How do you tabletop these days?

[Micah Sweet]

Can you tell me how you activate the video chat? I can't see how you'd do so. There's ways to set up audio ones, but nothing I see that provides a video option.

I don't have access to my PC at the moment, but from what I remember in my private group you make a call and click your picture to turn on your camera.

 

[payn]

I find the video distracting and I have an easier time of getting into the game without it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I believe we're talking about Discord, yes? Is this in a server or a group DM?

By implication from Micah's answer it was in the former; I already know it can be done with group DM.

If it's in a server, you have a list like this (see spoiler images below). You clicked on "saltmarsh voice" to join the voice chat. Then, you click on it AGAIN to enter the "voice channel." That takes you to Image 2, where at the bottom you hit "turn on camera." You'll see everyone else in there as well, either with their profile image if no camera, or their faces if they turned on their camera

And so it does. I'd never noticed this, and the information I had was either bad or out of date. Thanks to both you and @Micah Sweet

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think the other thing, now that I've thought more on it, is that most of my friends don't want to use their webcams for the same reason of convenience etc. of playing from their home. If the whole group is using webcams, it does something for me because I can see people. But just voices, that isn't helping me out

Definitely something that's going to be different from person to person.

Well, back in my MUSHing days it was farther even than that; it was purely text (which I've argued has some virtues but requires people to be able to type at a reasonable speed).

 

[Thomas Shey]

I find the video distracting and I have an easier time of getting into the game without it.

Yeah, we never used video on Skype; it was just an extra distraction and bandwidth consumer.

 

[Wolfpack48]

I'll just add this for me: my workday is 100% online meetings and screen and video sharing. I made the decision awhile ago that I want my out-of-work TTRPG games to be exclusively in-person and paper and pencil only. I need the break from digital.

 

[payn]

I'll just add this for me: my workday is 100% online meetings and screen and video sharing. I made the decision awhile ago that I want my out-of-work TTRPG games to be exclusively in-person and paper and pencil only. I need the break from digital.

I can understand that, and some of my pre-covid players are lost to me because of it. Im at the point that its VTT or no play at all often int he RPG space. I think I do a lot of Battletech war gaming in person and it goes a long way.

 

[Ath'kethin]

In theory, I run three games every week (all Dungeon Crawl Classics): A game on Wednesday evenings at my FLGS, a game on Sunday mornings over Roll20 for my 11yo and his friends, and a game on Sunday afternoons with my family around our dining table.

In practice, the only ones that happens consistently are the Roll20 game and one of the other two. So I picked "about the same amount of VTT and in-person."

 

[Faolyn]

If you're talking about a normal Discord channel, how do you do it? Its not obvious, unlike sound.

Well, we have voice/video channels--two, one for the regular game and one for when the GM needs to take a player aside for a moment. I'm not a moderator and haven't created a channel of my own, so I don't know the actual mechanical details involved.

We also have a bunch of different text channels, but only some of them are specifically for RP: one for gaming talk in general, one for GM announcements (typically for recaps and things that would be handouts if this were an in-person game), one for dice rolls (although most of us don't really use it), and one for loot, so we have records of treasure that we've found, and one for the game reviews I do.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Thanks for the answer, @Faolyn. It shows I don't even regularly look at voice channels that I'd never noticed the video option there.