Rialacha Teach Mhorgunna

Attachment 17365

"... So we can learn to pick ourselves up."

I think I have died and gone to Valhalla.

Last week I wrote about my first gaming session with more than one player. I had been so excited over the possibilities of not only having more players, but being reunited with friends. One of these friends, Will, is one of my longest time friend ... since seventh grade. I played with Jim since he was 16. I wanted everything to go right. Will's son Kevin and I have been playing for around a year and both of us were pretty confident. And if you read my first post ... you know things fell apart.

Now let me state right here. This was in no part a Fantasy Grounds issue. There were 3 mistakes I made:

1.) We were using Google Hangouts ... the video chat. It worked well enough when there was just the two of us. The four of us brought the system down to a crawl.
2.) I tried to do character creature with multiple players all at once. My bad. Bad judgement on my part.
3.) More than one on one tutorials is not efficient. It probably takes twice as long.

So the first thing we did was switch to the discord chat system. It came to my attention as I subscribed to GeoQuester on Patreon. It is I believe, what he he uses for his streaming. The system is lean and mean. It provides a means of control, allowing control of access and content. Though we have not used it to any extent, I like the fact that there are options for different channels to use. I currently have a channel, besides the general access one, for the administrators, common talk and even one that allows secret discussions. While it took about a half hour to get the practical grasp of discord, we I am sure, can go on from there. Even with our fumbling ... it was agreed to be an improvement by all.

Before the Tuesday night session, I went back to my adventure set up and completed the character sheets. That way, come the next session we would be able to just jump right into play. I also went on line and added an image of a street scene, an old man and of couple of sound bites to flesh out the story line.

Lastly, with Kevin there to help out his father, Will, I could concentrate on helping Jim. Double team and one on one all at the same time.

The adventure went well. Jim is a very aggressive player, so it's a very good thing his character of choice is the Barbarian. We did not finish the first encounter with a large group of goblins. Both Will and Kevin had the death saving throw experience but still had fun. At the end of the night (we went a half over our allotted time) I asked the group if they were good and if they wanted to leave the practice campaign for the ongoing one. Will did not even hesitate. His response was, "Can't we finish this one? I want to see how things turn out." Jim went on our Facebook group page and urged others to join in on the fun. He also stated his intentions to run his own Fantasy Grounds games.

Thursday we should be able to finish up the tutorial. From there ... onward and upwards!