Hey online gm bros. How do you plan/prepare an online game?
define game
>>92743714sessions for 5e or pf2e campaigns
have you tried playing an older edition of tsr dnd
>>92743723my interest is piqued. Please regale me with your tabletop tales using your edition of choice.
>>92743695I run games from my smartphone because most of my players are either too broke or too busy to use a battlemap, so theater of the mind has dictated my combat, which means I can write my notes in an app, a pdf for the core book, and maybe a printout sheet or picture for a GM screen
How about them sandbox games? How do you run them? Do you just throw every battlemap/token you have on a vtt and hope they come in handy at one point?
Online games have literally never worked for me. Everyone quits after a few sessions.
>>92743695Not very well.
>>92743695>>92743903I've never ran sessions for 5e or pf2e, but I've run plenty of pf1e in foundry and it works well for me. Much better than Roll20 at least. For the campaign that I'm running with my group right now once a week, if there's a question about where or what to do next at the end of the session, I try and ask my players during the week what they want to accomplish or where they want to go next (almost like a west marches game, if you're familiar with that). Then i just plan accordingly with the needed maps and tokens, with some extra misc maps that might come in handy (for example, if the party's going to a desert, i prepare a selection of desert maps with varying terrain heights like mesas, cliffs, or man made structures). If all else fails and there's no map that fits the scenario, there's always the fall back of having a blank map with drawn terrain and objects. Tokens i usually don't stress too much about, just grab some artwork from somewhere, toss it into gimp and make some edits like removing the background and such, then throw it into the campaign directory. I use some generic looking humanoid tokens as a fallback, in case my party deems some random passerby to be the next thing they pursue. Any additional notes i try to write down either in my obsidian.md notebook, or on my physical notebook (though i still have the habit of keeping all the session plan locked in my head).As a side note i do know my group IRL, but we've all moved apart from each other, so online stuff is just easier in the long run for us. I've never played with randos online so i can't speak to that experience.
