How We Game

As I mentioned before, I've been gaming almost solid for 10 years. Over the years, I've run and played in many different kinds of games, and in a various set-ups. During college it was in massive 10-12 person games around conference tables, then normal sized gaming groups.

Nowadays, we're in an interesting situation. We had a group of 5 people that we gamed with weekly. (We're some of the lucky few that still game on a weekly basis). Then various factors forced our wedded gamers to move into a different state. Thus began the innovations.

Initially we set up a webcam and computer and used either Yahoo Messenger, GTalk, MSN Messenger (whichever was feeling most cooperative that day) to videoconference them in. We would move the camera around to switch between the DM and the battlemat for combat. These chat clients were barely passable. Audio and picture quality were fairly low, but we troopered. on.

Then we discovered Oovoo and life became drastically better. Oovoo is a chat client similar to the above mentioned, but it also allows voice calls and video calls. The quality of both the voice and video was incredible and I cannot recommend this tool enough.

This helped alleviate some of the difficulties we had with battle maps not showing up clearly, but it still was lacking. Our next advance was in using Google Docs to create a spreadsheet that everyone can view and change. Our players in Colorado can view the map as we updated it and move themselves around; one of the players locally (in Texas) makes the appropriate changes on our battlemat.

This way everyone has a clear view of the board and can strategize much more easily than trying to do so based on a birds eye view of the battle mat.

How about you? Has anyone had any interesting challenges in their gaming that has been overcome by the use of technology or creativity?