You lose eye contact entirely, and often people do a garbage job of actually pointing their camera at their faces.Ī lot of people have two screens, and then put the camera above the screen with Roll20 or whatever on it.
It might start with looking up rules for something that just happened, but soon you’re looking up new character builds based on that feat you found, and then before you even realize it you’re just surfing reddit or whatever. The mental dynamic of having the entire internet at your fingertips makes temptation to get distracted much harder to resist. Not only does using Roll20 put everyone in tiny boxes while the map is blown up, but even if you use Zoom and put people big on a second screen you’re only looking at them half the time. There’s a lot less of a focus on the person. This ups the complexity for communication on a subconscious level in ways you don’t realize unless you look for it. You can’t get someone’s attention by saying “hey” in their direction, because it sounds like it’s coming the same direction for everyone. This makes layered communication impossible (most tables have 2+ conversations going on at a time in many situations as required, but you can only ever have 1 cogent conversation at a time on Zoom etc).Īnd makes it impossible to put in side remarks or comments without trampling over the main conversation. You can’t do an aside whisper to someone or anything like that. There’s none of the cross talk or volume dynamics that you get in-person. A short list (some of which you hit on): Monochannel In the years since, I’ve spent a ton of time paying attention to what makes online play different from local play. I’ve spent a ton of time thinking about this since, so this post touched on some stuff I care a lot about. It took me a really long time to figure out what was going on, but about 2 years later, while playing a game of FATE with some local friends at a game bar, things finally clicked: it was the format that’s the problem! I had really enjoyed tabletop until then, but the magic slowly and silently disappeared after that. Pretty much all my groups went online after a big move from MN to WA. Several of our fellow RPT GMs wrote in with fantastic tips.
Recently an RPT GM asked how he could help his players engage more and roleplay better after switching to online Virtual Tabletop (VTT) games.