...okay, why did this *never* occur to me before now...?

[demiurgent]

So... I have Skype.

Which is free.

So we could all have Skype.

Which means potentially Frank, Bankert, Kevin and all the rest could have Skype. For a voice conference. At will. For free.

...why precisely can't we run a D&D game this way? No matter how far away we live from each other?

Comments

[not-croaker.livejournal.com]

Sure. I've been in D&D and Amber campaigns run entirely via internet chat... Skype just enhances the experience. Go for it.

[troutman.livejournal.com]

Completely unrelated - if you have Skype now, you totally need to be on the Keencast sometime.

Not that you actually talk about webcomics or anything these days. ;)

[demiurgent.livejournal.com]

I'd love to. ;) I'd even talk about webcomics.

[scarfman]

I wondered today, since my characters use Skype or something like it but I don't - is there a particular sound that it makes when you initially connect for a session, that I could use as a recognizable sound effect?

[troutman.livejournal.com]

It's something between a "SHWOOOOOP!" and a "FWOOOOOP!" when it boots up. When you recieve a call, it makes a really obnoxious old school telephone ring.

[scarfman]

Thanks. I'm developing a joke for which I may need to know that.

[ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com]

There is no reason not to. If I recall, Monty Cook is running a campaign where two of his players attend via video conferencing.

Good Luck. That would probably work immensely better than my AIM game.

[drderanged.livejournal.com]

"I roll another natural 20! Amazing!" ;)

[demiurgent.livejournal.com]

It's pretty simple to have a chatserver of some sort up and running with a die roller. Which could also be used by players/the DM to "pass notes" without others hearing. ;)

[prodigal.livejournal.com]

For the most part, the OpenRPG dieroller isn't bad. It hates me if the rolls I tend to get are anything to judge by, but still.

[cartoonlad.livejournal.com]

Take a look at RinkChat over at rinkworks.com. The die roller accepts "/roll xdy+z" commands. (It's a feature I requested and the site owner was good enough to put in.) Plus, you've got the option to spawn private rooms and have private messages. Just remember to put your preferences on streaming instead of refresh if you use it.

[demihappycow.livejournal.com]

if you're looking for a program for dice-rolling and such check out http://gametable.galactanet.com/
I haven't actually used it, but it looks as though it could work well

[redneckgaijin.livejournal.com]

Don't ask me. All I know is, I ain't got the pipe for Skype.

[prodigal.livejournal.com]

No reason whatsoever.

My group uses OpenRPG to game together, but I like your idea quite a lot.

[ryuko-midori.livejournal.com]

Sounds like fun. I have to remember that so my other study-abroad student friends and I can continue the games we've started now that we're here...

[bodhranplayer.livejournal.com]

Have it already.

I'll e-mail you my Skype ID

[ivan23.livejournal.com]

::grin:: It's fun. Especially with webcams, so the DM can backlight himself and talk all spooky. Assuming the DM is a huge nerd.

[no-relation.livejournal.com]

If the DM isn't a huge nerd, how did he become a DM?

[sailormur.livejournal.com]

Yay skype! I'm mightymur

The only downside is that skype tends to act wonky when there are many people in conference call, so if you don't add too many people, then you should be fine. I've had conferences with three, sometimes four.

[jfargo.livejournal.com]

How well does Skype work? After a little bit of internal monologuing I decided to give it a try and downloaded it. The only bit that worries me is that everywhere on the page it says "calls made to the US and Canada are free until the end of the year" (emphasis mine, obviously). What happens at the end of the year? Do you know?

Have you had any issues with it that new users should know about? I'm actually pretty psyched about it.

[elvedril.livejournal.com]

Skype to Skype calls are always free. They added a feature recently that lets you call regular phones in the US and Canada for free until the end of the year (before then you had to pay some sort of fee to call regular phones, I don't remember how much it was). Chances are that they'll go back to charging for the house calls (but not the skype to skype) next year.

[jfargo.livejournal.com]

So, I suppose I just have to get everyone I know onto skype before the beginning of next year. Aside from my parents and my girlfriend's parents that should be pretty easy.

I would almost allow this to become the only phone in the house but for the part where you can't make calls to emergency numbers on it. Does that just mean 911 calls, or that you shouldn't be calling any emergency numbers on it? Like, if instead of 911 I called the Fire Department directly.

If you don't know, that's fine, I'm just curious and just now looking in to it, so I tend to ask people instead of looking it up. I'm lazy, it comes from being part of the internet generation, I guess?

[copperhamster.livejournal.com]

Skype doesn't work with E911, but you could still call the direct lines. The problem is that most of the direct call numbers for your fire department, police, etc, are no longer setup to accept and deal with actual emergency calls. That's what E911 is for.

[no-relation.livejournal.com]

I'm not 100% sure on this, but I THINK that you don't have to pay for emergency service on a phone line. So, you should be able to cancel your phone account and still be able to call 911 on it.

[copperhamster.livejournal.com]

It can be amazingly frustrating for some people to actually get their microphone working. Other than that, no issues I can think of.

Oh and it takes a reasonable amount of bandwidth. Dial up need not apply. Satellite can apply, but it will have noticable pauses due to latency issues.
ISDN works if you are not doing anything else. (I speak from personal experience).

For most of my voice app with bunch o buddies things I just use the voice chat client I have installed (teamspeak) with our local server. Or ventrillo. I run both. (Ventrillo has this neat thing where it supports surround sound and can 'position' people in the auditory field

[sinless.livejournal.com]

I prefer running a private ventrilo server when I want to talk to people like that (it'll hold up to 8 I think) because skype makes my system laggy :(

[wednesday]

Yeah, uh, Gizmo conference would be better, surely. :) (Remember, our issues with Gizmo have nothing to do with Gizmo AFAICT.)

[robotech-master.livejournal.com]

Personally, I'd be inclined to suggest using Ventrilo for gaming-things instead of Skype; Skype is great for person to person phone calling, but if you're going to be doing extended gaming-related communication among multiple people, Ventrilo scales better and has some handy features that Skype lacks—most notably, the option to use push-to-talk or sound-level-based microphone activation, rather than the more telephone-like always-on-unless-you-press-mute-button. Push-to-talk is vital if you have people who don't want to bother with headphones but don't want to be treated to the hearing-your-own-echo-a-half-second-later effect that is so distracting that experiments have been done with using it to break up racist chanting at soccer matches (http://www.digg.com/technology/Sound_Neutralzing_Technology_Confuses_Abusive_Racist_Chants_at_Stadiums).

Also, Ventrilo has a handy little icon-lights-up-to-show-you-who's-talking feature, which is handy if some of the people don't know each other well enough to recognize voices.

Of course, conversely, Ventrilo does require that you have access to a Ventrilo server, which may be more rigamarole than you want to go through. But on the other hand, if you're getting people to install Yet Another App anyway, might as well go with the best one first.