Rise of the Return of Live Gaming!!!!

 I've been letting the Cypher Supers stuff dominate the blog for a bit, but I have plenty of non-Cypher Supers stuff to blog about, too. Specifically: we returned (again, and again!) to live gaming once more for the Wednesday night group. It was very cathartic, and was a reminder once more of how much is "lost in translation" with the online VTT experience. Our preferred live venue is a local game store (Ettin Games) which has some very nice play space and isn't too noisy. 

It was, in many ways, necessary, for lots of reasons....the online experience was just clearly not cutting it. It was also nice to see old friends in the flesh once again, and to ...you know....move around and walk outside and stuff. The pandemic is over, after all, and Covid is now just a fact of life like the flu, a thing we must live with, so being able to once more participate in RL was an immense stress reliever.

Sure, we started this a few months back then got rudely interrupted by everyone catching Covid, but this time feels a little more permanent, like we're all well and truly ready to make this happen. We've all weather Covid at least once now (some two or even three times) and just about everyone is up to date on vaccines and such, so it seems unlikely we could be any more prepared. Either way, it's sort of worth it....the ability to gather online and try to be heard on substandard communication channels is simply no replacement for actually just being in the same room.

Anyway, the plan now is permanent live game Wednesdays going forward. Now I just need to figure out how to make that happen on Saturdays again! Unfortunately on Saturday night we do have players who have health conditions that make them worried about going out in the wild, so that does necessitate VTT for that game. I have, however, been considering the possibility that maybe I can run a live afternoon game which incorporates my son, and maybe some other friends and family, as he is at an age now where he actively enjoys the hobby and wants to be more and more involved. He and I recently ran some short test sessions of Level Up! A5E RPG which were extremely fun, we basically replicated a bunch of Mortal Kombat characters and let them loose, and we're quite grokking the A5E vibe. I need to write more about that later....but the idea for the moment is maybe doing a live Level Up! session on Saturday or Sunday in the early afternoon. Need to go by the game shop and see what their attendance looks like in the day time. 

Seven Reasons I Prefer Tabletop (even as my state is probably going to go full lockdown again...)

 Talking about why one does or does not like VTT (virtual tabletop) gaming can be a tricky thing.....what usually happens is you are really critiquing VTT in ways that it fails to replicate the experience at a live tabletop, or you critique the extras that it brings to the tabletop which may only be possible in VTT, but done better in other ways.

My recent return to gaming in a live environment has helped me to clarify significant reasons as to why live tabletop gaming provides for a more fulfilling experience, using seven short and easy reasons:

1. You can actually look at someone who is talking to show you are focusing on what they are saying. Even better, the table can see this and other players will react in context.

2. More than one conversation can be had at once (with people recognizing when they need to talk quietly about plans on the side and such).

3. If you did not plan to TPK the party and would prefer the dice fall where you want them to to insure a good time is had by all rather than watch the group disintegrate under a wave of arbitrary RNG misfortune, you can do so.

4. If someone has an issue or is upset/unhappy/needs help you can easily identify that through a range of visual and verbal queues.

5. You will (almost) never feel like you are talking in to the void at the game table. You see who you are talking to, and you know who is listening (and not playing a video game on a second screen).

6. If you are in a public space when gaming you can meet actual new humans who may want to join your game. The vetting process is much more empathic and efficient due to the actual range of physical and verbal communication at play.

7. Small talk before/after a game can be about fun stuff instead of technical issues.

BONUS!

8. Don't ask why, but TotM (theater of the mind) style combat/event resolution seems to go much, much more efficiently at the live table.* On VTT the white space demanding you fill it with virtual maps and minis is like a black hole into which all creativity is crunched up and spat out in the form of nominal tactical gains and amazing lighting effects (at the potential expense of an interesting mental picture and narrative).

*Presumably for my style of DMing, but as always YMMV.

The Secret to Success with Roll20's RNG

 It's become something of a joke that Roll20's random number generator for dice doesn't seem to like the players much. The reality is that it's...well....probably averaging out where it realistically should, and the GM occasionally does see a bad streak of rolls too, but of course GMs get to roll a lot more dice over time so those bad luck streaks often die out soon enough.

In games that are player facing like Cypher System, you might think this would lead to better averages over time (or as many hills as valleys at least), but this doesn't always seem to work out. Some of my players are about fed up with Roll20, which can seem to give them alarmingly consistent failure streaks. 

I have a theory about this, born of my own player experience in a related VTT, Astral. It goes like this:

Some players are cautious, and tend to build "average characters" who can do a lot of stuff reasonably well, but not much stuff very, very well. I'm often one of those....if you've ever built a Call of Cthulhu character, for example, who rarely had more than 50% in a skill, but also ended up with a lot of below 50% skills as a result, you might be one of these.

Other players suffer from a different problem: they don't really learn the game they are playing, or they miss the key elements of the system that help them out. These players might often try to do things and fail but miss opportunities to improve their odds of success or overlook strategies that could help them out. Some simply try to do things they probably shouldn't, or misunderstand their characters' abilities.

In VTT environments there's an entire other possible category: setting up your die scripts and forgetting modifiers of relevance. It's less common, as other players with better familiarity may catch your error, but it could happen.

A final category are: players who don't get the quirks of their GM. This one's pretty basic, but if you as a player know your GM frequently calls for history, society or perception tests then maybe you shoudl focus on those skills. This is a bit metagamist, but it's a valid strategy if your personal goal is "succeed at die roll tests more often."

Anyway, the result of these examples is players who fail more often than not at die rolls and are often quite flustered about it. I have at least one player who I feel is a combination of two or more of these situations, as he tends to learn the rules through play but overlooks the strategic elements of, as an example, how the die pool risk/reward mechanic of Cypher System plays out. If you play Cypher System like any other old RPG you are essentially doomed to failure. Conversely, when we play Pathfinder 2nd Edition I feel that most players (even the ones who are a bit shaky on the mechanics) tend to succeed about as often as you expect due to the fact that Pathfinder's probabilities and math are shockingly on target. If everyone is failing miserably in a Pathfinder 2E game on Roll20 it may say more about the GM than it does about the system or Roll20's RNG!

So what's a strategy for success? Well, here's some advice, and it may apply beyond VTT with virtual dice, too:

If you want to succeed, and your system allows it, try to find those 3-4 things you really want to be able to succeed in and max them out as best you can. If you're playing Call of Cthulhu and you want to spot hidden as often as possible then jam points in to it. You will sacrifice broad versatility but gain greater average success in those things you are good at. And it should go without saying: when you play the game, try to do things that are relevant to those skills!

Understand the game you are playing. Make sure you appreciate the probabilities so that when you are in combat or a tense encounter with die rolls that you think about your odds of success before you take on a task. Understand that if you make a Level 4 Speed Defense roll in Cypher without buying it down that the odds of failure are 55% but if you just spent some Speed you could reduce that failure rate to 40% or less. And when the dice still go against you....it's okay. You tried. The game is, ultimately, a game and not a wish fulfillment engine; we have video games for that.

As GM, make sure you are mindful of realistic encounters for your players' level of expertise and understanding. If your players seem to be struggling with understanding the mechanics (and the odds) then try to tailor the experience a bit as a teaching lesson. Coaching players with some learning encounters can be a wise move. Remember! You don't have a GM screen and you can't fudge dice in a VTT environment (well, not easily, as far as I know). As such, you need to respect the mechanics more, and the arbitrariness of the dice more.

  

Roll20 and the Compendium Resources (aka are those expensive VTT books worth the buy?)

Roll20 has a number of resources available in its online shop, though surprisingly not as many as a competitor like Fantasy Grounds can offer. What Roll20 lacks in content of this nature is made up for by inherent flexibility; you can run just about any game with it so long as someone takes the time to craft a character sheet for you.

As it happens, since it looks like my regular group will be gaming in Roll20 for at least the rest of May and (with any bad luck) June, I decided to investigate the rulebook compendiums on offer for Pathfinder 2nd edition. Worth noting right off, there is a way to link up your Paizo account. When you do this, it immediately gives you some decent discounts on the Roll20 rulebooks. The $49.99 rulebooks, for example, are $38 when you do this. I have only ever bought these books in PDF format from Paizo before, so I don't know if proof you bought a physical copy generates an even better discount.

I started with the book that had the most obvious potential at the virtual game table: The Bestiary for 2E. It was available immediately on unlock, and proved to be a wealth of immediately accessible resources. As a GM, here's what the purchase netted me of immediate and great use: all of the Bestiary monsters in the Compendium, each with the ability to pull standard stat blocks/text of their descriptions, as well as an NPC sheet format that lets me "one click" any action or ability to generate relevant rolls and ability block details. You can also drag and drop to create the icon for the monster, and basically gain roughly all the perks a player has on their end, but for your monsters.

The Bestiary for 2E on Roll20 is the full content of the print book, too. If you do not own it in any form, but planned on gaming only through Roll20, then you will find this book does everything you could want (except detach itself from Roll20). For some gamers, this may be more than enough. I know that just having this content loaded and ready makes it much likelier (and easier) for me to stick with Pathfinder 2E as my virtual system of choice.

I next loaded the Core Rulebook and the Gamemastery Guide. The intrinsic value of these tomes is slightly more ephemeral. You get the ability to directly reference and share content with your players, and you gain entries with full "use at the table" properties for the many magic items, relics, artifacts, NPCs and other details....but with the caveat that prior to loading them the base Roll20 game still gave me the 2E OGL content to reference anyway.

Additional content includes official NPC and player tokens and lots of compendium details on the many special optional rules in the Gamemastery Guide. Both books in total feel very complete, but I think as a GM on a budget you could ignore them and stick to the print or PDFs and not feel like you're missing out. Since I happened to have the cash it was worth it, but if you could only buy one tome, the Bestiary will provide the most traction.

One downside to Roll20 is that while it does offer the rules tomes, it seems to be way behind setting up the Adventure Paths. I am guessing that no one in the VTT business anticipated that in March of this year they would suddenly be the #1 resource for gaming across the country. My understanding from digging around online is that Roll20 does the VTT adaptations and they are way behind; this is a shame, as whether you ran the modules straight up or not, those would be great additional purchases for the compendium, since there's lots of useful content in the modules you can use as-is or pilfer for your own purposes. 

Anyway....the price of entry for VTT compendiums is a bit on the pricey side, and you can use Roll20  just fine with print or PDF books. But, if you want the full luxury experience and every official iota of Pathfinder 2E at your fingertips, then the compendium books are a nice addition to your virtual collection. I may cave and get the Starfinder books next.