The DC of scheduling a group is still pretty high, but most folks have a small bonus due to traveling less

@Himitsu_no_Yami DM some one shots with the others?

@MikeQ speaking of which, that's why our group tends to do every two weeks - RL having a bit of a saving throw DC. I will drop a msg for you in Back room.

@GcL it's just been us three and I haven't heard from the other player in a while

@Himitsu_no_Yami DM + 2 players actually works quite well for one shots. Also a good opportunity to invite new players.

@Himitsu_no_Yami While this whole thing is freaking awful, playing D&D has been my primary escape and way of dealing with it. My wife has been very forgiving with 3/week.

WHen normally i play once a week if i'm lucky, and more likely 2/month.

@MikeQ point being I haven't heard from the other player and with the DM doing other stuff It's just me

@Himitsu_no_Yami what time zone are you in?

@KorvinStarmast EST/EDT (whichever it is right now, 3:04 PM rn)

OK, I am on Central. For Future Reference.

And even when everyone's staying home, trying to organize a group via email is still like herding cats, and sometimes they still don't show up.

@Himitsu_no_Yami Could try looking for some players on reddit lfg. Run a few one shots with different players. Find some people you enjoy running one shots with... see if they're interested in a campaign after that.

@MikeQ I'll bet on the cats.

@MikeQ doodle can help. But then they have to fill out the doodle.

but on the other hand, folks don't have a whole lot else going on.

So I've just said i'm running mine every tues/fri.

problem is I'm at work and can't access most places where I could look for people

If you can make it, awesome. If not, i'll adjust.

you can always post something in here or in the backroom or NAB. Chances are good you'll get a bite.

At 3/week, i'm full up, though :)

Anymore would really be pushing it with my wife.

@Himitsu_no_Yami You could wait until you're not at work...?

@MikeQ I need things to do at work tho

@Himitsu_no_Yami Oh yeah... you've got that barracuda enterprise firewall thing running where you are. I hope they'd pick up on proxy settings, but it's worth a try. See if you can use a public proxy and get on reddit. Or use the mobile app on your phone?

Also sitting here trying to figure out how things work on Roll20 as a DM

@Himitsu_no_Yami i'll give you a hint. It's confusing as all get-out.

Have you tried working at work? Then play later?

@MikeQ No work to do

@GcL they have to store their phone in their locker

@MikeQ whoa, easy there.

@MikeQ Work? At work? that's for suckers. /S

@NautArch It's a valid point, I just have no work to do

Ask for more work?

Hm, I'm crossing streams with Workplace.SE, sorry. Usually the go-to solution is to show initiative and ask for available tasks, or come up with something to do.

@MikeQ we aren't assigned work, we sit here waiting for people to call us

and with the whole pandemic thing closing all the schools nobody has reason to call us

@Himitsu_no_Yami Rebrand as a complaint line! "I'm sick and tired of these kids running around my house not being in school!"

@GcL lmao

I hate roleplaying.

@A.B. Have you considered Yahtzee? That's a lot of shake playing.

They fool you with waving some interesting-sounding world around that you want to explore and hear more about.

GcL :-D

@A.B. Yeah... they sucker you into having to use your own imagination! /S

Then you get there and everyone stops dead and goes "Oh, right, tell us all about your character". And if there's to be any entertainment or anything happening you have to make it all up for yourself.

Well, literally what you said, GcL. It's like buying a book with an exciting blurb and cover, and you get it home and open it and there's nothing in it but the words "Use your own imagination"!

Depends on the system? Plenty of games have pre-built background/backstory features that players can use to flesh out their characters.

@A.B. You could probably write something better than that!

Out of curiosity, what would you write?

Or am I in the wrong game, or am I the wrong player?

Can't it be both?

What's that game where you're playing as a bunch of adventurers in a tavern who are playing a role playing game?

You could try that one. Then you'd be able to pick which player you are. I suggest the surly dwarf. I liked her the best.

Sounds like a mismatch either way. In some groups it's totally ok to bring a character without an initial backstory, so maybe leave it as a mystery and possibly fill it in later. In other groups they insist that backstory must be fully written from the start.

MikeQ - Well, not really. I mean, I can bring a pre-made character but then if they're the entire show...

I know the one yuo mean :-D Pity I've nobody to play that with.

@A.B. Could check out reddit lfg to find other players.

Just don't mess up the tagging. They really don't like that, and unlike here they won't fix it for you.

Maybe. I've tried various places but not there. (I usually avoid joining any new general-purpose social sites if at all possible as I'm a terrible time-waster.)

I think there are plugins that kill sites after some elapsed time. At least I recall reading about one for hackernews. Lemme see if I can find it.

@A.B. then you might want to join forces with @Himitsu_no_Yami

MikeQ That would certainly be easier. Having to make up every detail of my character in advance is not only a chore, it usually turns out once I start playing that it was a bad idea and I don't know how to play it. Surely it would be better to wait until I have at least some idea what's going on.

KS That's an idea.

@KorvinStarmast korvin starmatchmaker

@MikeQ you'd be a wealthy man

But the main trouble is I'm expected to be the entire action. I wish somebody would throw some bad guys at me, or anything.

How many people are in this group, and why is all of the burden on you?

@A.B. Oh yeah, that's definitely an expectations mismatch. I have that issue with my regular players.

@A.B. check out this extension

Some players like to be active and RP as much as possible. Others like to sit back and wait until the DM plops some monsters in front of them.

Haha. Well, I can't speak for the others, but I've often been left playing Generic Adventurer because although nagged into coming up with a backstory in advance, once I test it it turns out I have no idea how anything I've got there would manifest in practice.

Conversely, some DMs like to narrate constantly, whereas others like to sit back and let the players drive the narrative. Some DMs integrate player character aspects and backstory, whereas others completely ignore it because the "main plot" always has the spotlight.

@MikeQ I've had those players. "Wake me up for the combat"

@GcL we have a wizard in our group who is like that.

Well, if I'm one of those, I can't help it. Although I have a suspicion that possibly, maybe not but possibly, I'd get started more once something had actually happened to break the ice! If nothing's happening at all it's hard to know what t o do or what to talk about!

@KorvinStarmast How do you deal with it?

Especially with the featureless white void.

I'll be back in about an hour

@GcL As a player, I occasionally heal the people that he kills/tries to kill, and other times I just go along with his murderous tendencies. Depends ont he situation.

As a character, if you don't know what to do, you could try asking for prompts or available options. And you could ask the DM or ask other players, that way you can use your fellow players for cues.

@A.B. I recommend the slightly greyish void. You're limited to 60 feet per round flying, but you might run into some interesting ghosts!

@GcL I keep a 300 GP diamond and a revivify spell handy for that express purpose.

@KorvinStarmast Oh, murder hobo, and wake when the fight starts? Damn.

@KorvinStarmast Ha!

@GcL He's a friend, we work around each others imperfections.

GcL :-D

And that plugin looks worth looking into.

I also have each PC wear a pendant with a 300 GP diamond, or an earring, so that if they drop, I have easy access to their material component at need. (We share treasure, so we went grocery gem shopping one day ...)

@KorvinStarmast That's clever. Instead of matching tattoos, matching material components for the cleric to restart your heart. "Hey what's "defibrillator" mean?" "Nothing. It's ... uh... the name of the jeweler!"

@A.B. Table communication is key for these sorts of games. Otherwise players may assume that everyone else has the same playstyle and expectations, which leads to that friction.

@MikeQ Except the Spanish Inquisition.

Some of the people I've been playing with are very non-interventionist, you know - obsessed with the idea that they mustn't interfere with what and how you want to write, to the extent that you can hardly get them to say anything else except "it's up to you" over and over again. Which, when you haven't, in fact, got any ideas yet, or at least don't know which ones would go down well, is awkward.

@A.B. Is this also the style of character creation where you're expected to go away from the table ( / chat / whatever ), write up your character, and come back and show everyone? I've always found it hard to get any traction when doing that, compared to an approach where you kick ideas around at the table and play off each other.

Don't know what more I can say to some of them to get it across to them that I WANT them to throw things at me.

Yes, yes definitely!

Maybe something like, you want your character to be connected to the world and/or other player characters, so you'd prefer to have some sense of direction (from the others) instead of writing in a vacuum. Or along those lines.

@A.B. What do you mean "throw things at you"? Can you give a brief example of that?

@MikeQ Gosh that would be noisy... and so much dog and cat hair whirling around. Nothing would ever get done... it would suck

X-D

Nosy questions, bad guys, anything. Rather than standing back politely and making way for the cherished ideas that, in fact, I don't have.

@A.B. Can you give an example of something you're expecting the DM to say?

Does roleplaying in your group mostly come out PC-to-PC rather than PC-to-NPC or on interaction with environment etc.?

On the off-chance that your wizard is like me, not good at coming up with ideas unprovoked, maybe try giving him a few surprises and see if he reacts to them? Have another character object to the random murdering, have the guards chase them, that kind of thing. Making it clear of course that it's not malice, just trying to make things more exciting.

I'm having a difficult time imagining the situation in which you find yourself. Currently, it's four people on voice chat explaining character backgrounds for 15 minutes each then literal silence. The kind of silence that you check if your internet connection failed. However, I think that's probably not an accurate model of what's going on.

Politely allowing people to do whatever they can think of without it making any difference to the results actually makes things seem a bit pointless if it goes too far. Resulting, depending on the player, in either subsiding into dispiritedly doing nothing, or amusing yourself by randomly murdering stuff.

So the DM is describing an environment to the players?

So the group expects you to write a backstory and describe your actions, and then says that the backstory and actions don't matter?

@MikeQ I'm definitely a sit back, take notes, sketch the scene that was just described, and fiddle with tangibles type of player. I don't think I'm being ~inactive~, I'm just not ~loud.~

Text chat. In fact, often forum PbP, because I'm in the UK, therefore hard to get anyone in my own time zone.

@A.B. Okay. Play by post is an entirely different beast with a different set of issues. I was reading some Ars Magica posts about how to do PbP well.

Lemme go find those links

Ah! PbP is often that kind of game where each person is expected to come up with material on their own, since it's assumed they don't have back-and-forth communications in between.

It's possible to ask for prompts out-of-character in PbP, but kind of inefficient for that format

Although either way, there should be initial prompts and cues before players begin writing stuff.

The players should know in advance what kind of game they're going to play.

That's odd that the links didn't format nicely.

@GcL Multiline posts break formatting

I blame the cats.

Meow.

Ah! Links about forum RPing always welcome. Half the time it seems to be assumed that because it's just writing rather than rules it's sort of obvious and goes without saying, which it is not. There's any amount of technicalities involved, they just don't show.

Yeah. Play by post seems like an exercise in creative writing to me. It lends itself well to the AM5 system, but I don't know how well it would work for something like D&D where it's very encounter based.

I suspect the featureless white void is harder on me than on some players because I am in reality not very much of a people person and when I'm introduced to people I do tend to fiddle with the scenery rather than say much, at least at first!

Hence when there is no scenery to fiddle with...

Maybe I should make up scenery myself if the GM isn't coming up to scratch, at least small details, and just say "Stop me if I'm taking too many liberties".

@nitsua60 Sketch the scene that was just described - you do that? I've been considering doing that but I was wondering if that was obsessive and loony!

@A.B. I do it all the time.

If that's a thing other people do do do then hmm! I really can't get my head around who's where without a sketch-map. Theatre of the mind be blowed.

@A.B. I don't usually sketch maps, I'll sketch things like the scene were the ruffian's being thrown from the tavern, or when the firebolt picks one-of-five stirges off the barbarian's back.

This is coolio

I've been thinking of keeping an inventory list, too. With free-form RP people seem to expect you'll do everything from a "theme" and an atmosphere and some emotions. But I think in things.

@GcL yeah, it's a 'his and hers' thing, I guess. 8^D

@KorvinStarmast They went to Jared Jewelers Defibrillators

I like the fashionable and useful bling.

Not only does it say "we're powerful and are well funded" it also states "we're willing to die... and have "

@GcL Yes, bravo; and maybe I can get a tat that says that! 8^D

Terrifyingly self aware adventurers.

Adds +5 to the insight checks of NPCs to intuit if they're part of a side quest or a main quest.

If I keep a note of the things I've mentioned my character having at one time or another, a lab coat, a book on goblins, a bicycle, etc., I can look at that for ideas about what to do next.

I have to go for a bit.

@A.B. best wishes

Trying to figure out how to actually set a profile picture but it's... not working. I'll try again when I get home or something since the filters here might be interfering

news from around the Network:

(there's a familiar-looking moose on that list)

I'm sure that an MC to help the MT interact with CMs, will make things much less confusing.

[cough]

@Himitsu_no_Yami Hi

Are you about at the moment? I'm very much up for teaming up with you if you want - either today or tomorrow or whenever.

Teaming up to do what exactly?

Fighting crime.

:-D

I had the idea you were looking for someone to play RPGs with maybe wires got crossed.

Or I'm thinking of someone else entirely.

I mean I'm interested but only for one system

And I can't DM

Which is?

Haven't really figured out how

D&D 5e

Oh, I know that. But never actually played it.

But have repeatedly studied up on the rules before being let down. That's how it happened.

If you're able to DM a game I'd probably be down. Like I said tho, I haven't quite figured out how to DM myself

Arguably most DMs haven't figured out how to DM, but they do it anyway

I haven't figured out how to actually do it in Roll20. Like physically

Go to Games > My Games > Create new Game, and set it up. Then invite players. Roll20 has online documentation for roll syntax and such.

@Himitsu_no_Yami What do you need roll20 to do?

I mean with regards to like moving player tokens between maps for example.

Ctrl C + Ctrl V

It does get kinda fiddly trying to synchronize tokens with their corresponding character sheets

that copied it but can you not just move it?

Move it? The maps are separate grids.

moving it would essentially be deleting it from one while copying it to the other in one go

I'm not sure if that's an option. Why delete the tokens? Wouldn't it make more sense to instead switch to another map, and then copypaste the tokens onto there?

cut and paste seems like it would make more sense to me so as not to have several copies of the same token

Ah, because of persistent values like hp?

HP is a big thing that would make sense

That stuff should be stored in the character sheet view, not the actual token.

Character sheets are independent of maps, but tokens are map dependent

Here's the fancy way: Once you set up character sheets, you create a new token and then link it to the character sheet. Then every time you click+drag from the character sheet onto the map, it creates a copy of the token.

hmmm I see

I only just know how to use Roll20 as a player, no use asking me.