I have been experimenting with GMing by means of the InterNet
since my gaming friends from university scattered to the ends of
the Earth, which happened in the early nineties.
The first thing we tried was RP by e-mail. But that was too
slow: it lacked interactivity and personal contact and turned out
like a giant, very complicated collaborative writing process. I
have archives….
Then when we got InterNet text chat we tried using that. The
problem there was that I am not a very fast typist, while everyone
else found that in text chat you can keep on composing
continuously, without having to hold you tongue while others are
speaking. As GM I got snowed under, everyone turned to side
chatter, and the game content drowned in badinage.
Next up was VoIP conference calls. I can't remember whether we
started with Skype or with iChatAV. That worked well, with two
slight problems.
(1) First was the lack of a table, scratch paper, hex mats etc.,
which meant that we couldn't use any rules that depended on
detailed positional information, and that it sometimes because
troublesome even to give general positional info. I took to
preparing maps and diagrams as graphics files and sending then to
players as needed. But it helped a lot that our preferred style of
play was highly narrative with little interest in tactical combat
rules.
(2) Second, and more trying from my point of view, was the lack
of posture, gesture, and facial expression as communication
channels. I found it surprisingly hard to understand some speakers
when I couldn't see their mouths move. (I had my hearing checked:
the doctor told me to get friends who don't mumble.) Also, we found
that there was some difficulty in cueing people as to when it was
their turn to speak. A couple of times I played with two or three
former military men, who used radio protocols. If you find that too
stilted, I'm sure that it would just be a matter of cultivating
such habits as diligently addressing people by name, addressing
remarks and questions to individuals, and a few tricks like
that.
Nowadays I do almost all my RP by means of InterNet video
conferences. I'm sure Skype would work fine on other machines, but
it doesn't do multi-party video chat on Macs. iChatAV is excellent
for the purpose, but it only runs on Macs. So mostly we use Google+
Hangouts as our videoconferencing solution. Results are very good
while each player has his own camera and stays close to his mic.
Background noise becomes a serious problem when several people try
to playing one room four metres from the webcam and using a room
pickup.
The chief lack is a way of quickly conveying a sketch-map or
diagram. We use a virtual whiteboard (such as Sciblink or Twiddla).
Results are okay, but it's a bit small, sketching is slow, and
accurate erasure is difficult. We're still trying to nut out a
solution in which a hex-mat on the GM's desk gets its own webcam
and channel. We did try using a suite of virtual classroom software
(called "Colloquy", I think), but we had technical issues with it,
and some players weren't happy about the involved installation.
