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Lazy Friday Video Post: D&D Session with Skype

I recently stumbled upon this video and found it very intriguing. One of the players obviously couldn’t make it to the gaming session, but was able to join the fun using Skype. And from what I can see, not much more than a computer with a webcam and Skype is needed. I think I will to try this out sometime.

What are you experiences (if any) with something like that? Have you ever used a video conference to add a player who couldn’t come to the regular meeting?
Stargazer

Michael Wolf is a German games designer and enthusiast best known for his English language role-playing games blog, Stargazer's World, and for creating the free rules-light medieval fantasy adventure game Warrior, Rogue & Mage. He has also worked as an English translator on the German-language Dungeonslayers role-playing game and was part of its editorial team. In addition to his work on Warrior, Rogue & Mage and Dungeonslayers, he has created several self-published games and also performed layout services and published other independent role-playing games such as A Wanderer's Romance, Badass, and the Wyrm System derivative Resolute, Adventurer & Genius, all released through his imprint Stargazer Games. Professionally, he works as a video technician and information technologies specialist. Stargazer's World was started by Michael in August 2008.

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Sunglar

Interesting… We recently had a player move, not too farm but far enough that he can’t regularly make it to games, and we considered this possibility. It should be pretty simple theses days.

Way back in the early 90s (1994 or thereabouts) we tried to do this kind of set up when one of my best friends moved and left the game. Then the set up was a little harder, the connection was slow and we eventually gave up on it.

Good friends of mine have a virtual player that plays them via the internet and a webcam every week. They’ve gotten the bugs out of it and it’s a regular weekly thing for them.

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Voidman

I consider a working solution to (inevitable) dispersion of gaming buddies to be one of the Holy Grails of the hobby. A few years ago I was hit very badly by my group shooting off in three different directions and Skype looked very promising to create a conference session of sorts. However 1 to 1 communication proved to be somewhat disappointing and unreliable: lag, breaking connections and poor quality (and I work a lot with voice during the sessions) we've never gone ahead with that. I think I'm waiting for the internet to reach roughly the same standard in all Europe, or our group reunion whichever comes sooner 😉 It's worth testing definitelly especially if only one participaant is away but for more than that – probably no non-enterprise grade option is available (yet). Still best of luck.

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TomB

I've run Skype games for about 3 years now. We're working on the video/camera side of it – I usually just send maps as filles using a simple executable HTTP server I can throw up, drop a file on, and my players can pull it.

Skype, if you've got a good connection, is good for gaming audio although you may get some issues with some audio setups (one friend has a laptop that always introduces 'hum' into the channel).

One of my friends has skyped in from: Kandahar Afghanistan, Stavanger Norway, Kingston Ontario, somewhere in Dubai. He managed to play through NATO missions out of country, often on off days at 5 am or late in the evening, but our Stargate game kept flowing smoothly (he was the team leader and he said op planning for missions in the real world gave a real feel for the Stargate experience… esp when he had to don 'full battle rattle' and go places).

I regularly run from a different city than my PCs (although one Skypes in from the far reaches of my city). One Skypes in from Virginia Beach, USA.

Over Skype, I've run or participated in:

Traveller

Stargate: SG-1

All Things Zombie

3.5 D&D

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