Playing with a remote player

[Cheesegear]

So, we have a player leaving our local area due to circumstances outside her control. But since we're nearly at the end of our current campaign, she really wants to play out the ending.
I am not talking about an online group. We have an IRL group, and the board is on the physical table.

One player, wants to play remotely, with us while the rest of us are together. I know that it's possible. I just don't know how.

Anyone done this before, how did it work? Skype or Facetime? :smallconfused:

[CMCC]

I did it for a couple sessions before. I was the DM. It was fine. Just have someone move the laptop or tablet over the map when needed.

It’s not as good as all in person or all online but it’s doable.

Crit role has done this a bunch too. It’s usually not great but passable.

We either used Skype or teams.

[BloodSnake'sCha]

Put her on a laptop on the table with a camera in everyone direction and another on the map.

When we play IRL we prefer to use a projector for the map and everyone move their characters via a laptop so if you do something like this you can just give her access to the map.

If you have a physical map you can always mark it like a chess table(so she can always say fireball on E3, moving to A5).
Or just give a player the responsibility of moving her character based on her directions.

About rolling dice.
You can just let her roll by herself and tell you the results or let someone else roll for her(that is a question of trust).
Or you can have her use an online dice roller and tell her to share the rolling app/website on the screen.

Discord can work great for it.

[Sigreid]

Did it once. Set up a quality microphone and a webcam so they could see what was going on. For a while someone had hooked up a Teddy Ruxbin to sit for them at the table that what they said came across.

[Contrast]

Not to be a naysayer but I've been in groups that have tried this occasionally and it hasn't worked very well in my experience.

We were plagued with technical issues in that the online person didn't pick up half of what people were saying/had to repeat themselves a lot as not everyone heard what they said and didn't really know what was going on half the time. Plus occasionally talking over people/connection issues.

If you're really near the end of the campaign and are keen to keep them involved in might work in the short term (or everyone transition online). Otherwise, make sure you have a good microphone/speaker set up and maybe someone dedicated to keeping tabs on text chat so they can query things they missed without interrupting the whole flow of the game.

Maybe try out the set up in a one shot or a board game evening or something before trying to get it to work one of the climatic games of your campaign.