fub | RPG-a-Day #4

4 – Where would you host a first game?

These days, all of my gaming is with geographically dispersed people. So the first game will probably be online. If it’s in a work context, then we will use whatever video conferencing platform they use. In all other cases, I use Discord — it’s not perfect, but it works good enough, and it has the advantage that it also includes an asynchronous chat for things like scheduling. For dice rolls and character sheets, we’ll use Roll20. It has a ton of support, and I have a top-tier subscription so I can do all kinds of fancy stuff with macros.

I think that, for a first game, a virtual tabletop is actually superior. Yes, rolling dice is a lot of fun, but the character sheets automate so much of the various rules procedures that a player can just dive in. They just click on the skill they want to do, and don’t need to roll, add, subtract and compare. The rules should just fade into the background, and automated character sheets help with that.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.