VTT/online-play Etiquette and Horror Stories

[Lanefan]

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.

It wasn't my choice to go online. I voted against it, but lost.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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).

Its a thing that can happen. I live in a suburb near Los Angeles, and until a couple years ago when fiber came in, the best I could get was pretty weak DSL. And I don't mean I was too cheap to get better; I mean it just was the best available.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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).

As you can see from my post above, I dealt with that for years.

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

Like I said, sometimes that's just a weird thing that happens and makes no sense. We used to have one group that had trouble with Skype and Discord worked fine and another where it was vice versa. Weird as could be.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It wasn't my choice to go online. I voted against it, but lost.

I get that some people just lose something out of not playing FTF (I can't say there's nothing there even for me), but I was using some aspects of VTTs locally before I even played remotely, and I can't say I miss the drive to places at all, especially back at the end of the night.

 

[Koloth]

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.

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.

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.

A group I am playing with is using a VTT as a play aid due to our gaming site not being suited for a physical table. Many times we the players wind up sitting around while the GM takes an hour or more to prep for the day's session. Each of the last 3 sessions have involved a 15+ minute pause while the GM preps an NPC in the middle of an expected encounter while we are doing the assigned mission. Not unplanned.

Not a fan of Discord for security reasons and more recently, their growing attempts to monetize the thing. In the past, I liked Teamspeak. It is still around and you can run a personal server for free(at least the last time I checked) but free is limited to about 30 on line users. Should be more then enough for most TTRPG sessions. Teamspeak used to be the goto chat solution until free free free Discord showed up. Now Discord is becoming less free as investors are starting to demand profits.