Most of it will be focused on GM’s, but I will point out things that are different or helpful for players.

UPCOMING EPISODES

No. 1 – The GM: Getting Started.

No. 2 – The Player – Getting Started.

No. 3 – The GM: Building Basic Character Sheets.

You can catch the introduction to the series here: