I wanted this post to be about how I am digging GM’ing 13th Age, but we had serious issues for our first session. The trouble with RPG sessions usually center around people not showing up rather than any sorts of technical problems, which is what we had last night with our first session. To give you perspective, we started things off at 8PM and called it at 10:45PM or so; a good 2.5 hours plus– and we were playing online– NEVER a good idea if you can help it. We can’t so there we were.
First, we were using Roll20 and whatever voice chat system they implemented– it simply doesn’t work or in the hour or so spent with it, it didn’t. We switched to Steamchat with voice but could not get everyone to hear each other — as in one person could hear everyone, another person could hear everyone but one person and so on. It was a complete communication mess.
One option in Roll20 is to use Google Hangouts, and I know that shit works– however, the account that I use with Roll20 has been BANNED by Google for not adhering to their names policy. Since we are Google’s product, we’re not a sufficient product unless we use a real name on our account… but I have MANY google accounts and only one uses my real name so I don’t know what the issue is there. You think I want to use my real name for all this shit? Am I some attention whoring millennial?
In terms of game played, it was just terrible progress. I had to work on some characters a bit but to give you some perspective of how little game we actually got to play: at the start of each session of 13th Age, you roll Icon relationship dice to see what Icons are somehow involved in the session– , this is a roll of 3 dice per player and I wrote down the results, this was the ONLY thing we were able to get done in terms of the adventure proper.
In terms of planning, I figured we would get through the ENTIRE included adventure in the back of the book…
