Sunday, March 11, 2012

Had my first Constant Con game last night.

Justin Howe of the 10 Bad Habits blog ran the second session of his Vaults of Ur campaign.  It's a ruin-crawl in a vast science-fantasy city of the ancients sort of setting.

We had a few too many players - 7 - which made it pretty chaotic, especially since we had trouble getting Dean of the Busan Gamers in, and since he was playing at Jeremy's in the same room then we had some sound/feedback issues.  But once we got that sorted out, it went fairly well.

We explored some ruins, fought giant plant monsters, giant wasps, and then a slime-beast which killed Jeremy's Fighter and a guy named John's Magic-User.  My Beastman (animal-like humanoids that use the Classic D&D/Labyrinth Lord Halfling class) managed to survive by running away from the monsters most of the time, although I did manage to score a good hit against one of the wasps with my crossbow.  It's a low gold game, so the crossbow was ALL I had going in.  And we survivors came away with a couple of small pouches of gems, a jade mask from the slime beast, and a book (plus loot taken from our fallen comrades).  Oh, and the javelin-like seed pods of the giant dandelion things, which we can use as weapons and will likely sprout into new monsters when we least expect it.

It was a good time.  Now I'm thinking I could run some Flying Swordsmen games on G+.  I'll have to limit it to only a few players though.  I'll keep everyone posted on that as it develops.

12 comments:

  1. LG - thanks for posting! That sounds like a really fun campaign. I'm curious how it all went mechanically. How was the whole computer-based experience compared to in-person gaming? How did you do mapping? How about dice rolling?

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  2. G+ Hangouts took a bit of getting used to. First off, everyone's got a webcam, with their pictures at the bottom of the screen. Then there's a big window with whoever's making the most noise/motion that keeps shifting. At first, I expected that it would show my face to me when I was talking, but it didn't, so I was never sure when I was on the big picture for others. That was a bit odd.

    Once I got used to that, though, it worked fairly well. Aside from some sound issues (some people's mics were better than others or they were closer, or just speak louder or whatever), it was almost like being in a room with other players.

    We were playing LL, so we didn't need minis/battlemat. Players were free to make their own maps if they wanted from the DM's description. For dice, we just used the honor system.

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  3. Thanks for playing!

    It was my second time using the hangouts to game. In the future they should go smoother. And next time, yes, fewer players.

    James Mal from Grognardia mentioned this site for group mapping that he used for his game: http://www.twiddla.com/ Not sure if it's needed just yet.

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  4. just played around with twiddla a bit. They say it's free for educators to get a professional account. Might have to look into that...

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  5. I like what you did with the spindler (taking the spindles to use as javelins.)

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  6. Dennis can you send me your current email - mine is stewart.qatar at me dot com . Peace

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  7. hey, did you get my email about the RPG writing job?
    -josh

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  8. Steve, it's the same as before, but I'll send you an email.

    Josh, got it. Thinking about it. Thanks.

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  9. hmm... I guess next time a better name would be nice for my character. John's magic-user is a bit undistinctive...
    on another note: oh, that was YOU there?
    all of a sudden this blog has a face connected to it. Weird.

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  10. Sorry, John. I'm really bad about tracking the names of my fellow players' characters. Back when I was DMing most of the time (and just playing more often...or maybe just because I was younger) I never had trouble with that.

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  11. cool. back to korea for the summer on april 20th. later.
    -josh

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  12. I am working on a Hangout app to make playing games easier. Its called Tabletop Forge and the G+ page is https://plus.google.com/b/110771920494591644897/ and a small website at tabletopforge.com. I am about to start a more wide open beta if anyone is interested.

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