Brent P. Newhall's Blog
Role-playing – Apr 2009

27 Apr 09 – Skype

A few weeks ago, my role-playing group tried to add a virtual player.

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Wait. Back up. One of our regular players went off to college. Worse, she's one of the best role-players in the group. I pined for her.

For those of you unfamiliar with tabletop role-playing: A bunch of friends sit around a table. One of them lays out a situation, while the others pretend to be people in that situation, and narrate their reactions to the situation.

So, physical presence is important. A simple phone call won't suffice. Moreover, we play with miniatures laid out on a wet-erase mat to illustrate everyones' physical placement in the scene (especially relative to the occasional nasty monster). You need to see.

So we decided to try setting up a Skype webcam-based video conference call with her. I brought my laptop, connected to Skype, and placed the laptop on a few books. She came online, I called, she accepted, and after a bit of fiddling with audio and video settings, her head filled the screen.

I was worried. Had been in the weeks leading up to it, and was while I set this up at our table. It's undoubtedly just my prejudice, but when I think "free videoconferencing," I think of jerky footage, stuttering audio, and a dropped call every ten minutes. Webcams still kinda suck, my geeky side declaims, and audio/video quality over a college network tends to sound and look like RealVideo streams from 1999. And if we had a mediocre experience, we'd soldier on through the session rather than drop one of our best players. I grit my teeth and prepared to wrestle with technology.

It worked perfectly.

Besides the aforementioned technology issues (especially when we switched laptops, and the second laptop had a microphone worse than mine), we played normally. The technology mainly faded into the background, and we just talked and narrated and had fun.

Of course, it wasn't exactly like having her in the room. Humans just aren't used to talking to a flat screen that's filled with a smiling human head, and she couldn't pick out everything we said.

This is now simply part of how we play; if you're physically not there, you can always call in via Skype. And with the second laptop (and a better microphone, hopefully), we can add another distant player.

The technology works.

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21 Apr 09 – What is the City of Talon?

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In the real world, The City of Talon is a role-playing setting. It's a 107-page PDF that describes a fantasy world, including physical locations within the city, well-known residents, the history of the city, etc. It can be used in pretty much any pseudo-medieval fantasy RPG, and is also a great inspiration for authors; Talon makes for a great setting for a story. The PDF is a US $5 download from DriveThruRPG.com.

Within that document, Talon is a bustling, hectic port-side city. It's relatively new, and highly mercantile. Duke Malinare runs the city with a strong and very involved hand, but does little to disrupt trade. For money is the lifeblood of Talon.

I've developed dozens of characters who live in Talon, from the influential judge Sirrah Mortiss, to commoners like the kind healer Sera, to killers like Alphonse the Slayer.

I've laid out dozens of places within Talon, from the elegant hills of Bloodoak Row to Ged's Slaughterhouse to the Sanctuary of the Nearly Damned to the sprawling Pits beneath the city.

I did it to create a tiny world, and to give people a chance to live in that tiny world for even a few short hours. I did it as a creative exercise, and a chance to make a little money.

And it's worked. I've made a few bucks, and a few folks have checked it out. I'm proud of the document, too; it's well-organized and contains quite a few helps to potential GMs (including character stats in several different systems). I made sure to include a number of things I find important, such as a full index, a full table-of-contents, and many links and references within the document. If one character description mentions another character, there's a hyperlink and a page reference right there. I also created some effective, full-color maps.

If you're interested, feel free to check it out, and let me know what you think.

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14 Apr 09 – Gunwave Reborn

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I really need to get to bed right now, but I just couldn't help sharing this. I've just released a serious upgrade to my mecha anime-inspired tabletop RPG system, Gunwave. It's a fast, fun, exciting game that lets you play angsty teens during an epic space war.

And it's all free. Check out the PDFs on gunwave.net, stop by the forum, and let me know what you think. It's still in beta—need to do a lot of playtesting and get lots of opinions and just generally add some more cool stuff—but it's playable and fun right now.

Hope you enjoy.

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