As I’ve alluded to in several posts, the first game of D&D 3.5 that I ever played in was done over IRC, with people I met online. We had two chat rooms, for in and out of character chat, and most in-character actions were done with the /me command. Everyone wrote out their actions in full sentences, and as a novice roleplayer forced to write everything out, a lot of my early roleplaying was pretty painful.

* Suzku draws his scimitar, hissing through grit teeth, “GOBLINS KILLED MY FATHER!”

Still, it was fun. It really did feel like we were telling a collaborative story, the way everyone was writing. People were being very descriptive. Another benefit was that every session we played produced a log of everything we had written, allowing us to review the sessions, even today.

One of the things I hated most about the text-only format was that you couldn’t interrupt people. I know it’s considered rude in polite society, but sometimes your characters are rude, and sometimes they need to interrupt people! While everyone writing up entire sentences describing their characters actions made the sessions seem more like a collaborative novel, each message was individual, standalone, and definitive. Very rarely did someone go back and say, “I would have interrupted you there and said…”, as everyone was more interested in advancing the story as opposed to revising what was already written.

Having to type everything out also slowed things down a lot, as you’d expect. Not only was everyone spending time crafting perfect little sentences for their characters, things ended up being very “reactive.” While writing your line, oftentimes someone else would finish theirs and it would greatly affect the conversation, and you’d want to change what you wrote. It took a lot of time to have a back and forth, and we ended up doing up doing a lot of decision making out of character.

We played several adventures this way over about three years. My first character, Suzku, lived and died before I ever heard the voice of my Game Master. Several others wandered around Nate's original campaign setting of Annwyn, killing snow-goblins and trying to survive in an ice-age world one line of text at a time.

After a summer hiatus, most of the the group and a new player came back together to play through Paizo's Rise of the Runelords adventure path. We moved from D&D 3.5 to Pathfinder, playing through the various beta phases, and tech-wise we upgraded from IRC to Skype and MapTool. There was an immediate and noticeable improvement in our in-character interactions, and I was very happy to have the ability for my cheeky halfling monk to cut off my friend's rogue from time to time. Moving from text to speech also allowed more of the subtleties of language as well, changing our intonation or muttering something under our breath. This probably seems silly to someone who grew up playing across from their friends at a table, but for someone who played exclusively online it was a whole new level of interaction. Nate's masterful impersonations of the clumsy goblins attacking Sandpoint had us all laughing ("HORSEDOGGIES!"), and I quickly began to feel that my monk really did have a voice.

Due to various real-life issues and multiple hiatuses for Nate to go adventuring around the world studying ancient ruins in real life, this group played for over five years, but we managed to run the adventure path to completion, from the sleepy town of Sandpoint all the way to the Spires of Xin-Shalast. I definitely felt more engaged with my party and with the story itself, and I largely attribute that to being able to hear everyone speak. The NPCs felt more alive and real when Nate voiced them, and when someone did something funny in character we could hear everyone laugh.

After another break and with some player changes, the group got back together to run Paizo's Legacy of Fire adventure path, and we again upgraded the communications technology, moving from Skype to video-enabled Google Hangouts. By this point webcams were everywhere, and the free video calls offered by Google were too tempting not to play around with. Just as it was before, when we added voice to our games, video was completely transformative. Nate's hapless goblin and silly gnoll voices were greatly enhanced by comedic play-acting, and everyone in the party was constantly gesturing, making faces, or otherwise demonstrating how their characters looked during various scenes. Some of us even started using props! Again, this is something people who play around a table may take for granted, but it was pretty awesome to be able to do all of this when no two players lived within three hours of each other.

Another interesting side-effect of seeing everyone's beautiful faces is that players stayed more engaged with everything, and things tended to move quicker than when we had been playing on Skype. When playing on a computer with people hundreds or thousands of miles away, it's very easy to get distracted. While playing on Skype we noticed a lot of people asking for things to be repeated, or not being ready to declare an action on their turn in an encounter, but when you're looking your friends in the eye and watching the GM pantomime exactly how the hulking gnoll brute is lurching towards the party, it's hard to not stay in the moment.

We’ve been recording our play sessions for years now, and we’ve started sharing them publicly to drum up interest in our tools and services. Here’s one of the recent playtests of one of our VTT-ready Tempest adventure modules, The Rescue of Doniert Ironvale.

It has been over a decade since I first began playing roleplaying games online, and my group and I have run the gamut of digital communication technologies during that time. I had a cleric-abolitionist that died trying to free child-slaves in a world of text, a halfling monk that slayed the Runelord of Greed with his voice, and I am currently slaughtering gnolls with a sylph mystic theurge in a bi-weekly videochat that truly feels like I'm meeting up with my friends around a table. Each innovation brought with it an incredible enhancement to the way we were playing online, and I am eager to see what's in store for the future.

Maybe I'll have to buy everyone a pair of Occulus Rift goggles for the next campaign.

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