[Dragon Age] The Dalish Curse: Part 1 – An Online Game
Since playing Dragon Age last week, I’ve been wanting to do it more, but my GM, Enrique, is out of town for the holidays. I was sitting at home, very bored, on Saturday night, eating Chinese food (National Jews Eat Chinese Food Day) when I decided to run an impromptu game of Dragon Age online. I got a few takers but having never hosted an online virtual tabletop, I eventually decided to move it to Sunday night. Sunday during the day I sent out invites to a few people who had expressed an interest, and managed to get four players. At 11 PM EST (and with players literally all across the US), we got on Skype to play The Dalish Curse, the introductory adventure included in the Dragon Age Game Master’s Guide (no spoilers below).
As I mentioned, I have never hosted a game via an online virtual tabletop (VTT); I have played in games that have used MapTool, but someone else has done all the heavy lifting and I simply connected and played. I spent a good chunk of Sunday downloading both MapTool and Gametable, and fiddling with all their infinite nifty features — and there are a ton of them, nifties that would’ve made the game very attractive visually — but eventually realized that I’d been wasting hours trying to set up something that was way more complicated than what I needed it to be for a one-shot game. So eventually I scrapped the VTT idea and decided to use good ole Skype coupled with Google Docs for maps and info reference. I pulled the maps from the PDF copy of the GM’s Guide I have, pasted them onto individual Google Docs, and put together a Stunts reference sheet for the players, then shared the folder with everyone. For dice , we used an online dice rolled found at Catch Your Hare, which is especially neat as it displays the dice results graphically and by die, as opposed to the sum of all dice rolled. Each player picks a color for their dice, and I ruled that the middle die is always the Dragon Die, making it easy to see how many Stunt Points were generated on a roll of doubles. Easy peasy.
My four players were Tamara Deeny, Thomas Deeny, Ryan Macklin and Brennen Reece, and all four signed up for the game via my post on Twitter. We used When Is Good? to figure out a time when we could all play, and jumped on Skype at the appointed time for some dark fantasy adventuring. To save time, I had the players choose from the pre-generated characters available on the Dragon Age RPG website. The party consisted of Masarian, a Dalish Elf apostate mage (Ryan); Ackley, a Ferelden Freeman rogue (Thomas); Kedwalla, a Surface Dwarf warrior (Tamara); and Shinasha, a City Elf rogue (Brennen). We played using the rules in Set 1, though I added the Exploration and Roleplaying Stunts available on the Set 2 Playtest document so we could take them out for a spin.
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