Gaming with Wave or Why I Hate Play-By-Posts

Written by Tyson J. Hayes on 2010/02/16 – 00:00 -

After gushing lovingly about the Savage Mushroom Kingdom, Theron “SlasherEpoch” Seckington of These Dice Look Funny, invited me to partake in a game over Google Wave. Not being one to pass up an opportunity to play the game with the designer himself, and looking for other ways to branch into online play, I began excitedly communicating with him about character ideas. After we began play however I’ve grown a bit of disdain towards Wave as a gaming platform. Theron has been great at corralling all of us together and providing an interesting story so far I can’t but feel a bit far removed from my normal role playing experience. Granted, we’ve only just begun and I do need to give it more time to really sink in, but I couldn’t help but thinking about my experience thus far.

Lack of OOC interaction

What I miss the most is the ability to interact with the other players. While I can have side conversations and engage them out-of-character, it lacks the social aspects of why I love gaming. Even though I do have a great common point with all of them (we all love gaming) I find myself at a loss on how to start a side conversation. The addition of any type of voice chat would definitely add to the interaction level, and facilitate the conversations.  However, getting everyone together would be tough. Granted, if I knew all of them in person and had a chance to play with them before I’m sure this wouldn’t be as big of a deal.

Slow Response Times

One of my biggest complaints with play-by-post games in general is the length it takes for people to respond. I’ve gotten so used to having an immediate response I find myself impatient for things to happen. The reasons of course are simple time, distance, and when we’re on make for slow response times. Unfortunately, it is the nature of the beast and unless we coordinated a time for all of us to be on (which I doubt could be done) there isn’t a way around it. So I stare longingly at my GWave notifier waiting for an update.

Organizational Mess

The Dice of Life has a great post on Gaming with Google Wave which gave some great organizational tips for running your game, like having a table of contents.  The platform however, is still a bit of a mess. What I need are rules of social etiquette.

When should I do an inline reply or when should we start a new wave?

Is it ever OK to edit someone else’s wavelet, or comment in the middle of it?

Most of the etiquette would need to be handled on a per group basis but some guidelines would be appreciated. While so far the game so far has been readable I can easily see it getting out of control. While I look forward to continuing the Savage Mushroom Kingdom game I don’t think I could ever switch to Wave for all of my gaming.

Have you played any games on Wave? Any luck with Savage Worlds or did you find other games worked better?


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Categories: Game Masters, Roleplaying Tools |
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Tips for Getting your Game Online

Written by Tyson J. Hayes on 2010/02/09 – 00:00 -

Last Sunday was my first attempt into trying to bring my Savage Worlds game into the 21st Century by moving it online.  Some of my players will be moving out of the state (and one the country) so we were looking to change our play to adapt to the new distance.  While I am big fan of internet technology and generally try to live more and more in the cloud I found the experience frustrating and bit off putting.

Set it all up your stuff a week in advance

It may seem like a bit of a duh but get all of the programs you’ll need to run your game setup well before you play.  I chose to use MapTools for our game as it was free, open source, and generally didn’t annoy me.  That being said it does have some quirks that are not apparently at first, unfortunately, these “quirks “held up the game for an hour while we tried to work them out.

1) Everyone needs to use the same version. Which was something I wasn’t aware of at first; fortunately some of my players also play in another online game and quickly pointed this out to me.  So save some time and use the same version.

2) Just because the program says it can be accessed from the internet doesn’t mean it’s not lying to you. I was never able to host the game.  While the internal tools told me I should be able to host the game no one was ever able to connect.  In the end I had another one of my player’s host the game.  I never figured out why it didn’t work, but I discovered some great port forwarding tutorials at PortForward.com.

3) Careful with maps done in Photoshop. While a minor quibble at this point it was frustrating to put in a map that had been lovingly crafted only to have it not fit the internal grid.  After getting everything is setup, make sure your maps work properly; it’ll really dampen your mood if it doesn’t.

Register all the accounts before hand

Most of my players either didn’t have Skype.  So we spent a good while getting everyone registered, futzing with mics, and generally getting us all on at the same time.  Save yourself some pain and assign some homework to everyone to get the accounts setup and registered well in advance.  Skype has a great built in tool to make sure the mic is on and that you can hear everything.  Use it.  It’ll save you time pretending to be the Verizon wireless guy.  “Can you hear me now?!”

Have you tried to make the transition to online play? What successes or failures have you had?


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Categories: Roleplaying Tools, Session Management |
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