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Playing our games online

Kumospace tips

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In our last post, Mark R told us about Kumospace, a spacial chat app he used to host Death in Venice.

So I thought I’d try it out and successfully ran Reunion with Death using Kumospace.

***Reunion with Death*** on Kumospace – the pop-out map showing the whole floor is on the right

So here are my tips for using Kumospace:

Names: Ask everyone to change their name to the character’s name. You have to do that at the account level—you can’t have a name just for that session.
Rooms: Set up a room for the briefing and debriefing. Rooms mean that everyone in the room can hear each other—so you don’t need to be really close. I didn’t do that (rooms had only just been introduced, and I didn’t have time to work out how to set them up), and as a result, when we had the debrief everyone was piled on top of each other.
Announcements: For Reunion with Death’s game announcements, I copy-and-pasted them into the global chat window and then used the broadcast function to let everyone know that the information was there. (The chat gives a little bleep, but it’s easily missed if you’re busy roleplaying.)
Timetable: It’s hard to read the room in an online game—and I found Kumospace harder than Discord. So while I will sometimes vary the timings in a live space depending on how the game feels like it’s going, this time I stuck closely to the timetable and that worked fine.
Out of character area: I set up an out-of-character area that we all met in first so everyone could get used to Kumospace. (I used one of the templates—the beach. You can use anything.)

Pre-game instructions

I was sure nobody had tried Kumospace, so I sent the following pre-game instructions the day before the game.

If you’re new to Kumospace, here are some tips:

Please change your name to your character name (you’ll need to do this at your account level.)
There’s a chat function in the bottom left of the screen—I’ll use this to share game announcements.
The pop-out button enlarges your video and whoever you’re talking to so you can see them better.
The map button (rh side of the screen) shows the whole floor and where everyone is.
Try the “double-click to move” setting if you accidentally move around the room.
Some of the scenery is interactive—you can have your avatar drinking wine/coffee and eating. Have fun with them—they do not affect the game.

I’ve set up an out-of-character area (a beach setting from one of the templates) which we’ll start with. Once everyone has logged in I’ll do a brief introduction and then we’ll move to the game space, “The Hotel”. (You change floors by going back to the lobby and then choosing your new floor.)

For game abilities, you’ll have to read them out to whoever you are playing them on (and they will have to read out their Secret or Clue or whatever). I trust you not to cheat.

I’ll be wandering around, listening and occasionally making announcements. If you need me, we can either find a quiet spot somewhere or pop back to the OOC area.

Items, money, pickpocketing and combat

Like Zoom and Discord, you need to have a way to manage items, money, pickpocketing and combat if you’re running an online game with those features. Reunion with Death was designed to be run online, so it has none of those features, so I didn’t have to worry about that.

We have some thoughts on managing this in this post on our blog.

Player view

Overall feedback from players was that they liked Kumospace and it felt more natural than Zoom or Discord. The one complaint was that videos could be smaller than you get with Zoom or Discord. But they’d be happy to use Kumospace again.

Virtual murder parties – Kumospace review

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Mark R recently wrote to tell us about Kumospace. In Mark’s words…

We did Reunion with Death back in 2020 using Zoom. The game was great, but Zoom is a bit clunky since the host must admit people to rooms.

I just bought Death in Venice. I’ll use a different service this time: Kumospace. I haven’t used it yet (other than to play around in it), but I believe it could be the ideal tool for hosting online.

Your video feed (about a 1″ square) is placed in a room that you can move around in. At all times, it has a large circle drawn around it (you see only your circle). This indicates the area that you can hear and be heard. So, rather than use different channels or breakout rooms, everybody roams around the same room as they were really there (but you can create multiple rooms if you wish). The proximity-based volume makes things like private conversations and eavesdropping possible.

The site offers some pre-made rooms, or you can create your own to fit the game theme using their drag and drop furniture, accessories, etc. You can also upload custom images. If you want to keep it simple, just pick something like the pre-made living room.

The host has broadcast capability, so when announcements need to be made, the host just goes into broadcast mode and all players can hear. All you have to do is login and create a space (it’s just a name and a URL). Then you share your space’s URL. The learning curve for using it is practically non-existent.

It’s free for up to 30 people in a room and runs in a browser window. As a test, I went into a room and walked away. Eight hours later, I came back, and the session had not timed out. I also googled kumospace time limit, and got no hits, so I don’t think there is a limit.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

After party report

After his party, Mark then told us how it went.

We hosted/played Death in Venice yesterday using Kumospace. We opted for the in-person setting (all of us confined to the Casanova’s saloon rather than to individual rooms). We had a great time, and at the end, everybody said they preferred Kumospace over Zoom.

It played very much like an in-person game with no need to have a “platform host” to manage breakout rooms.
The broadcast feature was great for announcements. I cut/pasted announcements into the chat box for all to read. The only problem we ran into there was with the two long “solution” announcements–apparently, there’s a character limit for the chat box. Both of those were too long, but that was easily worked around.

We did run into a few minor glitches with cameras/mics. However, these were easily remedied by exiting/re-entering, which can be done in a matter of seconds.

I’m guessing that Discord might do as well, but from playing with it a bit, it seems more complicated – at least for setting up.

I highly recommend Kumospace.

Trying Kumospace

Based on Mark’s recommendations, I though I’d see how easy it is to set up a space in Kumospace.

And it’s ridiculously easy. A couple of seconds to sign up, then you create a space. You’re presented with a standard layout that you can then customize—the tools are very intuitive and it took me about ten minutes to create the layout at the top of this blog.

(My biggest challenge in using Kumospace was finding the chat box that Mark mentions – it’s at the bottom right of the screen…)

All I need to do now is try it out!

Alternatives to Kumospace

Kumospace isn’t the only virtual space out there – we talked about Gather Town a while back, and I’m sure there are others.

If you try Kumospace or any of the alternatives, let us know how they work!

Additional Way out West character and Zoom tips

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We have received a great story from Rosie about her Way out West Zoom party.

I ran Way out West via zoom for a group of old school friends last weekend and it was so much fun! The players said it was one of the best evenings they’ve had all year.

I wrote one extra character. My husband played it and said it worked really well- in fact he got quite a few murder accusations (is that a mark of success?!)

(I wrote the character so that it could be played by male or female as I’ve noticed there seem to be fewer female parts in the murder mysteries I’ve seen- but then saw you’d given the stable hand a name already so he is Pete.)

Zoom worked pretty well as a medium, I only have the basic account so we had to restart the call every 40 minutes which wasn’t as annoying as it sounded as the game broke fairly neatly into 40 min chunks. A word of advice to others to check out their breakout room settings- they need to tick the box to allow players to exit breakout rooms themselves!

Thanks for a lovely evening.

You can now download Rose’s extra character, stable hand Jay Sidwell, with the other extra characters in the same place you download the main files.

Her note about gender balance is interesting – we try to be even in the genders across our games and include a good number of genderless characters to keep things flexible, obviously we can always do better.

In fact originally her character, the stable hand, was male. That’s because the stable hand, Pete, is mentioned once in Way out West – they’re the poor soul who finds Zeke’s body. So we’ve changed Pete to Jay and made them genderless.

Way out West now has three extra characters, and you can see the full list of extra characters for all our games here.

Playing The Food is to Die For using Gather.town

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Gather.town is a map-based virtual space where users can walk around a map and engage in video conversation based on their proximity to one another.

Although we’ve not tried it, it’s another option if you want to run a murder mystery game online.

The Food is to Die For

Gather.town uses a map, and while several are provided none of them are ideally suited for our games.

However, one of our fabulous customers create a gather.town map for The Food is to Die For and has shared it with us.

Gather.Town-Map Download

Freeform Games in 2020

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Unsurprisingly, 2020 was all about the pandemic for Freeform Games.

2020 had started well, with sales in January and February building on 2019 (which was a good year for us). And then in March the pandemic properly reached the UK and USA and our sales dropped off a cliff…

We’ve been doing these reviews since 2013 – you can read them all here.

Learning to play our games online

With lockdown, our amazing customers started playing our games online—using Zoom or Discord or Google Hangouts or whatever system they found easiest.

That inspired us to both create games specifically for online play, and also to learn how to play our “normal” games online.

So for most of 2020 that’s what we’ve been doing – learning to play our games online. And also sales dropped off a cliff in March, things picked back up. Not to 2019 levels, but our sales for 2020 were similar to those in 2017.

Best-selling games

2020 brought a change to our best-selling games, with new online game Reunion with Death coming third (close behind perennial favourite Way out West). A Will to Murder topped our best-sellers list in 2020.

***Reunion with Death*** – our third most popular game of 2020

Overall our top three games accounted for a hefty 35% of our sales. It’s noticeable that in 2020 our smaller games have been more popular, which is I think a reflection of the smaller games being easier for online play.

Three new games

We published three new games in 2020.

Reunion with Death by Mo Holkar. Written specifically for the lockdown, and set in a hotel where everyone is locked in their rooms. We also produced a festive version, Christmas Reunion with Death (but I’m not counting that as a separate game).

Death in Venice also by Mo. Another lockdown murder mystery, this time everyone is locked in their cabins aboard a luxury yacht.

The Food is to Die For by Anastasia Kulpa, set in a restaurant. This has been close to publication for a couple of years now, and in 2020 we finally rolled up our sleeves and published it.

We also updated Under the Big Top, to bring it into line with our newer format.

Last year’s goals

We set ourselves a few goals in 2020:

Improve our website: We made a few improvements this year:
- We improved the look and feel by as increasing the overall type size and line spacing
- We improved the right-hand menu on the games pages to make it easier to see new and best-selling games.
- We changed the style of our game cover graphics for our new games – we’ll update our earlier games as we go along.
- Our blog became more important as we posted lots of stories and advice about how to play our games online.
Publish The Food is to Die For and Murder on the Istanbul Express. So a partial success as we published The Food is to Die For. Murder on the Istanbul Express will have to wait for 2021.
Finish updating Under the Big Top: This was originally planned for 2019, but we updated it in 2020.

Plans for next year

Improve our website: Our website is key to our business and so we’re always looking to improve it. I don’t think we’ll ever not have this as a goal.
Publish Murder on the Istanbul Express: With The Food is to Die for published, we’ll concentrate on Murder on the Istanbul Express. And after that, we’ve got Death at the Derby lined up.
Another new online game: Even if the pandemic disappears (and I think that’s for the long-term), it seems there’s a space for online murder mystery party games and so we’d like to publish another.

Summary

So although 2020 was bad, we weathered the pandemic and have learned more about playing our games online.

As the vaccine is rolled out and normality returns, hopefully we will return to playing our games in person.

Using Discord for online murder mystery games

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We used Discord when we ran The Karma Club and Death in Venice. It’s probably the most flexible of the video chat options, but it’s also the least intuitive.

This is a brief guide to setting up a Discord “server” (a space to hold your game).

Advantages of Discord

It’s easy to create lots of game spaces for players to chat in.
Players can move themselves in and out of the spaces without needing you to move them (unlike Zoom’s breakout rooms which require someone to manage them).
You can easily see who is in which space, so you don’t need to go searching for people.
When you get into it, Discord is powerful and flexible.

Disadvantages of Discord

You can’t add a background to your video, like you can in Zoom. (At least, not yet.)
With lots of people, Discord can take up a lot of bandwidth. That can be a challenge for briefings if your broadband connection is slow and when everyone is in the same channel, it can be mitigated if people mute themselves and switch off video. It’s less of a problem once the game is flowing as most players will be chatting in small numbers.
Discord can be a bit geeky—there is lots of jargon and it’s not as user friendly as some alternatives.
The Discord app isn’t as user-friendly as using it on a PC. (So if you’re going to use it on a tablet, make sure you’re completely familiar with it first.)

Step 1: Sign up to Discord

First step is to sign up to Discord. I recommend downloading the desktop app (as performance is reportedly better), but you can do everything through your browser if that’s easier.

Step 2: Create and customise your server

A “server” is what Discord calls its chat rooms. To create one, click on the plus symbol “Add a Server” in the left-hand menu.

You will be asked whether you want to base it on a template or create your own. You don’t need a template, so click “create your own”.

You need to give your server a name and you can upload a photo if you like. (You can change these later.)

Once you’ve done that you will have a new server with one text channel called “general” and one voice channel (also called “General”). A channel is like a small chat room for a specific subject. Note that the voice channels also accept video.

Your server should look like the one above.

Step 3: Add more channels

Now you can rename or add your channels. (Click the + to add a channel. Click the cog to edit the channel to change the name or set other properties.)
For Death in Venice I set up these channels:

***Death in Venice*** server – note the channels

(See our story about hosting Death in Venice for details on how I used them.)

To limit the number of players that can visit a channel at any one time, click on the cog (“Edit Channel”) and change the User Limit . Once you become proficient at using Discord you can create hidden channels and other tricks.

Step 4: Invite your players

To invite players to your server, click the down arrow next to the server name in the top left. You can either send them a link to the server or invite them directly if they are already on Discord. Either way, the link only lasts for 24 hours, so you may need to send it more than once.

Step 5: Change your nickname

You can change your nickname for your specific game server. For Death in Venice I changed mine to Cruz Vicente (he, Steve). If I was just hosting a game, I’d probably change it to Steve (he, Host).

I suggest you ask everyone to do that when they join your server.

Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to play!

Photos

Note that your Discord username is displayed on screen in the bottom left-hand corner. If you take a screenshot of your game to share, remember to crop that bit to hide your username.

More help

Here’s the official Discord article on setting gup a server.

And here are our tips for hosting online murder mystery games.

Hosting and Playing Death in Venice

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Last weekend I hosted and played Death in Venice, using Discord for video chat.

When Mo wrote Death in Venice earlier in the year I deliberately kept away from it because I wanted to play and host simultaneously.

Normally our games don’t allow us to do that – the host needs to know too much about what’s going on, but as the games we’ve written for online video chat are simpler (there are no items or money to be managed, and no fighting), we’ve included a version of the instructions that lets the host be the player.

So that’s what I did. (I had planned to do this earlier in the year, but other events interfered… 2020 has not been an easy year!)

e instructions, the game background, and the quick reference sheet. Don’t read anything else!

Organising and Casting

I recruited players from the Facebook UK-Freeforms group (filled with enthusiasts who enjoy games like the ones we publish) and created a Facebook Messenger group for early game discussion.

I created a Google Form for casting, and asked each player to choose which three players they liked the sound of best, based on the information from the cast list. (I also had a “I’m happy to play anyone” option.)

I cast myself last, as I didn’t mind who I played. As it happens, I ended up with one of the optional characters. I didn’t do that deliberately, but I would do that again—I didn’t read my character until the day, and that meant that I could step in if we had a last-minute cancellation. (We did have such a cancellation, but I found a player from the waitlist instead.)

When I sent out the character booklets I stressed to everyone that I couldn’t answer plot or character questions as I hadn’t read anything. (I could answer logistics questions though!)

Discord

I set up a Discord sever for Death in Venice, as it worked well when I hosted The Karma Club. I set up individual channels labelled “Casanova #1” and “Casanova #2” so the players could have private chats. (I’ve described how to use Discord here.)

We did have a few minor technical problems, but they were resolved either by closing Discord and restarting, or just waiting for Discord to resolve the problem itself.

I asked everyone to change their name on Discord to their character name – mine was Cruz Vicente (Steve, he).

On the day

I told everyone that I would be joining Discord 30 minutes before the start of the game. That gave us time to sort out a couple of technical difficulties, and some players changed into costume. (My costume was just a hat.)

As part of my initial announcements, I covered all the items that I had sent out with the character booklets (playing time, the fact that I couldn’t answer plot questions, how abilities would work, and so on). When I ran The Karma Club I had forgotten to do this, and I think this game ran a lot smoother because I went over the logistics again.

I stuck to the timetable in the game – we started playing at 2pm and finished at 4:30pm. Because I’d clarified that we were finishing at 4:30pm, I found that at the end of the game everyone returned to the main game “common room” with no prompting, so that worked well.

For announcements, I had them in a folder on my laptop. (They’re provided as graphics files.) I messaged them directly to the player who needed to read them out. Shortly after that I posted each announcement into the announcements channel on Discord so that if anyone wanted to go back and read them they could.

For abilities, Secrets and Clues, everyone had printed them out and we just showed them up to our webcams. That worked fine.

How was playing and hosting?

Playing and hosting worked fine. I was worried that I would get carried away by playing, so I set a countdown timer on my phone for each announcement. That gave me a reminder for each announcement so I didn’t forget them. (I should probably do the same when I’m hosting a game normally—they can be hectic.)

I achieved most of my goals, I had a good time, and between us we identified the murderer.

I think that given the choice I would rather either play or host rather than play and host, but it was definitely an interesting experience.

My Tips for Running and Hosting

So here are my tips for running and hosting our online murder mystery parties. They apply to both Death in Venice and Reunion with Death.

30 minutes: Be online 30 minutes in advance to settle everyone in and help fix any technical difficulties.
Stick to the timetable: Stick to the timetable in the game, and let everyone know when you expect to end the game.
Go over the logistics again: Go over the logistics again—not everyone will remember them.
Cast yourself as an optional character: As an optional character you have the chance of taking a core character if one of them drops at the last minute.

Lord and Lady Westing’s Will – online!

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Lord and Lady Westing’s Will is one of our more challenging murder mystery games to run online. The game is set in an English country house with numerous private bedrooms to sneak into.

Our rules for searching the rooms involve talking to the host (because you probably don’t have an English country house of your own to run the game in).

Different locations in ***Lord and Lady Westing’s Will***

Online this can become complicated.

Online locations

One problem we have had in creating locations using Zoom or Discord is that when players want to do something in that location (such as hide an item), they move themselves to that location to do that. After all, that’s what they’d do in real life.

But we want them to interact with the host, so that the host knows what’s going on. And the host may be somewhere else.

Ryan, one of our customers, ran Lord and Lady Westing’s Will using Discord and here’s his story about he set up and used locations.

Ryan’s story

Ryan discussed with us his ideas, and one that caught our attention was this:

“I realized that in Discord, I can make certain channels visible and accessible only to certain roles in the channel, so I was planning to have all the upstairs private rooms hidden to everyone except to me, and then create a small channel called “Stairs”.

“If I saw anyone go into the “Stairs” room, I’d go in and ask them which room they’d want to access, and then move them myself into the channel corresponding to that room (which again they normally can’t see, but once I move them into it they can see it). That way no one else could see them in the channel, it would just seem like they had disappeared for the time being.”

He then reported back after his party:

“The party turned out great! I had a voice channel for each of the rooms on the ground floor, and then a Quiet Corner that only two people could go into for more secretive discussion.

“I also had the Stairs, which only 1 person could fit into at a time, leading to hidden upstairs rooms (which I would drag the guests into after they told me where to go).

“I was the only host, so it got a bit hectic towards the end of the game and adding someone else to help out with items or moving people around would have been be nice. Besides that, I feel like the private rooms had their ups and downs. It gave a sense of privacy to what you were doing. If lots of people were upstairs, the ones downstairs would notice because half of the people were missing from the voice channels.

“That led to some curious individuals going upstairs to specifically find out who was in what room. At first I was apprehensive because just easily letting a guest find someone who took the time to hide in a bedroom sounded lame for the Guest #1 searching the room, but in the end I winged it and told the Guest #2 that they had to spend some time “looking” for Guest #1 (usually like 3 minutes). That felt fairer, but I feel like there’s a better way I could’ve handled it.

“I’m definitely going to run another game soon. Thanks again for all the advice!”

Small spaces

We like creating small spaces in Discord – it’s something we’ll try in future as well.

If you’ve run a game online, we would love to hear about it.

Reunion with Death and Death in Venice – Kelly’s story

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Kelly in Michigan has tried both Reunion with Death and Death in Venice, and has shared her story (and some great tips) with us.

“Thanks for making the online versions of the games! We tried both of them. I don’t think I am qualified to review Reunion With Death though. The first time around I was going through stuff and made a mess of it. The second time I tried to run it I had Zoom issues, a no-show with an important part that I then was trying to play, and one person left in the middle due to a work crisis… It had nothing to do with the game.

“So, when I saw Death In Venice, I figured we would give it another try.

“We played on Zoom. People would take turns speaking with other players for 5 mins at a time (I set a time limit in the breakout rooms). Since we had an odd number of people, the one left over would hang out with me, take a break, etc.

“I forwarded the information to the person who was making announcements on Facebook. They read it aloud. I also had it on a shared screen. I think this was the first time the announcements were all on schedule.

“We didn’t do our normal awards ceremony, but we did have a rousing debate at the end over who the killer was. It was a good time.

“Our hints

“Let your guests know that the game is a bit faster moving than it would be in real life. They should invest a little more time than usual in getting to know their roles pregame.

“Remind them to have a pen and paper handy to take notes. When we play in real life we always included them with our character packets.

“If players are going into private chats or break out rooms to talk, limit the time they are in there. We found five minutes ideal. It gives them enough time to chat, but it is short enough to keep the game moving. People spoke to different players multiple times if needed.

“Thanks for helping us maintain some level of sanity during these trying times. It has been a soul sucking few months, hopefully things will normalize. Our group can’t wait until we can safely get together and finally play Murder At Sea.”

Tips for hosting our games online

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Note: We now include a guide for online play with all of our murder mystery games. That guide was largely based on these tips, although there’s a little more detail here.

Last weekend we hosted The Karma Club for 14 players online, and combined with our experiences of Reunion With Death and Death in Venice, I thought I’d share a few tips for hosting our games online.

***The Karma Club*** online – using Discord

Four key aspects

The four key aspects of an online game:

Setting it up – making sure everything works before you start hosting
Video chat – which video chat system you use
Announcements – you will need to make announcements
Game mechanics – how you will deal with items, abilities, combat, locations and so on.

I’ll discuss each in turn below.

Setting your party up

In many ways, preparing for an online party is much the same as for a regular party. You still need to send out invitations, check that everyone is attending, cast your game and so on. However there are also a few differences…

Most of the differences are around deciding on which video chat to use and how you are going to manage announcements or items, and I’ll cover those below.

For The Karma Club, I was inspired by one of our customers who ran Murder at Sea. They had set up a website for their online party, with links to the Zoom rooms, Google Hangouts and to their character folders. I did the same and built a Karma Club website using Google Sites (which is free and easy to use). I included the game details, links to the character folders, and details of how the game would work.

(I originally had links to the game rooms, which I set up using Jitsi. But that didn’t work – more on that below.)

There’s no reason you can’t set up a website for your regular parties of course. (If you’ve already done that and would be happy to share, we’d love to see your websites! Click here to tell us about them.)

Video Chat

There are lots of different video chat systems now available, but whichever you choose it needs three key features:

It needs to be able to cope with the number of players and GMs in one room (mainly for the briefing and debriefing). Some systems (eg Google Hangouts) have a maximum size of 10.
You need lots of smaller rooms (or channels) for people to talk in small groups.
It needs to allow people to be present for about three hours. (Most do – but the free version of Zoom only allows group calls for 40 minutes max.)

I don’t have experience of many video chat systems, but I’m going to cover a few of the more well-known systems.

Zoom is one of the most popular video chat apps. The basic plan is free, and you can host up to 100 participants, which is more than enough. You can also create breakout rooms for everyone. The downsides of Zoom are that the meeting host has to move people in and out of the breakout rooms, and that the free plan only allows groups to chat for 40 minutes (but you can rejoin).

Google Hangouts is really easy to use and doesn’t require any special software. However, it only allows 10 people at most, and while you can create separate hangouts, you can’t easily see who is in them. (But that’s not that different from playing in real life…) Hangouts’ biggest flaw is not knowing how long Google will continue supporting it, particularly now that they are promoting Google Meet (which I’ve not used).

Jitsi is a free alternative to Google Hangouts, but will manage bigger groups. However, I have found it to be very unreliable – I had planned to use it for The Karma Club, but it was so unstable we moved to Discord instead.

Discord is the system I would recommend – providing you have access to someone who can set up an area for you to play in. Discord has been used by gamers for years for voice chat while they play online – it’s stable and doesn’t use much bandwidth. But it has a fairly steep learning curve if you are setting up a server (it’s a much simpler if you’re just using it to play a game). Discord allows for lots of sub-rooms, and players can move themselves from room to room. (Click here for our tips for setting up a Discord server.)

Video chat tips:

If possible, arrange a test beforehand to make sure it works with everyone at the same time. Be prepared to change if things don’t go according to plan.
Give your rooms/channels appropriate names. But don’t use in-game locations, if they are used as part of the game. For example, in The Karma Club I had set up a video chat space as “Bob’s Room.” My thinking was that Bob could use that for a private chat. But if players then wanted to hide something in Bob’s room then they’d instinctively go there to do that (and that was a problem if I wasn’t there to supervise). So next time I will use different names (or locations completely unrelated to key game locations) so that people can say “Let’s go to the Purple Room” and if someone needs to hide something in Bob’s room, they know to talk to me.
If your video chat system allows it, get everyone to change their screen name to their character name as that will make it easier for everyone to find each other.
Set up an “out of character” room for everyone to congregate in before the game and where you will deliver the briefing and debriefing.
If you’re suffering from lag issues it may be due to your computer rather than the chat server or your broadband speed. Try closing other apps (that may be causing conflicts), update your drivers or even reinstall the software. I also know someone who when they checked their Task Manager found that they had 5 instances of Discord running – which won’t have helped!

Announcements

One of the downsides of online play is that it can be hard to make announcements during the game. For example, most of our games have announcements at various times such as clues to the murder and so on.

How do you make those if everyone is in their own video chat?

Some ideas:

Some systems (such as Discord) allow you to send updates and messages to all the players. This is probably the simplest way.
If you’ve got a small game and you’re using something like Google Hangouts, it’s quite easy to drop into each chat and paste the announcement into the chat window.
For The Karma Club, I had set up a Facebook event page so that I could post updates as the game approached and for announcements during the game. There were two problems with this idea: First, not everyone was on Facebook. Second, not everyone saw their notifications – so if you’re going to do this make sure everyone has their notifications enabled for the event.

Rules briefing: Don’t forget to do a full rules briefing at the start, including how things like abilities and items and locations will work online. Even though you’ve probably explained in advance how these things will work, you can guarantee that someone hasn’t read that or has forgotten what you told them.

Ending the party: When I am running a live game I will often decide when to end the game based on the energy in the room. When the energy is high (lots of people whispering in corners) then I know the game is going well. As players start to achieve their goals and run out of plots the room will start to get quieter.

That’s obviously much harder to do online and for The Karma Club I just used our game timetable.

Game mechanics

Our games include special abilities, items that move from character to character and (occasionally) specific game locations. We’ve designed the games to be played face-to-face, and these aspects of our games need some thinking about when playing online.

You might want a second host to help run the abilities and items (Mo helped me with The Karma Club.)

(Our two online games, Death in Venice and Reunion with Death specifically don’t include items, money or locations so that they are easy to play online.)

Abilities

For The Karma Club, and our online games, we recommend that players print out their abilities, Secret and Clue. That way they can hold them up to their webcam when either they need to use an ability or reveal their Secret/Clue.

For those who don’t have a printer at home, then trust works equally well. (Or you could have the character booklet on your phone/tablet and hold that up.)

Items and money

For The Karma Club I used the Windows Snipping Tool to turn all the items and money into graphical png files. I named each file the item name, plus a unique number (“notepad-72.png” and “USD100-23.png”). The unique number was because some of the files had duplicated names (particularly the money).

Money png files – note the unique number in the filename.

I set up Google Drive folders for each character, and into those put their character sheet and their items and money. The players had access to their own folders, but no others. If they wanted to give an item or some money to another player, they sent me a message and I moved the files from one folder to another.

Tips

Make sure you move the files, don’t just copy them!
Keep a complete set of the files you’ve created in a spare folder that only you can see, just in case something goes wrong!

You can also do this with Dropbox or OneDrive or whichever cloud storage works best for you.

You could also do this with a spreadsheet to track items and money.

Locations

Very few of our games use specific locations, but for those that do then it’s generally best if players speak to the host when they want to access a specific location.

And as I mentioned above, be careful naming your video chat rooms. It’s very tempting to give them “realistic” names to give your players a sense of moving around the physical space, but that can create confusion if the players think that that’s also where they interact with the locations.

Another option for locations is to create a folder for each (using Google Drive/Dropbox/OneDrive/etc as above) and put a description of the location in each folder (in a Word file or similar). Then players can go into those folders to “visit” the locations. If there are items there they can be in the folder and they can then take those items themselves, without needing a host to manage. (I know of a group who did this, but I worry about players accidentally deleting or duplicating something, so I didn’t do that for The Karma Club.)

Online games in summary

I’m pleasantly surprised at how well our games work online. While they’ll never fully replace the experience of playing face-to-face, I expect that the advantages (no need to travel, you can play with people from different time zones) mean that even after this crisis has passed they will still be played now and again.

We’re always interested in hearing about your stories – so if you successfully run one of our games online or face-to-face, please let us know!