Playing in Person Is Just Better (for me)

[ColinChapman]

Add me to the chorus of folks who find in-person play preferable; I find online play a bit too impersonal and artificial feeling. The last time I told someone that, they piped up, "Oh, you should give online play a spin, it's very good." as if I hadn't tried it multiple times and found it personally a bit lacking. Plus, the RPGs I run don't significantly benefit from VTTs at all (I run simpler system with no battlemap-related play at all), so that's one upside of online play for a lot of folks that simply doesn't really exist for me personally.

Mind you, I've had folks take the same response of, "You don't like it? You must not have tried it." when I've told them I don't like player-facing-only systems too. The idea that someone tried the thing you love and didn't like it still seems to confound too many folks, unfortunately.

 

[AlexofBarbaria]

I'm tempted to make a liquor-related analogy: in-person play is scotch, online play is bourbon. The former certainly can be better, its ceiling is higher. But the latter is so much more accessible, and even the cheap stuff can be surprisingly drinkable. Bourbon drinkers do enjoy their tipple of choice, and tend to enjoy it more often than scotch drinkers. I'd wager their total enjoyment under the curve is greater in fact.

I prefer in-person play, but I'm very glad online play exists. I never would've been able to get multiple long-term campaigns going at once if it weren't for online play.

Now to make another Kentucky Mule...

 

[Kannik]

I guess this is mostly a "me too" post. The humorous and now almost cliché aspects of online meetings (silence, then everyone talking over each other, followed by everyone stopping, then you firsts, then more stuff, then 'you're on mute', then...) can also rear their head to get in the way of RPG play over a video call. And while you can still see each other, there's still some aspects of acting or the communication aspects of positioning (such as when you lean towards someone, etc) that gets stripped out. Oddly, in some ways VTT and voice only at times feels more smooth, if only because playstyle adjusts to interact differently. I'd still call it less rich than in person, but because it's trying less to emulate in-person (your focus is on the VTT tokens rather than the person) the 'lessness' is less noticable.

Perhaps the most awkward though is one of my groups that is hybrid, with part of the group meeting locally with laptops and a big screen to run the VTT and video service, and the others joining remotely. It mostly feels like fully remote VTT/voice, but with the added complication of audio quality and the perils to avoid crowding out the remote people who can't make gesticulations or eye contact to initiate communication.