Prior to the stay-at-home orders of the past couple months, I had never played a tabletop RPG online. I blame a combination of fear and snobbery: I already hated seeing myself on screen and hearing myself on podcast recordings, and I didn’t want to have to adapt my beautiful and perfect skillset (ha). It always seemed like a compromise, something almost as good but not the real thing. Non-alcoholic beer, sexting, the Lord of the Rings movies.
Well, given a lockdown of uncertain duration, I had to either get off my ass and learn things or set gaming aside for a few months. So I got off my ass.
I’ve been running Adrian Thoen’s Impulse Drive online for my regular in-person Tuesday game group for a couple months now, and I’ve learned a lot. We have a long way to go and so much more to learn – I’m constantly bugging Gauntlet superstar Rich Rogers for advice – but I’ve picked some stuff up. If you’re facing a similar plight (or want to know more about Impulse Drive!), read on.
The First Time Is (Never) Magical
I’m grateful I started playing online with a game I had less investment in. Our first go was The Nightmares Underneath, an interesting OSR/PbtA hybrid fantasy game from Space Wurm vs Moonicorn designer Johnstone Metzger. I like his aesthetic! And I’ve had good luck with a couple OSR and OSR-adjacent games in the past, specifically Kevin Crawford’s Godbound and Stars Without Number. Heck, I even occasionally run a B/X game for my daughter.
Well, The Nightmares Underneath didn’t work out for us. It’s got a lot of weird bespoke systems, but more importantly I was also learning my way around Zoom and staring at myself on camera and juggling shared screens. But it was a chance for me and my players, only one of whom had ever played online before, to figure stuff out. It lasted a session but the experience was invaluable.
Here’s what I’ve put together so far.
Character Keepers
I had no idea what a Character Keeper was until Rogers introduced me to the Gauntlet’s vast library. The very short version: they’re shared Google Sheet documents to track character data. That’s it. But spreadsheets are a whole realm of document I know next to nothing about. I had no idea they could be so pretty! And functional, holy cow. There are some character keepers – like the one we’re using for Impulse Drive – that do so much behind-the-scenes math and interactivity they’re practically apps.
The longer version is that character keepers have evolved into campaign managers, with tabs for every kind of data you could imagine: NPCs, locations, timelines, whatever. My players have enjoyed having everything at their fingertips – and each other’s character data specifically – that we’re thinking about how to replicate this at the table. I don’t love screens at the table but it’s something I might go for.
One fact my total reliance on the character keeper has highlighted is that I need to be mindful of the range of players’ setups at home. I have three screens (ridiculous, I know) and a rocket-fast gigabit connection, but I’ve also got players on laptops with sketchy wifi. So I’m trying hard to keep things simple on their end, no matter how elaborate my setup is here.
…But Also Paper
I tried following the advice of my gaming bestie Mad Jay Brown, who uses Trello to manage his various online campaigns, specifically Into The Mad Lands. He’s a (literal) pro at this! But he’s also accustomed to using Trello for project management in his non-gaming life. His brain works in a Trello-compatible way. Mine does not.
I still use a notepad and paper to track stuff in the game. On occasion I move my notes to a shared Google Docs file. Different games might need different management tools, so I’m still on the lookout for one that might work for me. Paper and pencil is a tough form factor to beat, though.
Zoom (Or Something Like It)
I know the pandemic has shoved several videoconferencing platforms into the mainstream, but Zoom is the platform I settled on. Why Zoom? Mostly because people I know and respect with tons of online play experience are happy with it.
I’ve been using Zoom for a couple months now and it’s good. The company had some squicky privacy policies they were forced to address early because of the explosion of civilian videoconferencing, but the audio and video have been bulletproof.
I also love the shared whiteboard functionality of Zoom. There are lots of similar free-standing solutions out there – Jamboard, Kumo, Padlet, Miro – but I like that it’s already right there, ready to be used. I purchased an inexpensive drawing tablet so I can doodle more naturally. Excellent tool when I need it. It’s a fairly robust drawing program (freehand, shapes, text, colors, pen widths and colors, all that) that exports a .png when you close. You can even run multiple whiteboard pages at once. If I could share and import whiteboards from previous sessions it would be ideal. Maybe it can, and I haven’t figured out how yet.
Sharing Screens
Besides the whiteboard/drawing tablet thing, I’ve fallen in love with sharing visual aids. I’ve got a Pinterest board where I dump inspirational images, for one. There’s a move in Impulse Drive called “Into the Abyss” that’s very similar to “Open Your Brain” from Apocalypse World, for example, and every time a player invokes it I share this marvelously spooky animation while the move plays out. I also have carefully “cast” dozens of NPCs, which helps me characterize. I share images to set the mood for locations, to show off alien artifacts, kind of everything I think might come up in a session. I haven’t tried sharing audio files yet, and it seems like more trouble than it’s worth, but I might!
I lost the theatrics of drawing a big sprawling relationship map but image-sharing has mostly made up for it.
Shared Dice
This one’s a matter of taste: As a practical matter, I know many experienced online gamers prefer to just let players roll dice at home. I really like the theatrics and tension of everyone watching dice roll, though! So we’ve been using Shane Liebling‘s rollforyour.party, a free and very handy site that generates a unique URL each time you open it. Share that URL with your players and boom, you’ve got shared dice. No clatter or animation, but I still like to see the results.
Shorter, More Structured Sessions
The big surprise for me was how exhausting videoconferencing is. I’ve never had to do it professionally. My wife does, and she has to take big breaks after her hour-long slogs. Well, our first and only session of The Nightmares Underneath was a full four hours! A combination of excitement that we were actually doing the thing, and getting to see all my friends again for the first time in a couple weeks, made me drag it out too long. Bad idea. I also forgot to account for potty breaks.
Combined with struggles with an unfamiliar system, I just felt wrecked and frustrated afterward. One of my players, who spends many hours a day on Zoom professionally, asked that we back it down to three hours with a bio-break around the halfway point.
The shorter session has been really good for play quality, I think. I start the meeting 30 minutes early so folks can log in when they want and shoot the shit. Then it’s time to focus on play. I have the clock in my face at all times, so I can adjust the tempo and scene-setting more carefully. I don’t let scenes run too long, while also making the scene (hopefully) more specific and framed: here’s where you are, here’s what’s going on, who’s there, who’s joining you? When we’re at a live table, I often let scenes meander and breathe a bit. Mostly that’s good, and we don’t notice because it’s not exhausting. They might get bored, but that’s a different issue.
Clearer Social Signals
The other skill I had to learn fast was clarifying who I’m talking to at all times. Literally everyone on the screen is seeing the same thing when I talk, right? They can’t tell who I’m looking at. I’m embarrassed to say how many times this came up: I’m looking right at Jason but somehow everyone thinks I’m talking to them. Dumb!
There’s so much missing bandwidth when you’re online, right? No meaningful body language. No directing my voice and face toward specific players. The very slight delay between video and audio throws me off all the time. It’s hard to feel the table, you know? So we’ve all learned to be much more explicit. This also has highlighted an ongoing issue at my table, where one player character will zip off to do something on their own, and neither I nor the other players will think to contrive a reason for other PCs to be there. Because I’m already having to direct my cues toward specific players, it seems a lot easier to remember to ask who else is there, if anyone wants to tag along, and so on.
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My home group finished our season of Impulse Drive this week. We played it entirely via Zoom, character keepers in Google Sheets, rollforyour.party for dice, and Pinterest. It was my first successful run at playing a tabletop RPG online. I learned a lot about online play, and I’m looking forward to the next online experience. I can safely say I’m over my online play fears.
Click here to read the first half of my deep dive into Impulse Drive. I describe the meat and potatoes of how the game works there. These are my closing thoughts and I make several references back to it. Go refresh, I’ll wait here.
Good? Let’s do it.
The Pleasure of a Formal Finale
Bringing our game to a satisfying end reminded me that we frequently don’t do that. Far more often I just give up on a game, get distracted by something shiny, give in to impatience. Bad habit. I’ve shut down many games that needed to push past a hump.
I’m not sure what the inflection point is. For us it was around 10 sessions. Everyone was fluent with the system (even the little-used moves), their character options, and understood my interpretation and style of using the rules. Everyone’s storylines had momentum, so players could express their characters in more subtle and less urgent ways. We understood the setting better, including its underlying metaphysics. Every interpersonal connection had solidified – the pilot and the bounty hunter’s shared interest in professionalism, the pilot’s fear of the weird alien AI’s judgement, the mystic’s connection with the AI over their outsider-ness, and so on.
Arrrrgh!
A satisfying finale is, I think, satisfying because it’s your last chance to complete patterns. But to make the finale grand, you need to be willing and able to imply very large patterns leading up to it. The pattern-completion of each move playing out is a tiny little hit of happiness, but closing out the accretion of 40-50 hours of bits? Oh boy, it’s the final jigsaw puzzle piece being dropped into place. Actual, physical relief.
One thing that makes Impulse Drive play out one (and only one) campaign/season is that each playbook’s Calamity list includes a move that will take your character out of play, one way or another. It’s a neat, variable alternative to “retire in peace.” Two of our characters, the bounty hunter and the mystic, got to end the game with them. The bounty hunter faced off against the recurring villain with one final “only one of us walks away from this” move…and against all odds, missed. Astonishing. He rolled against his best stat – +3 – and missed. It was perfect. Meanwhile, the mystic had to burn through so much Stress to survive during the grand showdown that he picked up two Calamities, which allowed him to narrate taking over his mystic order and his sister becoming an estranged apostate of the same order. Marvelous.
It’s a Crew Game, but #notallcrews
“Space adventure” is a sprawling genre, particularly in the scamp freighter vein. We had chosen the smuggler ship playbook, which is baseline Impulse Drive. While fun-loving troublemakers are easy to understand, though, I think Impulse Drive forgets the genre also centers on frequent low-level conflict among the crew: Mal and Inara’s on-again-off-again relationship, Luke convincing Han to rescue a rich girl, everyone versus everyone every episode of Farscape. Sometimes everyone’s on the same page – particularly when they’re on mission – and sometimes they’re not.
The greatest ship crew ever conceived. I will not be taking questions at this time.
PbtA type games, especially when they’re close to Apocalypse World’s baseline, are tricky to maneuver through when it comes to PvP type conflict. All my players are experienced with Burning Wheel, and BW is our gold standard for fair-but-tough PvP play. The Duel of Wits system lets the players mechanize and resolve their arguments without any GM input. Impulse Drive doesn’t offer that. The PvP advice in every PbtA game I’ve ever run, including ID, is simple: follow the fiction. But in terms of gameplay affordances, it’s easy to push against that.
Like straight AW, there are essentially two mechanized social interaction sequences: intimidation and manipulation. Intimidation is in the Go Aggro vein: make a real threat and asking the target to force your hand or submit. Manipulation requires you have something on offer in return for agreement. Those choices are fine when it comes to pushing against NPCs. They’re less good against another player, because they both demand the target give up agency. There’s no counter-offer in the intimidate, and there’s no enforcement in the manipulate. Manipulate, in fact, is purposefully quite weak: the stick is that a PC must roll to get out from under it. The carrot half – XP if you do what I say – becomes non-incentivizing for reasons I cover below.
I mean, this is just how these games work without a ton of PvP infrastructure, like you find in Monsterhearts. What Impulse Drive is quite good at, though, is mechanically reinforcing a functional team. For example, you can support each other with a great move called “Lean on Me,” which covers both direct support and emotional comfort. It’s my current favorite version of helping rules, mostly due to the move being tied into the Stress rules. Not only can you provide help toward succeeding at the roll, you can also help them recover from Stress while you do it. Very neat. There are other examples of group decision type moves throughout the game as well.
Let us contemplate the fruit-filled gap.
On the other hand, leaving that gap in place is itself a design decision. If you’re not willing to actually harm someone, and you have nothing specific to offer, what does that leave the players? I know my BW-head players want a system cudgel, and not having one reflexively bugs them. But either the game goes on, or they dig in their heels and the game stops. This is also a legitimate outcome.
Story time!
We had an excellent moment in the game, near the end, where two characters had been acting like they were on the same page but were definitely not. Tons of marvelous dramatic irony, and the players reveled in it. But when the secret agent receives orders to get the mystic out of the way so the agent’s master can do a thing, the agent drugged the mystic and flew him out of the current system. The mystic eventually woke up, liberated himself, armed up, and got ready to murder the agent. Wow! But after some mystical psychic probing, he discovered the agent was following outside orders and would never physically harm anyone on the crew. That prompted a frustrating discussion.
The mystic wasn’t willing to blow away the agent, so no Intimidate. So instead he promised to mind his own business if only the agent would fly back – it’s the only thing he had to offer. He rolled Manipulate, but the agent got out from under it by succeeding at the Keep Your Cool roll. I think it cost a Stress, but whatever. So the players were left without a clear mechanical way forward. Interesting! I could have stepped in and offered something, but the real-world social pressure of both of them knowing the cost of digging in their heels meant they worked it out on their own.
Sometimes no system is itself the system. Sometimes frustration is okay.
The Long Game
As I suspected the last time I wrote about Impulse Drive, the playbooks are set up to play through one season of a TV show. It was a show with lots of little subplots, of course. Think Agents of SHIELD: three big acts within a larger arc. But the short list of advancements (you only buy from your own playbook, unlike Apocalypse World), the rapid pace of session-based advancement when sessions are short, and the list of Calamities you’ll eventually run out of all add up to a system-mandated endgame.
Would the game be improved with a … holy hand grenade? It wouldn’t not be improved.
To my mind, that’s a good thing. Because advancement is tied to missed rolls (Dungeon World style) and you use your Hooks to invoke more frequent misses and there are end of session questions, the shorter the session the faster the advancement. Everyone in our game of 12 sessions (or so, I lost count) advanced all five stats, bought all their playbook advances except each book’s “grenade” move – for real, every playbook has a special use of grenades, of all things – and most of their loadout slots. They did that a couple sessions short of burning through all their Calamities.
Our game shifted from lots of advancement-incentivized missing via Hooks, to all the stats improving, to everyone growing beyond advancement as an incentive and just killing it with boosted stats and no more Hooks. Which, you know, awesome. Love me some good competency porn. But since the Space Master (GM/MC) makes moves in the usual PbtA ways, I found myself grabbing more “when they expect you to say something” opportunities and making harder missed-roll SM moves because they were so rare. Giving up on advancement also meant the players spent less time thinking about and updating their Hooks at the end. If they had engineered better hooks I would not have minded a slower, longer focus. Ours didn’t, not really, and once hooks stopped mattering for advancement the players didn’t care about them.
The Work:Fun Ratio
It used to be fashionable in indie circles to loudly, angrily declare: “If the game doesn’t work, play a different game.” I think that has led to weird design choices, over-explaining rules, perfectionism and general paralysis among designers. It’s also led to much better, tighter, more focused design – even in mainstream games. Trade-offs! But as a culture-of-play value? I propose a different formulation: “If the game is too much work to make fun, find a game with a better work:fun ratio.”
Impulse Drive is an imperfect game. Its Apocalypse/Dungeon World origins are readily obvious if you’ve played either game. The new bits, like Calamities, stand out as novel. The bits of design tech from other games like Blades in the Dark (Stress, scene-scaled clocks) are also easy to suss out if you’ve played those games. In other words, the more different games you’ve played, the better you understand what Impulse Drive is trying to get at. You may need to help get it there sometimes.
The work:fun ratio to make Impulse Drive not just playable but fun is quite low, particularly if you’re experienced in the PbtA space. I would not suggest Impulse Drive as anyone’s first PbtA game, but third or fourth? It’s very easy to bridge over the game’s rough bits.
Parting Thoughts
In the end, I really enjoyed this campaign. I learned a ton about related subjects as well:
Character-driven PbtA play doesn’t really interface well with Stars Without Number style sandbox setup. Still a useful tool! But I learned a lot about both PbtA and sandboxes by trying to combine them.
Fruitful voids are still a thing, and I need to give the players space to navigate them (even if they’re frustrated with fumbling around).
It takes time for folks to get comfortable with a game’s systems, characters, and setting and situation. It’s almost always worth it.
There are notable technical upsides to online play, particularly the utility of a shared character keeper and the ability share screen media. I’m never giving up on live table play but I’m proceeding with online play with more confidence.
Clear endings are powerful enough that they’re worth intentionally pursuing.
Next up: still deciding! I’m leaning toward Imp of the Perverse. Which happens to be just $20 for the very beautiful book right now, by the way.
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Now that most of my local players are fully vaccinated, we’re slowly dipping our toes back into in-person play. And it is so weird and fraught.
I can’t stop thinking about all the stuff I learned to make roleplaying happen during the pandemic: video play, character keepers, Miro, screen sharing, dice rollers. I’ve developed a ton of skills in the one type of play I swore I was gonna fight tooth and nail. And here I am, a more-than-competent (I think!) online roleplayer. Now I’m thinking about the stuff that’s better online than in-person, and how I might adapt those techniques to in-person play.
Side Chats and Shared Screens
Parallel communication channels are an affordance I didn’t know I’d enjoy. Chat windows, shared Pinterest board, fun tricks with screen-sharing and voice modulation software — all stuff that’ll be effectively impossible to recreate at a table. Online play requires a lot of different kinds of work, and sometimes GMing online feel more like producing a TV show than facilitating an intimate social experience. I like it so much, though, that I’m thinking about whether a cheap flatscreen in my gaming space and a tablet to sync with it would be good, or distracting. No idea, and too expensive to try as an experiment. I could always try with a tablet, I suppose.
I’ve always hated screens at the table, so it’ll be interesting to see how habitual/fidgety players are gonna be with their phones when we can see each other. I won’t be able to sneak a peek at Twitter any more but that’s for the best.
Character Keepers and other Shared Information
If there’s one killer app in online play for me, it’s character keepers: shared character sheets, typically organized and at least partially automated in Google Sheets. I love being able to see most or all of everyone’s mechanical stuff in one place. Besides character sheets, you can also list all of a game’s moves, or equipment lists, a tab of NPCs with pictures, playbooks…the sky’s the limit and folks are constantly expanding on the concept. I’ve talked about character keepers here before. Tough to replicate at a table without introducing a tablet or laptop to the table, and that’s not a vibe I’m eager to bring.
In a shallow way, character keepers serve a similar function to name tents at a table. For at least some of my online players, keepers have been a bit overwhelming for them and they’d rather just focus on their own stuff. I’ll experiment with larger name tents, I think, where we can all see more stuff I want everyone to be aware of at the table. You can only fit so much on an index card! And everyone’s eyes are getting older. Maybe a GM screen type thing but in reverse, with everyone’s stuff aimed outward at me (and their totally not cheaty rolls hidden from my view).
I used to always do up a short cheat sheet of any new game I was about to run, as a way to learn and solidify the system. Creating a character keeper serves a similar function in my brain, with the added challenge of information design: should I put the “important” stuff higher, and what’s “important” anyway? How do I group related details? What elements can I leave off the keeper? What can I automate and how does the math actually work? Can I pretty it up without making it distracting?
Another tool I’ve enjoyed is using Miro to manage my relationship maps in real time. I don’t use a template, just a blank screen, but the fact the software reroutes connecting lines and allows you to label those lines? Pretty great. If I were more facile with my iPad + Pencil setup, I could do some very neat theatrics with in-person relationship mapping on the tablet. Since theatrics are, in my opinion, more than half the point of the r-map this is probably an area worth practicing.
What I think I’ll miss is building new Pinterest boards for quick screen-sharing purposes. No reason I couldn’t put that on a tablet, and I’ve met several players at conventions who keep big pin boards full of character art. But every time I put more stuff on a screen, that’s more screen time at the table. My intuition says that’s Bad, Actually but that might not be true. Another experiment I suppose.
Convenience and Shorter Sessions
Zoom can be hard on your brain, eyes, and body. My normal in-person tempo has always been 4-hour sessions, which is easy to break up as folks get antsy or uncomfortable, need to pee, refresh drinks, all that. But there’s that focused thing that happens when you’re on screen, and four hours feels interminable. I settled on 3-ish hour sessions, and honestly they felt great. It also was a little easier to meta-prep enough stuff for three hours of focused play.
Shorter sessions, combined with no commute time, is gonna be hard to give up. I really liked being able to just turn everything off, brush my teeth, and go to bed. Very nice. Gonna have to see if my new 3-hour tempo sticks.
The other thing about the convenience of online play is that it was so easy to pull together games from the whole wide world of players. Heck, I even ran an online con for my Slack folks, and got to meet a ton of folks I would not have been able to, probably even if cons were still live.
Unlearning Hypervigilance
Live long enough and hopefully you learn that every positive character trait can also be negative. One of the things I’m “best” at is table management: I’m very sensitive to engagement, energy level, reactions to input. I’m a pleaser. I give until it hurts. And sometimes it does! Lord knows, I have frequently brought games to a close (probably) too soon because I took the temperature of the table and found it tepid.
Turns out that’s been a mistake.
My home group played several games during our lockdown: The Nightmares Underneath (our learning game, wrong choice for our group before we knew how to play online), Imp of the Perverse, Shattered City, and Vaesen. Shattered City lasted a ton of sessions, much longer than I expected — I wrote a big wrapup deep-dive of it, made possible only because we stuck it out for so long. I’m certain that playing Shattered City online, and maintaining the vast trove of documentation that comes with it, is why it lasted as long as it did.
The flipside is that I’m hypervigilant in person. The screen makes it so I can’t quite pick up the cues I normally would. As a result, I mother-hen everyone less than I would in person. Real talk though? Reducing my hypervigilance is a change I need to bring to the table. I need to learn to ignore non-urgent cues that might normally derail the game. Tough balance to reach. Safety awareness needs to stay, panicking when someone rolls their eyes at my cheesy description needs to go.
Another factor I’ve seen is that the players are less engaged, which is good when play gets contentious. I’ve seen many moments in play where something that might have triggered an in-person argument just fizzles out because negative vibes don’t transmit through a camera. The downside of course is that it’s been really hard for my players to engage with each other the way they will at a table. It often feels like most interactions are GM-to-player, because player-to-player is hard to signal. Players actually talking and signaling to each other is going to be nice to return to.
Still A Long Way To Go
As of May 2021, our local, specific pandemic situation is pretty good, not great: 30-some percent full immunizations, 5.5% positivity in our county this week and creeping back to “high.” At one point not too long ago, my county had the highest rate of infection in the world.
Not everyone in my group is immunized yet. Combined with differing personal values and health situations, there’s some weirdness around who gets included and excluded, who attends and whose attendance forces awkward choices. I’m not browbeating anyone, but even that lack of browbeating is weird! It’s weird all the way down.
On the technical side, having to learn my way around online play has made me acutely aware of focusing my techniques for in-person play. Building and testing a character keeper is a lot more work than typing up a cheat sheet, so that taught me to be more mindful about what players actually need in terms of documentation and information sharing. Managing real-time changes to relationship maps is super fun and flashy, but it’s also resulted in losing track of old relationships and situations, something paper is naturally better for. Online shared dice rollers are fun but I also learned you should just trust folks to report their own rolls. Mostly, here a year-and-some into my online play, I’ve learned to pare back as much as possible, and that paring differs by game and by players.
On the emotional side, I’ve learned I miss in-person conventions much more than I thought I would. Those are still a long ways off. Maybe 2022? Hopefully? I read recently that we’re probably not going to get to herd immunity in the US, and we’ll just end up with a manageable cold/flu/COVID season and boosters. It doesn’t have to be that way though. I hope more folks will take their responsibilities as seriously as their rights.
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