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Author Topic: Shamdemic year 2 begins, you clowns still gaming from behind computer screens?  (Read 8903 times)

Spinachcat

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Or have you graduated to double-masking at a table? Maybe your group is excitedly planning a campaign, but only after everyone gets the experimental vax and an anal swab.

Our group tried killing everybody we know with the CoronaChan, but after a year of gaming as usual, sadly I must report a total lack of fatalities. Alas, the best we could do was a couple people got the sniffles.  O Chinese bat soup, how thou hath failed us.

So, how many of you have returned to gaming with your friends in reach of the pizza?

Kyle Aaron

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We're on opposite ends of the city to each-other, we used to meet in the CBD but the places there have closed permanently thanks to the lockdowns. We've lost a few game stores, too, and a few more have gone to warehouses and no longer have storefronts.
The Viking Hat GM
Conflict, the adventure game of modern warfare
Wastrel Wednesdays, livestream with Dungeondelver

Chris24601

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I’ve never been down with masks and the people complying drops by the day here. Despite the signs, I can walk into just about any local restaurant maskless without comment from the staff.

Winter has been a boon since no one cares about effectiveness, I just throw the same scarf I use to keep my neck and face warm loosely across my lower face if anyone gives me issues and the funniest part is you can have a two inch gap between the scarf and your face with it barely coming up to your lip and they act like it’s the same as a mask... as long as they don’t have line of sight to your mouth it’s good.

Anyway, we tried to get some online gaming going last March, but had given up and started meeting in person at our homes starting last May. That was before the idiotic mask mandates started up so we’ve never masked at the table because we all know it’s stupid.

I recently did start an online game via Discord, but that’s because one of my friends’ jobs requires them to be on the road all over the country for three to six weeks at a time with no pattern beyond demand for his services. It’s just easier to get a regular game in using online gaming and the voice chat, dice bots and theatre of the mind system we chose make trade offs worth it for the sake of keeping my friend involved.

Crusader X

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My group started a Basic Fantasy campaign last year, but we only got one session in before the Covid fiasco started.  I am now trying to get the band back together, and hopefully we start playing in-person again in the next few weeks.

rgalex

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When Ohio shut down the first time we took a month off from our in person gaming.  Most of us used the free time to do some home improvement projects and other things we usually didn't have the time for.  Once the lockdown was up we went back to in person gaming, despite the heavy implication that you should have a "bubble" and not mix households.  No one masked.

We had one guy who was going to go home for Christmas/New Year so he stopped coming in person 2 weeks ahead and joined in via Skype.  He's got elderly parents and was taking some extra precautions before going back.  No one minded and we just continued on.

When the curfew started we had one guy who wanted to obey it (he's pretty straight-laced like that).  No one raised a fuss.  Since our Saturday game goes from 1pm to 11pm we just agreed to cut our sessions short so he could get home in time.

There was a 2 week period we took off because our GM had come into contact with multiple COVID positive people where he worked.  Once he seemed clear of anything we picked back up.

We're back on our normal schedule now, despite Ohio still warning about mixing multiple households.  Still no one masking.  We tend to get individual pizzas though but that's more because we can't agree on toppings. :)

S'mon

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Yeah online only, I don't fancy losing child custody. Looking to restart when lockdown eases.

Abraxus

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Looks like someone pissed and took a dump in the OP cereal or may be it's the time of the month who knows.

For the moment and the foreseeable future online. Unlike other places my neck of the woods is very strict when it comes to wearing masks and lockdown in general. As well getting closer to 50 years old and no longer feel like driving or taking public transport to a game session.

In person or online who gives a flying fuck what method is used as long as everyone is having fun. Gamers need to realize it's 2021 and how rpgs are being played is changing. Instead of being grognard and safekeeping  how about just about everyone having fun with their hobby.

Steven Mitchell

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We never stopped in person and never wore masks when together.  What we did was slow down in person because of things unrelated to disease.  Our group has had scheduling issues related to work and personal changes that have shot our available time slots to hell and gone.  So we've started an online supplement to that in an effort to keep going despite those changes.

My work game got squashed, because it was a recurring bi-weekly lunch thing.  No one in the office; so no game.

The time I would have spent prepping D&D 5E got instead put into me getting off my butt and getting my own design into playtesting shape.  Guess I can't complain about how it worked out, since now I have my alternative ready to break from WokerdsOfTheCoast.

Lunamancer

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My weekly in-person game which I have to cross state lines for hasn't missed a single session.
That's my two cents anyway. Carry on, crawler.

Tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito.

Jim in Oz

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We play face to face but then again in Australia we didn't fuck it up royally like in other places.

K Peterson

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Haven't had face-to-face gaming since February of last year. It's all been VTT play since then.

I was fine with shutting FtF down from February to May last year. It seemed sensible and precautionary, and I was curious to explore VTT and see if it could be supplemental after the pandemic and the shutdowns came to an end (like, we could play an alternate campaign over VTT if some players were unable to attend a session of FtF). After May, I was ready to get back to FtF, as did one other player. But, the fear had really set in to the rest of the group at that point and they were unwilling to leave their bunkers. And that fear has continued on to the present date.

This past year has been one of the lowest points in the 4 decades I've played Rpgs. VTT turned out to be a completely awful experience to me. It was much more difficult for everyone to engage with; it took far more work to streamline the experience; and the end result was like some of the most-boring, work Zoom meetings I've been involved in. It didn't help that the campaigns that a couple of other players ran were lackluster.

I ran a VTT session a month ago for the start of a short campaign. And I felt like I busted my ass with both campaign prep, and getting Roll20 setup to cover all eventualities and streamline the experience. I incorporated audio tracks to try to immerse the players. Anything I could to maintain involvement. And VTT still left a bad taste with that experience. So I don't see my self joining a new, modern movement, playing VTT solely. In that case, I'd rather just drop out of Rpging for a time and focus on other hobbies. Similar to the old adage: for me, no gaming is better than VTT gaming. :)

A week from Monday, my state is supposed to enter "Phase 3" of emerging from the lockdown. Which would mean that small groups from different households could meet (without neighbors reporting them, I guess?), and FtF gaming would be back on the table. But, I don't know if our gaming group will reconvene until everyone has had 2 vaccine doses, and whatever other precautions are "needed". Or will fear-mongering continue, as worries about  variant strains and the inevitable, next-Fall-Winter case spikes keep people remote?

I'm pretty pessimistic today, but it feels justifiable after 12 months of disappointment and deserved pessimism. Oh well, I've invested a lot of free time into painting miniatures over that time, and I still like that hobby quite a lot.

Myrdin Potter

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I was already gaming via VTT before the pandemic as my core gaming group is scattered all over Canada and the USA.

My local store stopped running AL games (where I DMed on a regular basis) and those have not started up again and I will not DM in a public space until I get vaccinated. That should happen in a month or two (in the greater San Francisco area).

Social bubbles have been allowed in most places without a hard lockdown, so there have not been many rules saying that a responsible group could not stop gaming.

Personally, I have not been willing to just roll the dice and hope. Will start DMing in the local store and going to conventions once I get my shot(s).

Reckall

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Looks like someone pissed and took a dump in the OP cereal or may be it's the time of the month who knows.
Well, he is the guy who, one year ago, was pho-phooing the pandemic with gems like...
Quote
Millions dead? Not gonna happen. At most, we'll see the H1N1 numbers nobody cared about in 2009.
https://www.therpgsite.com/pen-paper-roleplaying-games-rpgs-discussion/is-dnd-twitter-worse-than-coronavirus/msg1124186/#msg1124186
...And I don't think that he felt the need to buy a pencil-sharpener in the meanwhile (he is, however, writing from the country that had 25% of dead from COVID with only 4% of the global population, so maybe there is a clue in-there...)

Over here, I had to stop my RPG gaming due to losing my father to COVID, almost losing my mother to COVID, and having my girlfriend to undergo emergency surgery while COVID was raging in Lombardy's hospitals - all in the space of one month (maybe this is the reason why I still get a bit testy when I hear from some idiots). During summer we opened up, so we played "Mythos" (basically "Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective", but centered on Arkham and Lovecraft, with Professor Armitage standing in for Sherlock). While it is not an RPG, it has a 8 "cases" campaign and a narrative structure that really makes Arkham and its citizens to come alive. It was a great experience.

This led me to put together "Mythos: Origins", a CoC 7E campaign in the same setting that winds the clock back to 1920 and has the players running real investigators (in "Mythos" you are basically yourself). Simple and cool! We met four times before the new - and current - restrictions hit. I know that a couple of my players are tele-adventuring but I'm not interested in this kind of experience. To me RPGs are the smell of pencils, the thunder of dice on the table, beer and the fellowship.
For every idiot who denounces Ayn Rand as "intellectualism" there is an excellent DM who creates a "Bioshock" adventure.

Ghostmaker

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We went virtual via Discord for a while, but we've started meeting in person again. Every Saturday.

Nobody has died. Nothing has caught on fire. No one has spontaneously polymorphed into an aboleth.


lordmalachdrim

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Our games were and are unaffected by the current state of the world. One group online (a player in another state made in person a bit difficult) and one group face to face every couple of weeks.

Only excitement was last summer when a pair of ticks hitched a ride home with me from work and scuttled across the table.