Combining in-person and VTT-over-the-internet gaming

I have the unfortunate situation where two of my players, a couple, are moving out of state soon. I want to continue the game with them in it.

My thought is to run Fantasy grounds and have the people in another state play along on Fantasy grounds and use a TV as the gaming table. My worry is the audio.

I am imagining mass chaos with two people on mic and the rest in person with me trying to negotiate that whole mess.

Has anyone dealt with this and found a reasonable solution? Having everyone running Fantasy Grounds at their place isn't really an option as at least one player isn't really tech-savvy at all.

Thanks in advance.

While I don't have real world experience doing this to share - I had been giving some thought to running something similar for the same reason you have encountered. One thing I thought might be useful was to run voice and video - hoping that the visual clues would help in reducing some of the cross talk. ...that was my working theory anyway. It seems to work well with some of the streamers,

Yea, it's not nearly the chaos you fear. I've done this, and still do quite a bit. It's not much different than a web conference, and I (and many many other people) do those all the time.

It just takes getting used to it. You (or another local person) may need to remember to occasionally ask the remote players what they think/say etc. And, they can also use the chat to through out ideas and you just have to watch for that. By your third session you will have no problems.

This is how my group has played ever since we banded together a couple years ago. We use Zoom for the Audio/Video and FG for the VTT. I have a TV set up at one end of the table with the camera looking back at the table. This way we can naturally (or as close to it as possible) make eye contact with the remote player. We use a USB conference mic/speaker for the input/output so there's no audio feedback loop on our end. Zoom handles the full-duplex audio rather nicely and the mic/speaker picks up everyone well enough.

I have a 'player' instance of FG running on my computer and put it up on the second screen (next to the remote player's video) for the local players to see the maps, images, etc, and they use physical paper and dice for the gameplay. I move their characters around on the map as they direct. We tried having everyone bring a computer and use FG, but it was too much for them, so we went back to pen/paper/dice for the local players.

The biggest problem we have with the setup is when the players bring some chips or something and set the bag next to the mic. lol