15 April 2013

+8d10 and he's knocked prone

One day this year I'm going to move to America.  I'll be living the dream of actually living with my partner, doing the dirty all the time between fun things.

But I'm going to want to continue playing games with my friends from Home.  And naturally that's going to be difficult.  I can't really fly over just to roll some dice every weekend.  I won't be earning that much money, and I won't be spending upwards of 30 hours of planeflight every week. I'm getting a headache just thinking about that.

We've been working on an online setup for a long time now, ever since Richard moved to Townsville actually, and it's just been us placing our laminated grid sheet down in front of a webcam and clarifying anything Richard has been unclear about.

It has been very hit and miss.  Either Richard drops out, or we drop out, or, as has happened, Scotts main computer will not detect that he has a USB Webcam attached and refuse to work.

And it's gotten worse with the new addition of Casey, one of Richard's workmates, whom Aaron has accepted with open arms.

Now we have to make two connections.  Any setup we had became immediately negated because it doesn't allow any of those shenanigans.  Three way conversations are for people with money.

So we began searching for alternatives.  Do we have a cheap and easy source for three way conversations?  Turned out we did, but that died in the arse enough times to finally move on to our eventual choice for Online D&D: Roll20.net.

It's still being worked on, so we excuse it on many accounts, but we still had software complications.  We logged in, we had a faff around, but we could hardly hear anyone.  The Audio/Video chat was terrible.

The website had prepared for that, and it uses the Google+ Hangout. Easy to implement so long as we all register with Google+.

It works. It works well. And we're doing well. Until I get capped.

Mum has a very good deal with Telstra. $10 for her 2gb allowance. The problem with that is how quickly it's chewed through. Mum won't change what she's got, which is fair enough. She'll lose the discount if she does change it, and i won't be here forever so she won't pay more for Excess Internet she won't be using.

Fair enough. So in the mean time if I am to keep connected to DnD, I have to find another computer. So who better than Scotty? He lives across the suburb, he's doing the same thing (at least when he's not playing The Old Republic), so easy peasy!

And now, since we've levelled up and improved our gear, I'm doing anywhere between 51 and 169 damage on a critical hit. And knocking them on their arse. Now to make Aaron threaten me. Cos I'm not worried about anything Aaron throws at me. Even slightly.