Actual play: Tabletop to FG during COVID

[PikeWake]

(TL: DR summary: Old farts have weekly game sessions, forced to switch to FG due to COVID-19, stuff happens, FG related stuff follows)

About fifteen years ago a close friend of mine came to me and said “We really need to do something that doesn’t involve staring at a screen”. We’re both IT professionals and spent a lot of our free time playing computer games and watching movies, so I got the point.

We had a few false starts with board and miniature games, but eventually agreed that even when career and family were limiting our time, we really needed this, so we reserved a weekly time and created the “Tuesday Society”. The whole point was having Tuesdays, from 19:30 onwards, reserved for gaming. No late meetings. The kids had to have someone else watching out for them. My wife had to accept that our dining room was occupied every Tuesday night.

The turning point was when we remembered that our best gaming experiences were in RPGs and that I had been GMing games for many years before life caught up with me. We invited a mutual friend and started an Ars Magica campaign. Eventually, my oldest friend and one of my original RPG players joined in and we had a real long term campaign going. We had all played RPGs, more or less since our teens, but now we're all in our late forties/early fifties.

Skip forward five years. The Ars Magica campaign was puttering along, but as a GM I was feeling a bit frustrated. The players were enjoying the action parts but not really getting in to the “long game” of Ars Magica. As the resident GM, I decided to go the opposite direction and paused the AM campaign. Instead, I treated them to a couple of sessions of Dungeon World.

Behind the scenes, I was an early customer of Fantasy Grounds and had bought a lot of the Savage Worlds content. We even did a few trial runs, early on, to see if that could be an alternative when one of us couldn’t be present (which happens a lot, with two of us working in global companies, and three of us have kids).

When the DW trial turned out to be a great success, I suggested a SW Deadlands Reloaded campaign. In terms of game mechanics, it hit the sweet spot between Ars Magica and Dungeon World, and I knew that my players would appreciate the setting.
So, we started out playing the DLR Blood Drive campaign, and the players loved it!

When we finished the final part of Blood Drive, we all agreed that this was a great system/setting for us. As a GM I saw the campaign as a trial run. After that run I had no issues with introducing “The Flood” to the players.
About five sessions into “The Flood”, COVID-19 struck. Two of us got the symptoms early, and one of the others have a partner who’s in the high risk group. Our weekly sessions at my dining room table… not an option.

Lucky me for already having all we needed for continuing our campaign online! I bought all the DLR content on FG years before we started playing.
I quickly converted the PCs from their character sheets (good thing I told the players to leave them at my place) and we could basically pick up from where we left our latest “IRL” session and switch to using FG and Discord.

I’ll post follow-ups on how we did. We used just about every feature of FG, and have comments on them. (hint: we're having a blast six sessions in)

[Dr0W]

That's great news that you are using FG to make it work for you.

I had a similar situation, but curiously opposite. For over 10 years now, I've been a digital DM only because I found out that face to face games were sucking too much time of my life whereas playing online would only take 3 hours weekly. However, this year I had decided to start a face to face game with my friends. I had everything set up, and being a veteran using FG I used it to manage the face to face campaign, roll my attacks through it and have an exact copy of my players' sheets in my computer. So I use it to attack their characters digitally, and they roll their obsolete physical polyhedron and tell me their results. This way I got even some of my friends who are completely All Thumbs to play while I keep using my computer.

Then Covid struck. My friends were afraid, their other gaming tables came to an end and were put on an indefinite pause. Did we stop? No. Since it was all ready, their characters were already on my FG campaign, it really was a matter of they log in the server, assume their characters control and keep gaming.

[PikeWake]

Interesting.
I was not using FG for managing our face-to-face sessions, but had some tools on my laptop, e.g. Heromuster, for managing encounters.
Right before we went to online session I was actually planning to switch to FG for keeping track, but for some reason I never got it installed on the laptop I use when GMing. If I had, the transition would have been even easier.

[PikeWake]

Some general findings from the first sessions:

It is a great idea to run a FG "tutorial" before staring play. Even though two of my players had used FG before, they needed a reminder on how the basich stuff works and also introduction to the new features.
If any of the players are using a laptop or other small screen: Take some time talking about a good placement for windows, especially for encounters using maps. I made a suggested layout with the mini character sheet, the map, a one-column right toolbar, and most of the chat window (the bottom part) visible. It worked out fine except for the one guy who insisted on having the combat tracker open.
Establish a "workflow" for combat encounters. The main thing that slowed us down was when we had to re-roll attacks made without having the target set correctly or clicking on the wrong die (the skill die, not the attack die in the combat section). Re-applying modifiers, adjusting ammo and clearing out mis-targeted attacks are not helping with the flow. Now I ask the players to follow the pattern: "State actions, Set/confirm target, Wait for the go-ahead from the GM, roll attack(s)." When everyone started doing that, combat went a lot smoother.
We still haven't found out a good way of handling re-rolled attacks using bennies. Maybe we have missed something, but "resetting" everything (ammo, one-time effects, etc.) by hand before re-rolling the attack is easy to mess up.
Automatic gang-up bonuses does not work well for us. Incapacitated and "removed" characters are included in the bonuses. We disabled that function after the first few fights with hand-to-hand fighting.
On a similar not: Blood markers on the map mess up targeting for the players. If an enemy moves to a spot where there already is a blood marker from a defeated enemy sometimes makes targeting on the map impossible. The players only get the defeated character as a target option when dragging dice or using the mouse to set target. In those cases I have to set the target for them in the combat tracker.


With that said, the transition from tabletop to virtual was a great success. Our homebrew combo of the SWADE and DLR rules worked fine in most cases. The only hassle was with the Hexslinger, but that arcane background is broken anyway :) (Happy to see that they are fixing that in the SWADE version of DLR).
The first sessions included a few fights with around 15 characters on relatively small maps and we got through them with only the minor glitches mentioned above. Everybody were happy to be able to continue our weekly sessions, and the worries that it wouldn't "feel right" soon went away.

Up next: A big fight that didn't go as well as the previous ones.

[Grendel111111]

Some general findings from the first sessions:

It is a great idea to run a FG "tutorial" before staring play. Even though two of my players had used FG before, they needed a reminder on how the basich stuff works and also introduction to the new features.
If any of the players are using a laptop or other small screen: Take some time talking about a good placement for windows, especially for encounters using maps. I made a suggested layout with the mini character sheet, the map, a one-column right toolbar, and most of the chat window (the bottom part) visible. It worked out fine except for the one guy who insisted on having the combat tracker open.
Establish a "workflow" for combat encounters. The main thing that slowed us down was when we had to re-roll attacks made without having the target set correctly or clicking on the wrong die (the skill die, not the attack die in the combat section). Re-applying modifiers, adjusting ammo and clearing out mis-targeted attacks are not helping with the flow. Now I ask the players to follow the pattern: "State actions, Set/confirm target, Wait for the go-ahead from the GM, roll attack(s)." When everyone started doing that, combat went a lot smoother.
We still haven't found out a good way of handling re-rolled attacks using bennies. Maybe we have missed something, but "resetting" everything (ammo, one-time effects, etc.) by hand before re-rolling the attack is easy to mess up.
Automatic gang-up bonuses does not work well for us. Incapacitated and "removed" characters are included in the bonuses. We disabled that function after the first few fights with hand-to-hand fighting.
On a similar not: Blood markers on the map mess up targeting for the players. If an enemy moves to a spot where there already is a blood marker from a defeated enemy sometimes makes targeting on the map impossible. The players only get the defeated character as a target option when dragging dice or using the mouse to set target. In those cases I have to set the target for them in the combat tracker.





For Bennies once you attack or do damage that you want to reroll pick up a bennie and drop it on the character sheet where you rolled the attack from.
I turn off blood markers as there were previous people saying they got gang up bonuses being affected. Make sure you are working out the gang up bonuses right too as they changed from Deluxe to SWADE. Now if you are in an enemies threat area you don't give a gang up bonus to the allies attack.

[PikeWake]

For Bennies once you attack or do damage that you want to reroll pick up a bennie and drop it on the character sheet where you rolled the attack from.

Hmmm... I tried that, but it doesn't seem to work. Due to DLRs use of Fate Chips instead of normal bennies, perhaps?

We kinda like the blood markers, but I think I'll follow your example and turn them off since they cause both the ganging-up and targeting problem.

We do use the SWADE ganging up rule, but play it mostly by ear. It is often clear from the situation on the map if someone is "available" for ganging up or being threatened or engaged by another character. Got an "Honorable" PC as well, who refuses to gang up on people, so we usually remember to check.

Thanks for the help!

[PikeWake]

The only session so far that I would deem a “failure” involved a bigger fight, both in terms of the number of characters involved and map size, than what we had run before. I will try to avoid spoiling “The Flood” so let’s just say it was in one of the Savage Tales and the mission for the pose and their allies was to defend a settlement from several waves of attackers. At most there were about 45 active characters on the map.

I know that game sessions rarely turn out as planned and that you have to be able to go with the flow as a GM. The first couple of rounds of this session really proved that point and I was frantically trying to incorporate the effects of some freakishly high rolls in a row (from both sides) in the story, to avoid derailing it completely. I am not afraid of fudging my own die rolls in case things get too improbable, but here it would have been too obvious that I was “cheating”. So, at round three I had a lot of tweaking to do to synch up with planned events in later rounds.

The next issue was that the players had a really hard time keeping up with the situation. We hadn’t had the “screen estate” discussion yet, so they were scrolling around the map (on small laptop screens), zoomed out to the point that the tokens were really hard to identify without hovering over them, getting lost and misunderstanding my descriptions of what the NPCs were doing. All that scrolling, moving widows out of the way, and trying to identify characters by hovering the mouse pointer over them also caused a lot of unintentional clicks on the map resulting in misplaced tokens and unintentional targeting. We weren’t using locked tokens at that point, so you can imagine the chaos.

The other issue has nothing to do with FG but made things worse. We usually bring beer to our game sessions and an appreciated part of the socializing is trying out new craft beers or our own brews. This tradition is still alive in the online sessions, and we take some time to chat about good and bad finds. We try to avoid the strongest ales, since we play on weekdays and can’t come to work with hang-overs, but it happens once in a while that some of us can get a bit “unfocused” towards the end of a long session. Of course this was one of those nights.

At the tabletop, it’s easy to see if someone is getting a bit tired or tipsy, losing their focus. Usually I try to wrap up the session quickly at that point. Being online makes that a lot harder, especially when you’re coping with the things mentioned above.

At the height of the battle I was frustrated, the players were confused and quickly losing focus. One player made a really poor decision, moved his character out of cover and almost got himself killed. I have no idea if he made that decision because he misunderstood the situation on the map or if he was just getting drunk…

Another player did what I should have done way earlier and said “We’re probably getting too tired to finish this.” And with that we ended the session.

So why didn’t I break earlier? One reason was that due to a weird error at my ISP we hadn’t been able to play for three weeks. We all really wanted to get a game going, and breaking off almost immediately after beginning would have felt like a huge anticlimax.

Lessons learned:

Make sure that the players are up to date on the tools for navigating and performing actions on the map before you start an encounter.
Also check that the players understand the situation and can follow what happens. Ask them before each turn if they really have seen what is going on on the battle map. If not: take a short time-out and update everybody on positions, active effects, movements and so on.
Even though I try to avoid this in my tabletop sessions: Ask the player if they really understand the consequences if they are about to take a “suicidal” action like leaving cover in the line of sight of several armed enemies with d8 to d10 in Shooting.
Ask everyone if they are still in the game. Also make it clear that anyone can suggest ending the session, not just the GM.
Lock the tokens. On big maps it helps a lot with avoiding accidentally moving tokens, and on smaller maps it helps visualizing player movement better.


The next session started with an OOC-walkthrough of the tools for managing the maps and actions on it.

Next we reviewed the situation in the ongoing fight, making sure everybody had a clear picture of what was going on.

When we commenced the fight, the turns just flew by. We did fifteen turns in the same time it had taken to do two turns the previous session, and that was not only due to having fewer characters left on the board.

The posse won the fight. Bennies and advances for everyone, and all the confusion and frustration was gone. Any problems we’ve encountered after that have been minor in comparison.