In my new Red Hand of Doom (RHoD) game, I am experimenting with meeting in real time for adventure, fighting, and puzzles, and dealing with town business via a large chat room. I need a way to track time asynchronously, because RHoD is a campaign that requires the DM track time fairly closely, but other than that, I am hoping it will let the players engage with the world a bit more deeply than world. I’m also trying to use MapTool over the internet (it’s usually just a battlemap on my TV, but it has a ton of bells and whistles) for the first time, and failing miserably. I resorted to sharing screen-shots via discord and that worked fine for a battle, even if it was a touch slow. I am hopeful that I’ll have my connection issues sorted by next session.

This comic outlines the reasons I want to deal with town via text fairly well. I have no problem at all with players engaging with an NPC in a deep, enthusiastic way. It’s cool and fun. What isn’t cool and fun is when this engagement comes entirely from 1-2 players, leaving the others to bang their heads against the table, wondering when they’ll get to do anything.

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