G+ Gaming

Ages ago, I used to game with a group that had a member who was out of town frequently.  He drove an eighteen wheeler for a living, and would spend weeks at a time living in hotel rooms in one horse towns.  Like airline pilots, truck drivers can't drink when they're on schedule, and there were only so many days he could sit in a room and read or watch television.  So his friends, the great people that they were, jury-rigged a setup to allow him to role play with them.  They hung a microphone from the ceiling in the middle of the table, and sat a speaker on the table in front of the seat where he would sit when he was with them, and he would play right along with us.

These were less technologically adept days, the phone line was analog, we took his dice rolls on faith (although the general consensus was that he rolled a suspiciously high number of critical hits compared to the rest of us), there were lots of, "Wait, what did he say?"s from us, and even more, "Could you repeat that?"s from him, and the general feeling was more like sitting on a conference call than playing an RPG, but hey - it kept him sane, it kept the GM from having to come up with in-game reasons for the guy's character's absences every couple of weeks, and it kept the group together.  It wasn't ideal, but it pretty much kinda almost worked, most of the time.

Flash forward to the present, and I'm hearing about playing on g+, and the first thing I think of is all the nights spent shouting into the microphone and trying to figure out whether he said, "I hit it with my axe", or, "That pit is full of cats!"

I received lots of positive responses from my previous post regarding online gaming, so I've been keeping my eye out on g+ looking for games and my god, I had no idea there were games going on at such odd hours.  A good part of it is time zones, I'm sure, but it seemed like half the games were either happening while I was working or sleeping.  Then along came an opportunity too good to pass up.  Edgar Johnson and Adam Muszkiewicz run a game on Thursdays using DCC RPG called the Metal Gods of Ur-Hadad.  They were wrapping up the first adventure, the Crypt of the Lizard King.  Reading further into it, I discovered that it riffed off of Jim Morrison and the Doors, and I was sold.

Despite some technical difficulties (from what I've read online since last night, Roll20 doesn't always cooperate with the Chrome browser - switching to Firefox, check), I had a blast.  I was officially inaugurated into the ranks of the experienced when Michelangelo Aggrosong, the crowbar swinging cooper fell in glorious battle, followed shortly by Miff Sapsipper, the Elven Navigator.  Crag Beerbeard the Dwarven Blacksmith and Lardo Cutpurssian the merchant lived to die, er... I mean fight another day, and collected 5 xp each for their troubles, setting them on their way.  The highlight of the evening was a wonderful example of Death By Treasure when another party member discovered, to their horror, that a magic helm did one point of damage per round to non-chaotic characters who wore it.  He was lawful.  He only had 1 hp.  He died.

At three hours, the timing was just right, I had a blast, and I'm looking forward to the sequel, Slaves of the Silicon God!