Challenges of Remote Gaming

[Catullus64]

As I suspect is the case for many people, nearly all of my D&D lately has been played via Roll20. After nearly six months of almost exclusively online gaming, I've come to notice a few challenges to the play experience which come with the territory.

For me, the biggest point of interest (and irritation) is the way that a digital interface conditions people's interaction with the game. Roll20 has plenty of options for automating game elements: HP bars, attack commands, toggled modifiers, all that. It's hard to articulate, but I feel as though I've noticed a psychological shift in my players, where they pay more attention to the elements of representation (the dice, sheets, and map) than to the scenario being represented. Sometimes, if a player realizes they don't have a macro for a certain type of roll they're being asked to make, or for some new modifier or effect, they'll start taking the time for making one, until I remind them that they can just use the /roll commands and do the addition themselves, the way we all did when this game was pen and paper.

On the side of more minor gripes, there's no great online substitute for rolling dice ominously behind a screen. There's the /gmroll command, but nobody else sees that, so you can't hit the beat of seeing the DM roll secret dice. That was a key part of my psychological arsenal for motivating players. Players are also more tempted to do other things while they have a computer screen up, so it's-not-my-turn-itis can be rampant in slower sessions. And game pace is undeniably slower, since every die roll requires opening the character sheet (typically closed while looking at a map or game image), scroll to and click the required roll, wait for it to show up on everybody's screen, and hope you didn't leave the Disadvantage toggle or the Bless modifier on by mistake. It takes maybe two seconds more than rolling the die and doing the addition, but those seconds really add up over the course of the session.

On the positive side, I definitely do appreciate the ease of sharing documents and maps with players in-between sessions, in a way that was always difficult when such things were made on physical media. The nature of the Roll20 map editor has also definitely pushed me to shake up my geography and dungeon design.

Any more observations about the unique challenges of digital tabletop gaming, D&D in particular?

[TheCleverGuy]

I don't have a great frame of reference,
because I've only ever played via Roll20. But one thing I've noticed is that players tend to move their tokens on the map much too freely. They might rush into a room or across a bridge while the DM is reading the description or something, and then the DM has to stop and say "wait, that door is locked," or "there was a trap there." With Roll20's dynamic lighting there are ways to restrict movement, but it's not always effective.

Maybe its the same with physical maps and tokens, but I suspect that it doesn't happen as often. And I suppose it's relatively easy to solve, just by not having a map on the screen until initiative is called for. But the adventures I've run have all been pretty heavily dungeon-crawly, so I've felt the map was more important.

On the side of more minor gripes, there's no great online substitute for rolling dice ominously behind a screen. There's the /gmroll command, but nobody else sees that, so you can't hit the beat of seeing the DM roll secret dice. That was a key part of my psychological arsenal for motivating players.

As a replacement for psychological dice rolling, you could just roll a d20 on the screen every now and then, without any modifiers and without any comment. Players will see the result but will have no idea what it means.

[No brains]

It doesn't necessarily have to represent a real roll, but can't you use the jukebox in roll20 to play the sound of rolling dice for the players to hear?

It's just theater, but a lot of the game is theater.

[zinycor]

One thing I love is that it would be very hard to fudge rolls. That leaves so much worry behind for me.

[MoiMagnus]

1) Interferences. I mean, IRL, there is always the possibility of someone receiving an urgent message. But with remote gameplay, you quickly understand which player have other peoples to deal with where they live (little children around, etc).

2) Lack of passive interaction. IRL, there is a lot of "passive" interactions. Smiles, looking at each others, ... And those are the interactions that ensures that everyone remain focussed on the game. Remotely, you don't feel as invested when you're not having a conversation. This is particularly a problem for groups with high player numbers.

3) What is on the screen matters! If you have a battle map and technical stuff on the screen, those will be the main focus of the game. If the players have their character sheet on full screen the whole time, they will be focussed on their personal abilities and probably their next level up. If players have a combined character sheet of the whole team displayed, they will often scroll to see if they can combine their skills with other players, or try to come up with ideas of what other players can do. If what's on the screen is the city map, the list of NPCs and what they know about them, they will interact with the world much more. Etc.

[Kyutaru]

These are less problems with online play and more problems with the interfaces being used for online play. They are frankly awful. No one has created a streamlined usable interface for D&D play with as slick a toolset as something like Baldur's Gate or most MMORPGs have. It can be much much better yet sadly even tools priced at full triple-A game price with hundreds in DLCs are still only copypasting copyrighted works into a digital format with no effort made to make them easily usable.

I haven't had to engage in these remote gaming problems but back when I was doing digital campaigns I would simply create the campaign digitally using Neverwinter Nights with a heavily modified ruleset. I didn't have to worry about what players may or may not be capable of doing, traps and combat was handled by the system rather than me, NPCs could be possessed or given routine dialogue conversations, and I had ripped out all the game abuse features from the default title while adding my own spells and feats and classes. This to me is the more ideal form of a true D&D remote gaming experience, giving players a toolset with which to craft their campaigns from rather than depending on hiding and showing PNG files.

[Zhorn]

I will always have a preference for an unplugged game in person. Physical dice, pencils and paper, tokens and dry erase mats.
Now my biases have been stated:

I've generally been enjoying the VTT experience.

No one forgetting their dice, character sheets, tokens, etc
easier to have fancy maps
fog of war and dynamic lighting make for more authentic "what can my character see" situations

We were playing on roll20 for a long while, but recently swapped over to Foundry VTT (DM buys the program, one off purchase, no subscription, gets any ongoing updates, everyone connect via browser) and it has for the most part been a step up in our games.

being said, things I don't like:
Easy distraction. everyone on their computers is just begging for trouble.
People are less isolated from the outside world during game time. other people int he house hold expecting the players/DM to act as if they are not in the middle of a session.
lacking body language. Roleplay has become so much more restricted being unable to use physicality in out interactions (I still do it at my end for the fun of it... but no one gets to see it, I just have to narrate it more).
Cannot show hidden rolls after the fact.
Macro dependency (though mass dice are at least easier)
Tech dependency. if things go offline, you are just kinda stuck. Had a mass power blackout 2 weeks back for almost a full day, could not join the session

[Mutazoia]

So my group has been playing via Roll20 for a while now, and we haven't had any problems (apart from one guy getting phone calls at random, but that would happen IRL).

We use D&D beyond for our character sheets, and a plugin called "Beyond 20" that lets you click on your character sheet in D&D beyond and it rolls dice in Roll20. It will automatically roll advantage/disadvantage, or your brutal criticals, etc. Click the "cast" button next to the spell and it will post the spell in Roll20 chat and roll a spell attack roll (if necessary) as well as the damage roll. This all makes the "I don't have a special macro for this yet" moot.

We use Discord for voice (so you can roll dice on the DMs end for the sound of them if you want and let your mic pick it up) and "handing out" game notes and tracking treasure and the like.

We don't use most of the bells and whistles of Roll20 besides the fog of war and the initiative tracker.

To date, the only problem we had was while we were playing Dragon Heist with one (former) player who looking up the adventure online as we were playing it. But he was stupid and got pretty obvious with it and now, as I said, he's a former player.

All in all, I would say that any problems you have with players getting distracted are really just that...a problem with the player. They are probably the type of player that would goof around on their phone at an IRL table when it wasn't their turn.

[da newt]

My experience has been a mixed bag - I am an old Luddite. I miss the face to face, but roll20 and Discord for voice has worked pretty well.

A few gripes - side bars and face/body expression are missing, which makes conflict/misunderstanding more common. I haven't been able to crack the nut on how to roll for 8 summons w/ advantage (pact tactics) at once. On popular times, the roll20 system gets laggy and dupes rolls. 3d has been hard to grasp for our group (I play an Aarocokra), but 2d is great.

BTW - minimizing your character sheet works, and we've even been able to figure out how to play with 2 players using one PC.

Overall, it's been working better than I expected, but I miss old school face to face, minis, real dice, and a battle map.

[firelistener]

I found Roll20 pretty cumbersome, so my friend group started using Tabletop Simulator. It's relatively much easier to create cool maps with 3D models and it feels way more like using a real board than anything else, so it's the best digital interface I've used so far.

That said, it's still incredibly cumbersome to use for doing certain detailed movements when building dungeons and such because of collision, and I felt it raised player expectations for sweet 3D model stuff all the time.

On the main topic, I did notice a shift in player behavior when we played where everyone got distracted much more easily and I couldn't tell as easily by just looking at them because we only had voice. It's obvious IRL when someone is on their phone or something, but basically every time we got to someone's turn virtually they would say, "Oh, what's happening?" because they'd been looking at memes or something.

[Satori01]

Zoom and Google Whiteboard has been an effective virtual experience.
Clearly, the setup is not going to roll dice for you, etc like commercial VTTRPG emulators.

I have used a Chessex board and a second camera for complicated 3D scenarios, and it is easy to do.

Our 'live' sessions were about 8 hours, which is too much for a video conference, but a four hour session seemingly is just right....we just play more often now, which is better, overall.

[Skylivedk]

As I suspect is the case for many people, nearly all of my D&D lately has been played via Roll20. After nearly six months of almost exclusively online gaming, I've come to notice a few challenges to the play experience which come with the territory.

For me, the biggest point of interest (and irritation) is the way that a digital interface conditions people's interaction with the game. Roll20 has plenty of options for automating game elements: HP bars, attack commands, toggled modifiers, all that. It's hard to articulate, but I feel as though I've noticed a psychological shift in my players, where they pay more attention to the elements of representation (the dice, sheets, and map) than to the scenario being represented. Sometimes, if a player realizes they don't have a macro for a certain type of roll they're being asked to make, or for some new modifier or effect, they'll start taking the time for making one, until I remind them that they can just use the /roll commands and do the addition themselves, the way we all did when this game was pen and paper.

On the side of more minor gripes, there's no great online substitute for rolling dice ominously behind a screen. There's the /gmroll command, but nobody else sees that, so you can't hit the beat of seeing the DM roll secret dice. That was a key part of my psychological arsenal for motivating players. Players are also more tempted to do other things while they have a computer screen up, so it's-not-my-turn-itis can be rampant in slower sessions. And game pace is undeniably slower, since every die roll requires opening the character sheet (typically closed while looking at a map or game image), scroll to and click the required roll, wait for it to show up on everybody's screen, and hope you didn't leave the Disadvantage toggle or the Bless modifier on by mistake. It takes maybe two seconds more than rolling the die and doing the addition, but those seconds really add up over the course of the session.

On the positive side, I definitely do appreciate the ease of sharing documents and maps with players in-between sessions, in a way that was always difficult when such things were made on physical media. The nature of the Roll20 map editor has also definitely pushed me to shake up my geography and dungeon design.

Any more observations about the unique challenges of digital tabletop gaming, D&D in particular?

Due to IRL moving, my longest campaign as a player has been roll20. Players in 4 different cities, 3 different countries (sometimes rising to 5 and 4).

We did all of ToA and some of Rise of Tiamat that way. Later, the DM coded Google Sheets to be able to run 5e.

Players having separate tabs for character sheets were definitely an improvement.

Biggest challenge was to see when other players wanted to say something, but we got better at using pauses for dramatic tension and to allow each other to react.

A huge plus: while others speak, we started being able to write body language and background activities in a way that made the non-talking characters come alive in a new way which would have been hard IRL.

Another challenge was that deviations from what the DM had prepared were a bit harder.

A higher level of concentration is required.

Talking for five minutes and then finding out that you have been dropped from the channel is frustrating.

Bad sound quality occasionally made accents and certain speaking patterns much harder (ie my gnome who spoke at double speed). Combat actually ended up faster, but did become a bit flatter (less swinging in chandeliers).

Zoom and Google Whiteboard has been an effective virtual experience.
Clearly, the setup is not going to roll dice for you, etc like commercial VTTRPG emulators.

I have used a Chessex board and a second camera for complicated 3D scenarios, and it is easy to do.

Our 'live' sessions were about 8 hours, which is too much for a video conference, but a four hour session seemingly is just right....we just play more often now, which is better, overall.

Interesting setup. How many physical/digital tools do you need to make this combo work?

[cutlery]

It is pretty easy to create useful on-the-fly dice rolls in roll20.

However, that requires something of a certain comfort level with command line interfaces that was always rare, and picking it up so it feels natural just for the game isn’t likely.

A more visual dice roller with easy to add modifiers might be better.

[TaiLiu]

I think some of these problems might be caused by Roll20 more than virtual tabletop roleplaying per se. I've done virtual tabletop roleplaying both with Roll20 and without. Personally, I've enjoyed playing without Roll20 more -- a lot of the tools Roll20 gives you have simpler alternatives, or just get in the way.

[Sigreid]

I don't do Roll20, but in Fantasy Grounds you can turn on a Dice Tower. If a DM drops the dice into the tower the players can see in the text box that the DM rolled dice, but it doesn't give the result for them to see.

[KillingTime]

Our group is using good old Skype and good old honesty, and it's working really well.
We're of the opinion that if anyone needs to win at make believe so much that they lie about their dice, then it's no bother.
But if anything we've been reporting an above average number of bad rolls and critical fails. Seems like the fun of the game is more important.

[ff7hero]

I feel like such a curmudgeon, but my biggest gripe with remote gaming has been my group's seeming total inability to keep side-chat to text or natural quiet moments. In person, I'm all for side chatter and OoC quips, but when there's only one audio channel and people are constantly talking over each other with non-essential banter, it gets frustrating.

[Chronos]

My group hasn't been using "gaming software"-- We're just using Zoom. Die rolls and the like are handled the same way we always have (and yes, cheating is possible, but if I were worried about that, I wouldn't be playing with this group). For mapping, we've been having the DM share a screen with a document with opaque shapes covering unexplored rooms, that are moved out of the way as the party explores them (and which only the DM can move, so the players can't rush ahead).

[Azuresun]

I think some of these problems might be caused by Roll20 more than virtual tabletop roleplaying per se. I've done virtual tabletop roleplaying both with Roll20 and without. Personally, I've enjoyed playing without Roll20 more -- a lot of the tools Roll20 gives you have simpler alternatives, or just get in the way.

Yes, I bounced off R20, but found Fantasy Grounds much more user-friendly.

[Waazraath]

Any more observations about the unique challenges of digital tabletop gaming, D&D in particular?

My group found the perfect solution, combining innovation and tradition, and desingned a concept I'd like to call "Hybrid Gaming"!(tm)

Ah, got you folks interestend, haven't I? What we do is:
- open a digital meeting room (we use jitsi, but can be skype, zoom, teams or whatever);
- everbody has his pens & paper character sheets and dice next to the computer;
- when we need to make a roll, we roll, and tell the other players what we rolled;
- we trust each other;
- the DM uses the share screen function of the meeting programm to share maps, pictures and whatnot.

Done!

(I'm making a joke out of it, but this is what we do and it works perfectly for us. We started with an app that makes the rolls, could be roll20, but it was far to much hassle to programm each possible dice roll that you might make, so we said bugger it and went oldschool).

[Vogie]

I've had very little challenges when it comes to normal play - no one can forget their character sheet, nor their dice. Heck, with the Beyond20 chrome extension, they don't even have to remember how to calculate things. The only challenge I've run into with Remote gaming is playing with homebrew. Homebrew classes, subclasses, and the like are much harder to exact into a digital setting... specifically because players get used to that push-button

The main issue I've found is that of distraction. Tumblr, Reddit, Social Media, et cetera. Running large groups was always hard, but running large groups in an online environment is even harder.