I had my second experience with playing D&D via Google+ and Roll20.

We had 6 players plus our DM.

We played straight AD&D 1st Edition, except the missile weapon speeds are from second edition. Also OSRIC is available for reference.

Each player had a session with the DM to roll up a character and a backup character. The idea behind the backup character is to use it when the primary character is training, or otherwise incapacitated, or if they die we have a character ready to go.

With 7 people on the hangout, we disabled video to minimize bandwidth issues. We only used Roll20 for token placement of characters, initiative tracking, and dice rolling. I liked this as it minimized distractions and let us focus and develop the scenery in our minds. There is one more player who was unavailable last night.

This was much more my style of D&D. However, there were a lot of rules used that we ignored in our games way back when, as it added more complexity than we wanted. Weapon speed really changes the way of initiative. I recall reading something a while back about everyone using daggers for speed in a fight, now I know why. This added a newness to the game. There were some other rules that I don’t even remember them being there related to combat. I’m still not clear on some of them. I will have to re-read that bit.

Our DM has a well though out campaign area that is a sandbox. We are in an island chain and came from the backwaters to the largest island and its largest city. He described a harbor very well and gave a sense of all the sights, sounds, and smells.

My character has taken more hits than any other, three, so far, and the last knocked him to -2, but the cleric used cure light wounds before it was too late.

We had to stop mid-adventure due to time constraints for a mid-week game, but we are all looking forward to the next session.

I am off work this week, as my youngest is visting me over his spring break, so I took advantage of the 150 bonus XP to write up the session. I took notes as we went of names and things, so I had a very detailed session log that received a lot of positive comments.

We are using a Google+ community for the campaign. There are sections to organize the community for an RPG group: All posts, General Discussion, Resources, Session Summaries, General Experience Awards, A section for each players’ characters (so there are seven sections for those), and Events. This makes for a good way to organize things so everyone can easily follow along. Resources has links to documents via Google Drive for the pitch, campaign background, house rules, OSRIC, a fillable PDF character sheet, etc. Session Summaries is the place for the summary for each week’s session. Experience awards are where the DM list what experience the group has to split. The character session is where we each post the link to our character sheet PDFs on our own Google Drive accounts. The Events section is where each week’s session is scheduled.

One thing I learned from the Events, is that players that join the hangout from the event page don’t end up in the same place as those who click the join button the DM sends out. I am not sure why that is. I posted a note to help us avoid that next time. This was only the second hangout I ever participated in, so I am not sure what was up with that.

I learned more about the Roll 20 scripting and macros. This DM is more about getting us up to speed. I don’t like that each campaign requires re-coding every macro. One has to have a log in to use Roll20, is there an easier way to port dice macros to avoid re-creating the wheel with every campaign? That is something I am researching.

Other than getting the hand of Google+ and Roll20, which easily integrate, I think they are excellent tools for modelling roleplaying for geographically varied groups. We ended up with a group of people that seem to be on the same page and enjoy the style of play that AD&D embodies. We range in age from a 17 year old, my son’s age, to a near 50 year old, me. I am not sure of all the other ages, but most have played AD&D before and know the rules. Our 17 year old player is more familiar with newer versions and rolls to sense motive, and is liking that roleplaying aspect to figure things out. The majority of dice rolls were for initiative and combat.

I am looking forward to next Wednesday!!