In Person Games: Easier in my Experience

This past Thanksgiving I ran a brief foray into the Tomb of the Serpent King (which as an aside is an excellent adaptable and low prep OSR adventure) in person with several family members. It’s really only the second totally in person session I’ve ever run—the closest was a hybrid of a couple players at the table and one virtually joining. The rest of my games have been online. While there’s absolutely nothing wrong with VTT solutions, and I did miss being able to toss out maps or images for reference. But overall, it was significantly easier to run using a small whiteboard for rough maps and relative positioning. I have four unpainted minis a friend 3D printed me, which I used as proxies for the characters. The monsters were other items as token stand ins.

I was struck by the logistical ease of much of the play. Rolling dice and doing simple math (we used Shadowdark as our system) was quick and made sense to the players. It was easier to help them understand how the game mechanics worked in practice while sitting face-to-face. I did discover that pacing and standing was easier to GM and help them quickly than parking myself behind my screen (my screen is pretty tall). The screen then truly became my curtain to hide the notes and levers I pulled to run the game in Wizards of Oz fashion. Matt Dietrich’s Guide to Shadowdark Monster Statistics gave me a one page table that removed any necessity to consult the core book for monster stats. I just improvised the monster based on the level I felt appropriate in the chart (this is something I intend to leverage more in 5e going forward with the same type of chart from the Lazy GM’s 5e Monster Builder Resource Document from Sly Flourish.

Overall, I felt better able to respond and adapt in play while communicating with players face-to-face. It was significantly easier to teach two completely new players how to approach a roleplaying game than any of the previous eight players I’ve worked with virtually. It was also nice to simply hand them a copy of the book when they went to buy gear in the nearby village to solve a trap carefully.

So while I’m certainly not going to stop playing games via VTT anytime soon, this experience definitely showed me that at least I can achieve unique successes, particularly with newer players, while playing in person. For me, it may be the easiest way to teach a new RPG system, and particularly to introduce one using pen and paper sheets.