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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