Advice for Running Long-Term Campaigns Online

The other day, all-around likeable dude Chris Wilson sent me a message:

“I know you’ve been running a successful Google hangouts campaign for awhile now, and I was just wondering if you have any advice for me to get a similar campaign started?”

This isn’t something I’d ever really thought about. After two and a half years, On a Red World Alone definitely qualifies as a long running online campaign, but that’s not something I set out to accomplish. I have no program for keeping it going aside from simply responding to problems as they’ve arisen. None the less, Chris seems to have found the conversation useful. Perhaps the same advice can be helpful to others as well.

The most important thing is to Keep Showing Up. Everything else I have to say could be distilled down to this single point. Campaigns end when the referee gives up on them. If you surrender to your first bout of “setting fatigue,” your campaign will be lucky to last 6 months.

There have been times when ORWA bores me. Days when I just don’t feel like running very much. I push through those times because I enjoy hanging out with my players, and because I know my boredom is temporary.  I know that in a month I’m going to come up with a cool new idea. When I do, I’ll be happy I still have my weekly ORWA session to inject it into.

On a Red World Alone will end someday, but it won’t end because I’m bored with it. It will end because I’m satisfied with it.

It’s also essential to understand that Your Players Won’t Keep Showing Up. That’s not a judgement on them, it’s just a fact of life. No group of adults will be able to consistently keep the same night of the week available for years at a time. People drop out. Presently, ORWA only has one and a half of its original players. I lost most of my starting group within the first 6 months, and since then there have been multiple “generations” of the party. Some of the later players have become more essential to my idea of what the game is than the people who were there with me at the beginning.

If I have more than a couple sessions of low, or no attendance, I go recruiting. I get out there on g+ and let folks know there’s room for them at my table. Sometimes it takes a couple weeks to find someone, but it’s worth the effort. I’ve had 16 different players in ORWA over the years: some dropped out after a few weeks; some are still new recruits themselves; some played for many years but have moved on to other things; some have returned to the game after long absences. Only one player has been part of the game consistently since its beginning.

To mitigate players dropping off, I do my best to Make The Game Part of Everyone’s Routine. In my experience the most common time to lose players is when the schedule is unpredictable. On a Red World Alone happens every Wednesday from 6pm to 9pm PST. That time has never changed, nor have I ever taken a hiatus away from it.

That isn’t to say we’ve never missed a session. In the 132 weeks since we started playing, we’ve only played 101 times. Sometimes Wednesday is a holiday, and we cancel the game so people can be with their families. Sometimes I can’t avoid needing to work during our normal game time, or I’m too sick to play. Sometimes I show up, but none of my players do.

These things happen, but it’s always handled on a week-to-week basis. The session is always assumed to be on until something disrupts it.

In terms of Organization, my games work pretty much the same way that everyone’s games do. I set lofty goals for myself and constantly fall short of them. Somehow the game hasn’t completely imploded yet, and is still a lot of fun, so I can’t be doing everything wrong.

The first step I take in any new campaign is to create a new community for it on Google+. A place where the players and I can talk about the game without any distractions. It is insanely useful, and is easily my #1 organization tip. Beyond that, I can divide my campaign documentation into three groups: the player’s guide, the public records, and my private notes.

The Player’s Guide is a document I throw together which contains all the house rules we will be using. I don’t have any of the ORWA guides available for easy sharing, but the guide I wrote for Fuck the King of Space is a good representative example. Don’t be intimidated by the 23 pages of writing I did for that game. I use a TON of house rules. The original ORWA player’s guide was much less impressive.

Public Records start with the play reports, where I note down everything important that happened during a session. I acknowledge that my style in this is wildly excessive, and creates a lot of useless documentation that nobody will ever use. Do not emulate the way I write play reports. A good play report can be much simpler than the ones I write.

Out of these play reports I copy some information into various threads. Some are more useful than others. For example: any time a new spell is created, I write it up in the play report, but I also copy it into the Spellbook thread. I do the same thing for any guns that are discovered. I have thread for recording the player’s activities during their Haven Turns, and threads for recording which sessions various NPCs have appeared in.

Finally there are The Referee Notes. Nothing too surprising here: it’s a document with all the tables I use, as well as a few notes about what certain NPCs are plotting, etc. Most of the details about the world just live in my head, same as any other referee. Occasionally I’ll need to stat up a monster or doodle a map. I have a pocket notebook where I write all that stuff.

Some issues are unique to running games online. I use Google Hangouts for a few reasons. Habit is the biggest one, but it’s also easily accessible to people I know through Google+, it’s good at supporting multi-user video chats, and is more-or-less reliable. That being said, Google has definitely been treating the service like an ugly stepchild, gradually making it less and less and less useful over time. I’m hopeful that Discord will be able to replace hangouts, but last time I tried it they still had way too many issues with multi-user video chats.

(Please: no one proselytize to me about Roll20. I do not care.)

In an online chat it’s important to realize that everyone’s voices are being pushed through the same set of speakers. Because of this, everyone gets flattened out to the same volume. It’s not possible for two people to lean over and have a side conversation, or for multiple people to talk at once and remain intelligible. The group needs to be good at giving one another space to speak. They also need to acknowledge that this puts increased pressure on people who are shy. If someone looks like they’re trying to say something, do what you can to give them the space to speak.

Don’t make a big deal about not being able to see people’s dice. Some folks get completely bent outta shape over this, as though it’s impossible to play unless there’s some shared dice roller application. It is pathetic. We’re playing D&D, not craps. There’s no money on the line. Who cares if someone fudges a roll? All they’re doing is damaging their own experience.

If someone showed up at my table saying they rolled an 18 in every stat and a 20 on every attack…so what? It’s not going to save them from making stupid decisions, and the only one who is gonna have any less fun because of it is them.

Audio issues happen. People are going to cause some echo or some static. It can be pretty dang frustrating, but you gotta be understanding. Take some time at the start of the session to let people know they’re causing an issue, and give them a chance to fix it. Often having them put on headphones is all that is required.

If it can’t be fixed and it’s a minor issue, try to live with it. Sometimes people live near the train tracks. It annoys them more than it annoys you, so try to be cool. If someone has a major technical issue which is disrupting play, it’s okay to ask them to leave until they can get their gear working.

People are absolutely going to get distracted. They’ll have you open in one tab while they’re looking at their g+ feed in another tab. It happens, just roll with it.

Finally there’s Mapping. At some point you’re going to need a way to communicate the environment to your players visually.

I’m fortunate to have a 25 square foot white board on my wall which I can easily direct my camera towards. It makes mapping a breeze. By far the simplest method I’ve ever seen in many years of online play. If you can set something like this up, I highly encourage you to do so.

If you can’t, some folks screen share their maps using an image editing program like GIMP. If you add a black layer on top of the map, you can slowly erase it as the players go along, revealing what they see. I’ve always found this method painstakingly difficult, because you can’t see the map any better than your players can. There’s always the risk of revealing something you don’t want.

There’s also Digital Whiteboards, such as RealTimeBoard. It’s a powerful tool. Not only can you draw on it, but you can also upload images & PDFs, place post-it-notes, etc. I’ve played in games that were run entirely through the RTB. John Bell has spent a lot more time with the service than I have, and has a few good posts describing the best ways to leverage it for your game.

The downsides to RTB is that everybody needs to create an account, and will need to be invited via email before they can access the board. Also, the company has been scaling back their free service gradually over the years in favor of a paid subscription. It’s not terribly expensive, but it may not be something you want to do just to play D&D online.

That’s all I can think of. I hope it is helpful.