First time playing online

Until this week, all of my tabletop roleplaying has been done face to face, most of the time literally at a table.  (I've done play-by-post type games on forums, but it's not really the same thing.)  However, on Monday I had my first go at playing a tabletop RPG online.

We normally play on Tuesdays at the MK RPG club, but this week the GM was unavailable, so we agreed to try a remote game the night before.  We already had a Discord set up, which handled the voice chat.  Everything else was done on Fantasy Grounds.

I was slightly concerned about the chat, it being more difficult to deal with interruptions and people talking over each other when you can't see anyone in person.  But it actually worked well, and had the additional benefit that Discord lets you adjust each person's volume individually, so I had the quiet people turned up to the max and the loud people turned down a little.  I could hear everyone clearly without seeing their faces.

The only problem was recognising voices.  While the GM has a distinctive accent, and I obviously know my husband's voice, telling some of the others apart was a little tricky at times.

The GM uses a lot of handouts in this game, and that's the area where Fantasy Grounds really helped.  Rather than having to print everything out, he could just push the images onto our screens.  Eventually my screen became so littered I was starting to wish I had a second monitor, but it was certainly better than sharing one paper copy between the table.  (We are absolutely the kind of group who like to over-analyse images.)

Fantasy Grounds also provides a battle map, which the GM had decorated in advance.  We were all able to move our own tokens around, and didn't have to worry about anyone with twitchy legs suddenly shaking the table and knocking everything awry.  (You know who you are.)  Along with a turn order display, this all helped make the combat go smoothly.  Turn order displays are something we could really do with in actual tabletop games, but I've rarely seen a GM actually use one.  Something to think about if I run a game with turn based combat.

The dice roller also worked well, and it was very convenient just being able to click a button on the character sheet to set the correct number of dice rather than having to count them each time.  The RNG hated us, while absolutely adoring the GM's monsters - but it's not like that kind of thing doesn't happen with real dice.

To me, the biggest downsides are the amount of work the GM had to put in on top of the normal game prep, and the fact that he had to have the Ultimate version of the software to be able to host a game for the rest of us using the demo version.

Being at my computer the whole time I found both a negative and positive thing.  On the one hand, it's full of distractions, even more so than my phone, and there was a bit of extra effort required to keep focussed on the game screen.  On the other, it made it very easy to make brief notes throughout the session, meaning I got the game write-up done in record time and didn't have to keep adding bits I'd forgotten.

While I can't see any of this replacing the cameraderie of getting around the table, it worked better than I expected, and I feel confident that I could enjoy playing online games in the future.