I’m interested in trying out Google+ hangouts for gaming; others are reporting lots of success with this. I’m also interested in trying out ACKS. So… are other people interested in a Google+ hosted game using ACKS?
I should be clear that at this point I’m just checking for interest, not trying to organize anything in the near future. If nothing else, I’m moving early next week, and it will be about two weeks before I have regular net access again.
But I would encourage people to post if:
A) You’re interested in playing in an ACKS game on Google+ run by some random person (like me);
B) You’re interested in GMing an ACKS game on Google+;
C) You’re interested in playing in an ACKS game on Google+, but only if we can convince one of the developers to run for us. 
If there seems like enough interest, I’ll probably try to get something going in roughly two weeks. And of course, if there’s enough interest, someone else is welcome to get the ball rolling before then.
If you’re still up, I am planning to set one up now.
Sounds cool to me. I have to admit I’d be most interested in option B, which sounds like might be a possibility if Tavis sets it up.
Could be interesting. A (or C, of course), I’m still combing through the rules and not ready to GM anything.
Yeah, I meant to say option C rather than B.
We had a successful proof of concept last night–Tavis ran for a group of four of us. It was lots of fun. More complete thoughts will follow later today.
Some thoughts from our experiment last night:
- Google+ hangout worked well as a venue for the game. The sound was pretty good, although we had to be careful to avoid talking over each other. The video could be a little choppy, but it still was nice to put faces on the voices, especially since they were unfamiliar voices. Also, it worked to have Tavis show us the dice he rolled (we could have done that in both directions, but we didn’t). It was also very handy for Tavis to show us a map sketched out in Sharpie.
One complexity was that because we weren’t rolling the dice, there was some information we didn’t get that we would normally. For example, we fought a tough orc hero, who was quite hard to hit. But we didn’t know whether that was quite hard as in we needed to roll a 14 to hit, or hard as in we needed to roll a 19. That made it hard to figure out if we should be running away. But that didn’t make a major difference in how the game ran. - The game was lots of fun! No surprises there; Tavis is a fun GM, and the game went really well, even if my character did die in the last fight with the orc hero.
- Character generation online is a little slow–partly that’s because the online Character Generator is slow, but it also invited doing things in sequence, not in parallel–first player A made a character, talking with Tavis, then player B, then … To the extent that tasks like character generation, domain management, etc., can be done outside the actual session, it will make the sessions more exciting and fun. Obviously, there is a tension between that and a pick-up game started on short notice, but it’s worth aiming to do things via private e-mails in advance.
- We didn’t really get to see the specifics of ACKS much in that session. Part of that is that it was a 1st level game, and at 1st level, ACKS seems to play a lot like any other retroclone. Part of that was that (partly because of the pickup nature of the playerbase), we didn’t use some of the specifics, like proficiencies. But a lot of what I’m excited about in ACKS doesn’t show up until a little later. That means that for my purposes, the goal needs to be more in terms of setting up a campaign, albeit likely a campaign with flexible attendance, etc., rather than just a one-shot.
All in all, it was a lot of fun–I hope that Tavis runs more of these.
I would like both A and B (and obviously C)… and the idea of putting a cam to dice roll is brilliant
I would definitely be interested in playing in a Google+ campaign, options A and C. I would be hesitant to run with option B until I’ve had a chance to get a hands-on sense of the system. But, yeah, count me in!
We are committing to setting up a Google+ session for all our backers if we make our third bonus goal! You’ll get more info in the update soon, and playtesting the Gen Con demo is teaching us a lot about how to get the campaign sweep of ACKS into a short-form, Google+ suitable format.
Playing a session with one of the creators would be all kinds of awesome. Playing a session with anyone else who knew the system well would be some kinds of awesome too.
I’d also be interested is partaking in a Google+ campaign, if anyone else has the wherewithal to put one together, and it somehow fits into my labyrinthine schedule.
Since my group has scattered to the four winds, we’ve had a fair amount of success playing various games over skype or google+. We have found that simpler games tend to work best, since anything involving charts or maps or dice manipulation can bog things down (D&D 4th edition didn’t go so well). ACKS isn’t terribly simple, so I do have some misgivings, but I’d like to give it a try. Online “tabletop” tools keep improving, which should steadily raise the complexity of a game you can effectively run.
I’ve never successfully played any kind of D&D-type game online, but I’d like to try.
I would love to give it a go.
btw on the mule there is a very useful post: http://muleabides.wordpress.com/2011/08/11/mapping-for-constantcon/
thanks for the link
an announcement about games on Google+
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/games-in-google-fun-that-fits-your.html
and more importantly - developing your own games applications on there:
http://googleplusplatform.blogspot.com/2011/08/stepping-onto-google-platform.html
dice rollers, trade apps, char gen, encounter tables maybe.