My Hangouts game got through character and crew creation last night with (mostly) success. I’ve got 5 players in a crew of Thieves – Whisper, Spider, Cutter, Hound, and Leech. As you might expect, here are my inevitable ramblings on how the session went.
1. We had about a 2-hour session, with maybe 90 minutes of that being actual Blades stuff. Trying to get people set up with Dicestream in the “classic” Hangouts mode, audio checks, toggling in and out of different browsers, all that was expected but it was still cumbersome. If not Hangouts + Dicestream, is there a better option? Roll20? Skype?
2. Trying to name a gang is waaaay harder than naming a starship, you guys. They eventually settled on the Dead Setters over email today. They may have to be based out of Catan Street.
3. Many players jumped for the “ghost” or “weird” options on the character and crew sheets (and if they didn’t, it was a hard choice not to). Kudos to John Harper for such an evocative setting. They took Ghost Echoes for their Thieves ability, with Ghost Mind (Whisper) and Ghost Contract (Spider). They’re planning on specializing in hijacking spirits and making off with the weird shit that other gangs won’t touch.
4. I think we had the most fun choosing the faction relationships. That’s a great way to brainstorm out a starting situation and give players authorship over the setting. Nobody doubled up on any one faction but with 5 players, it’s a fairly nuanced map with a lot of fingers in a lot of pies. We ended up with +1 with the Crows and -1 with both the Lampblacks and the Red Sashes.
5. The 1 contact, 1 rival thing is pretty great too. On paper, I thought having this limited set of choices would feel weird but it cuts out so much creative fatigue. I found myself coming up with plot hooks immediately, instead of worrying about names or skills for these people on their sheets.
I’m excited for next week’s game. I gotta learn the actual rules by then. 🙂
I have not been playing online lately, and will be very interested in the response to #1.
Also, the ‘Gang does weird shit other gangs won’t touch’ sounds like a great thing to start with. Seems like that could provide for some awesome/amusing NPC gang reactions. “You’re with them? Do you know what they do?”
> If not Hangouts + Dicestream, is there a better option? Roll20? Skype?
Man, let me know if you find one. I have similar struggles with non-technical players. Plus, new hangouts has much better bandwidth usage and quality than old.
Currently we’re using hangouts for audio and video, but Roll20 for dice and character sheets. I miss the lower third, though.
Thanks for the feedback! Your crew sounds like a lot of fun.
I’ve been using Zoom + Roll20, because that’s what Adam Koebel uses as our host. I’m pretty happy with that setup.
Oh, and for #2, I totally agree. 🙂 I’ll have a short list of crew name suggestions in the book to maybe help that process.
I’m going to sound like I’m selling this thing, I suspect, but I really dig it, so;
My group uses Slack for online tabletop stuff. It condenses everything into a good place, you can save files, players can have their own space to save their sheets and anything they want, the GM can save files into private channels, etc. You can use whatever voice-chat system you prefer, though Slack does have a number of plugins for voice and video conferencing. (Note: I still just use Skype and Steam for voice chatting, so I can’t vouch for call quality, I just know the api’s exist)
It has integration with all kinds of other stuff (for example, Google Docs), and plugin support for scripting, etc. So if you’re willing to dig a little it’s not hard to find dice scripts so that you can just type a command into your game room and it’ll spit out your roll results. You can pin character sheets via Google Drive, or images so they are accessible. It runs in your browser (there’s also desktop and mobile apps which are fantastic), so it’s super easy to access.
It’s also free, which is nice.
Things it won’t do:
1) Allow you to dynamically modify images within Slack, so you can’t move pieces around or draw in real-time. Personally I am content to use a web whiteboard for that, but there’s other software which is better suited, obviously.
2) Natively support dice. You will have to go through a tiny bit of effort setting up a bot to run the dice scripts you want. Fortunately Blades is super easy and any old dice script should probably suffice, but Shadowrun or Eclipse Phase or other complicated dice games would probably require some adjustments.
3) Keep an infinite log. You will eventually lose old messages. It takes a while before it starts trimming (Slack’s free version will store 10,000 messages before it starts removing old ones), so it’s not like you will lose messages from the start of a session. But if you like to keep logs you will need to do that manually.
Crew name suggestions would definitely help, although I think part of the paralysis is there’s no real tiebreaker. We had tons of names but like, with spaceships there’s usually one player who’s a captain or pilot with a little more weight to their vote.
I definitely can’t let them bog down in planning. 🙂
I also realized what kind of a friend would I be if I didn’t spew out those names here? Maybe it helps someone.
Reclaimers
Wraiths
Devil Divers
Dusk Devils
Ghost Dogs
Gang Plankers
Ghast Monkeys
Grimsby Gents
Grim Grifters
Gristmillers
Bone Doctors
Lost Souls
Caskers
Hullers
Tommyknockers
Grimmers
Grimtop Grinders
Blacktops or Blacktop Boys
Forgotten Five (or Fearful, Fearless, Fateful, Faithless, Furious, Fraudulent, Felonious, etc.)
Tomb Daddys
Dead Setters
Grey Cloaks
Blackboot Boys
Wight Hats
Lich Kings
Phantom Street
Screwtapes
Dead Ringers
Liars’ Keys
YOLOUYAG ( you only live once unless you’re a ghost)
Thanks, Adam!