VTT/online-play Etiquette and Horror Stories

[Lanefan]

My pet peeve is uncontrolled background noise. Someone doing dishes etc. I’m lucky I’ve never had it with my players but when I’ve been a player in other peoples games I’ve seen people with pets barking, and god knows what else.

Problem there is that other people live in the same living space as the player, and it's a bit much to ask them to not do anything while the game is on. And muting's not much of an option if you're trying to stay in the conversation (especially when, like me, you constantly forget to unmute yourself). My answer sometimes is to just type my input into the chat and hope anyone notices.

 

[Jd Smith1]

We don't use video because I feel its a waste of bandwidth, and plus several of us don't have cameras, so the clothing policy isn't a issue for me, but I would see how it could be.

We roll VTT dice only.

My very first online session, I was a player, and one of the group proceeded to eat his dinner not just with a live mike, but making yummy noises and explaining how good it was, while we were in the middle of a fight. Then got deeply offended when I advised the GM I missed what he said because of the noise of mastication. Needless to say, that was my only session with the group. If I hadn't been there to get a look at online gaming, I wouldn't have stayed for the whole session.

The 'wandering token' issue has been a problem for me in the past, but I solved it by having restricting movement out of combat; the party leader gives out a distance, usually around 20', and everyone moves, then they stop and evaluate. Its become popular, because now they aren't running into ambushes while badly spread out.

A lot of my table rules from the F2F days have not carried over, but online gaming brings new rules into use.

 

[payn]

Folks who cling to potatoes with a death grip because they don’t want to learn a new machine or ever change are a good example.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Can't blame the DM if the players have their characters go to unforeseen or unexpected places all the time. Roll20 (which is what we use) isn't great for on-the-fly mapping - or so says our DM, and I fully believe him.

I don't really get the impression any VTT is, but then, I wasn't great about it when I was dealing with battlemats and the like, so I'm not sure I'm much worse off now. I'm usually much better off it its outdoors since I have a lot of generic outdoor maps I can grab relatively quickly.

We use discord for audio (no cameras, and I'm glad of that!) and it's terrible. At one time or another every one of us has had (or is still having) problems with it.

Its weird; we used to have some problems with it in that regard, but they're rare now, except for one player's router sometimes getting twitchy (and me crossing my leg and putting it between my mouth and the microphone).

That said, I'm not at all a fan of online play at the best of times and consider it a very poor substitute for the real thing. As such, I'm not all that willing to invest any money into it in terms of updating the fairly old tech I have which for everything else I need works just fine.

Other than upgrading our bandwidth in general (which had a benign effect on pretty much everything I do online-adjacent) and finally finding a conference mike that works well, only thing I did to improve my VTT experience was break down and buy a secondary monitor for my laptop (and my wife uses that for her work when I'm not using it). The latter wasn't necessary, it just saves me some time flipping from Maptool to the screen I have everything else on.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Problem there is that other people live in the same living space as the player, and it's a bit much to ask them to not do anything while the game is on. And muting's not much of an option if you're trying to stay in the conversation (especially when, like me, you constantly forget to unmute yourself). My answer sometimes is to just type my input into the chat and hope anyone notices.

Honestly, I'd cheerfully play just via the chat and skip audio, but not everyone spent years playing on MUSHes.

 

[JediSoth]

My biggest pet peeve wasn't listed: a peanut gallery of people in the room as someone playing online and commenting on the action where everyone else on the call could hear them. I get that couples often have computers in the same room, but if one of them is playing an online game with others on mic/camera, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, please STFU.

We got that message through, fortunately. I don't know if he start using earbuds, or the rest of the group made it clear that if his partner didn't stop commenting on the game after she declined to participate as a player, then we'd either institute a "talking stick" app in Discord or kick him from the group.

He was a dedicated player, I'll give him that. He once logged in from a laptop on a mobile hotspot while in the car while his partner was driving. That wasn't distracting or anything.

We often played without cameras because my wife played with us (her computer is on a different floor of the house, so I wasn't breaking the pet peeve I wrote about above), and our bandwidth choked on two people on Discord while I was also pushing out Foundry to the whole group. Our Internet is terrible here (and I live in the suburbs of a major American city).

 

[MNblockhead]

My very first online session, I was a player, and one of the group proceeded to eat his dinner not just with a live mike, but making yummy noises and explaining how good it was, while we were in the middle of a fight. Then got deeply offended when I advised the GM I missed what he said because of the noise of mastication. Needless to say, that was my only session with the group. If I hadn't been there to get a look at online gaming, I wouldn't have stayed for the whole session.

Yeah, if it is a new group, that would be a red flag for me to nope out. First, I get annoyed at the sound of chewing, especially annoying when they are on mic and you are wearing a head phone. That's just a personal misphonia--heck some people enjoy it given the subculture of ASMR. But when it gets to point that it interferes with hearing what others are saying, I find it hard that many groups would be tolerant of that. The biggest red flag is if someone gets offended at being called out on it. I'm at the age where I just nope out on people like that.

 

[MNblockhead]

Folks who cling to potatoes with a death grip because they don’t want to learn a new machine or ever change are a good example.

I can understand why some people feel that their PC is good enough and have no desire to buy a new one just for a game, even if they can afford it. But I equally understand why a group playing an online game would require a certain level of equipment, bandwidth, and technical knowledge.

 

[MNblockhead]

We often played without cameras because my wife played with us (her computer is on a different floor of the house, so I wasn't breaking the pet peeve I wrote about above), and our bandwidth choked on two people on Discord while I was also pushing out Foundry to the whole group. Our Internet is terrible here (and I live in the suburbs of a major American city).

Paying for a hosting service for Foundry like The Forge or Molten can really help with this. If you have the option of upping your bandwidth that may be a better deal than paying for hosting, but if your location prevents using a hosting service will free up bandwidth.

 

[Lanefan]

Other than upgrading our bandwidth in general (which had a benign effect on pretty much everything I do online-adjacent) and finally finding a conference mike that works well, only thing I did to improve my VTT experience was break down and buy a secondary monitor for my laptop (and my wife uses that for her work when I'm not using it). The latter wasn't necessary, it just saves me some time flipping from Maptool to the screen I have everything else on.

We got a new router a few months back which made discord somewhat better at our end. Not much we can do about bandwidth, however, as our building isn't fitted for fibre (and may never be).

Now it's the DM having trouble with discord, lots of dropouts. And he just got a new fancy hi-tech router, so .