Maptools with Skype DM tips needed

[Goonalan]

For your Skype group, experiment with a seriously old-school device: the caller.

For the whippersnappers, the caller was a feature of 1st edition D&D. The caller is "kind of" the party leader - though nobody has to follow his or her orders. Rather, the caller serves as the organizer of the player side of the table - almost an assistant DM in charge of keeping the party manageable.

Pick one player to be the caller each time. (Shy players can be left out of the rotation if they don't want to stretch themselves.) It's the caller's job to solicit input from each player in turn, to be the principal voice of the party's official actions, and to coordinate any off-table discussion.

With Skype and Maptools, have players who want to speak use the chat window. Use the chat window ONLY for this, so that it doesn't get confusing. Players can just put up a "!" symbol when they have something that needs to be said. They can use "!!" or "!!!" to indicate urgency. The caller can then recognize people - "OK Phil, go ahead." Then when Phil is done, and Alex and Alice have "!"ed in, "OK, Alex, your turn."

The key to making it work is a little bit of discipline from the players. They have to shut up, in other words, unless they have something material to add. As the DM you can win their eager cooperation by giving small XP awards for players who are good at modulating their behavior, and perhaps giving a useful magical trinket (1x/day get a +2 on a roll, or something similar) to the player who does the best job each session of respecting other players' input.

Edited to add: as DM, once discussion has taken place, use the caller as your go-to player for asking "so what did you finally decide to do". If players are just absolutely opposed, they can act individually, but let people know that the expectation is the caller will make the final summary decision for the group and assess the weight of opinion. Talk more to the caller, less to the other players.

This is the one- we'll certainly try this. I suggested something like this to the players last night (actually around about 2 AM), one player leads each such encounter/interaction.

Excellent.

Anyone have any other suggestions- particularly for how to enable the players to keep a track of the questions they've asked and the answers they've recieved- that can be viewed by all players in real-time?

Cheers goonalan

 

[nerfherder]

It sounds similar to some of the problems you get in audio-conference meetings vs face-to-face meetings. I vastly prefer video-conferences to audio-conferences at work - although that is only between 2 sites, and you obviously have multiple sites. In another thread (in the 4e forum), someone mentioned that Skype are doing a beta with multi-site video conferencing. You could try that and see if it makes communication better.

 

[Hussar]

There are two problems I see with video conferencing. One, bandwidth. I know that in pretty much every VTT group I've ever had there's always one guy who's internet connection is slower and he/she constantly suffers from lag issues. Toss in a multi-site video chat and that's going to be a big problem.

The second one is space on your screen. You need a number of windows up and visible most of the time. The battlemap takes up a fair bit of space (I tend to go with 50 pixels=5 feet), plus your character sheet window needs to be up since all your macros are there, add in the chat window, which again needs to be visible all the time since that's where all the die rolls go, and there's just not enough real estate on a lot of screens to toss in a 6 person video chat window.

It's a great idea, and one that I wish could be integrated directly into Maptools, but, I'm not sure if it would work for my group at least.

 

[nerfherder]

There are two problems I see with video conferencing. One, bandwidth. I know that in pretty much every VTT group I've ever had there's always one guy who's internet connection is slower and he/she constantly suffers from lag issues. Toss in a multi-site video chat and that's going to be a big problem.

The second one is space on your screen. You need a number of windows up and visible most of the time. The battlemap takes up a fair bit of space (I tend to go with 50 pixels=5 feet), plus your character sheet window needs to be up since all your macros are there, add in the chat window, which again needs to be visible all the time since that's where all the die rolls go, and there's just not enough real estate on a lot of screens to toss in a 6 person video chat window.

It's a great idea, and one that I wish could be integrated directly into Maptools, but, I'm not sure if it would work for my group at least.

Good points.

If screen real estate is a problem, then a second monitor might help. You could run Skype on one monitor and your VTT on the other.

My thoughts were skewed by my group's particular setup where we have one laptop linked to a big screen to display the VTT and one for video skype. Only the DM is remote, and the rest of us are in the same room. Also, character sheets are paper and dice are plastic. Really, it's a bare minimum setup to allow us all to see the map and the DM.