Skype player + Table group. What to expect?

[Dragoslav]

One of our players is in Europe for 4 months, and our DM suggested we try keeping her included using Skype. I've done a fair bit of looking around for ideas on how to make this happen best, but I'm hoping to get some ideas about what sorts of issues/problems to expect. (This is D&D 4e, btw)

Here's my planned setup: I'll have the off-site player on Skype on my netbook sitting on the far end of the table. I bought a better webcam with a microphone (to replace my netbook's wimpy speakers). She'll have a wired connection, and on our end it will be wireless. The rest of us will just be at the table as normal, using a battlemat etc.

I'm most concerned about the video quality and frequency of dropped calls with a European student dorm Internet connection on the one end and a wireless connection on the other (at least the off-site player will have a wired connection, which I find more reassuring). Anyone worked with similar circumstances before? Or have general words of wisdom?

 

[[OMENRPG]Ben]

I've actually done nearly the exact same thing, and for interaction there is a bit of delay on Skype. I would say the delay can extend up to 2-3 seconds just between California and Colorado, so Europe to the US might be 5-10 seconds, I'm not entirely sure.

The problem with the delay is if there is a conversation in which interaction is important, the off-site player won't be able to react with as much alacrity or precision during such conversations unless everyone stops and waits for them to say something.

Also, honestly, I think Skype is a very poor quality service. Its nice that it is free, but there are superior web-chat systems, including Google Hangout. If you both have the paid version of Skype I've heard it is pretty flawless though. Yet, for my money, I would sign up for a Go-To Meeting subscription, as that is pretty darn fast and excellent picture quality (it is what I use for communicating with my staff in Europe.)

Anyway, good luck, it can be done if some minor accommodations are made. Have fun!

 

[Kannik]

We did this for a time when one of our players moved out of town. We had voice, we had camera, what could go wrong?

As anyone who has ever tried a conference call with multiple people can attest, not that things can go wrong per se, but there are definite challenges:

a) flow of conversation is difficult with the remote player, because all the visual clues between the group (knowing when to start, stop talking, etc) are lost

b) if there are multiple conversations going on at the same time the remote player will be unable to hear anything

c) even with the camera, staying part of any miniatures stuff is difficult (could call this tactical awareness)

In the end, at best, the remote player was perhaps 25% involved (not by their attention span, just how much they could comprehend and contribute). We did it for quite some time until they moved back to the area, however it was not the seamless experiment we thought it might be.

It did, however, let the campaign go on and had them be at least as much a part of the storyline as they could be, and for that reason it was worth it.

good luck!

peace,

Kannik

 

[Terraism]

Having done something similar in the past, my recommendations are twofold, and may be things you're not interested in doing. Obviously, whatever works for you, but in my experience:

1. Get an omnidirectional, conference-room mike. If you really want the remote player involved, sound quality is incredibly important.
2. Don't use a battlemap. No matter how you point the webcam and all, the remote player is going to have a very hard time following what's going on there. You'll do your best, and they'll do theirs, and the feeling that results is a mix of frustration and cluelessness. It just doesn't work well. There is an alternative, though:
3. Use a virtual tabletop program, such as Maptool, and for the local players have it being displayed on a nearby TV screen. It takes a little orientation to have the battlemap vertical, and requires a mouse to move tokens on it (a wireless mouse you can pass around usually works just fine), and the remote player can connect and interact with it seamlessly.

Really, the important thing to keep in mind is that information is key - not just for "tactical gaming", but for any social gaming. As people, we rely on a lot of visual cues that are extremely hard to reproduce, so doing what you can to make the sharing of information easier will make the experience far more pleasant.

 

[Piratecat]

Plane Sailing is near London, and he's been periodically joining us for playtests of A Game That Can't Be Named. Here's what we've done:

- I've been using Facetime, but there has been a lot of freezing and dropped calls. I hear that Google + Hangouts works better, and I'll try it.

- I put him on my iPhone, and plug my phone into a sound dock. That lets him be much louder and allows the phone to stay charged.

- Important! I bought a turntable/lazy susan that I put the sound dock on. Now I can easily swivel him towards whoever is talking, or spin it quickly to make him dizzy.

- I have considered another connection with a different camera so that he can see the map.

- I need to make it easier for him to hear. When many people talk at once it overwhelms my mic.

 

[Dragoslav]

Thanks for the responses. It sounds like there are many things to consider.

I considered getting an omnidirectional microphone, but the only thing stopping me was the price (all of the ones I saw were in the $70-100+ range). I expect sound overload for the remote player to be one of the biggest issues, and I hope it doesn't detract from the enjoyment too much. Fortunately, we have a really good group of (more or less) mature players, so it won't be as though everyone is constantly talking over one another.

I'll look into Google Hangout if we have problems with Skype.

FORTUNATELY, probably the thing that will make this experiment easiest will be the fact that this is the remote player's first campaign, and she isn't used to contributing much outside of combat yet -- so that, I imagine, will decrease the likelihood of frustration, as she is content to sit back and watch how things unfold for the most part.

 

[Troll Lord]

Okay I have to rat out one of my players. We did the Ipad/facetime thing and Chris played remotely. I noticed that he was looking up all the time and little bit dis-engaged (he's normally very into role playing). Not being tech-savy I thought it was the angle of the camera...only later occurring to me that the camera is on the Ipad so he should be looking at us all the time. Then it hit me, he was playing world of war craft during the game! LOL

It was really funny when we called him out on it.

Steve

 

[Nikosandros]

I've done exactly that, playing different games, including both 4e and PF.

We used a webcam with both good resolution and a good microphone. We also found that it is far better to use external amplified speakers instead of those of the netbook that we use at the table.

With the webcam clipped to the screen and pointing to the battlemat we had very good results. Occasionally we had to explain which miniature is who, but in general the remote player could fully contribute to the tactical combat.

One thing that we had to pay attention to was to be relatively quiet when the remote player was speaking.

 

[Nytmare]

Once upon a time, I had a player who would go on the road with work every couple of months.

The setup we had, that still left a lot to be desired, was two cameras: one birds eye, attached to the ceiling fan that showed the battle mat, and one on a short tripod that primarily pointed at me, but that I could swing to the other players' faces. He had two conversations open on his end so that he could switch between camera angles at will.

In addition to that, he had the following web page to use as a character sheet/battle mat: Malik's Virtual Character Sheet It was built primarily to work in Chrome, but other browsers shouldn't have too many non-cosmetic problems with it.

The character and power cards were duplicates of what we use in real life. They could be moved around the page, resized, or "discarded" off to the side.

The map was a duplicate of the players' monitor I had on my game table. When I updated the image being fed to the table it would automatically resync the image on the website for him. The counters on the map were only meant to help him visualize things, but there were a couple of times that he pointed his camera to his own screen to help me see where he wanted himself to be moved.

The scratch pad and die roller are pretty self explanatory. I wasn't sure how useful the scratch pad was going to be, but if I remember correctly he said it was helpful.

He typed more than he talked. The microphones were there more to let him know that he had missed something, which we would then repeat for him. Having better mics would have helped out a ton.

Distractions on his end were a lot higher than I had been afraid of. Most of what we were feeding him was just noise, unless we were speaking directly to him; so his attention wandered frequently to other places on his computer.

If I had to do it again, I'd try to find more ways to take advantage of the format. Combat was ok, but exploration was far better.

 

[KidSnide]

I've had success with an ibook angled down so the camera pointed at the map. I doubt a battlemap would be satisfying, but it seems to be adequate for a "here's which room you're in map." There are occasional audio problems, but it's totally dominated by the remote player forgetting to unmute on his turn.

-KS