Playing Polaris via VoIP (i.e. Skype)

[scbarber]

I've heard some really good things about Polaris (thanks to Paul Tevis and "Have Games, Will Travel") and some of my buddies want to play it with me, but we are geographically separated.  I haven't had a chance to pick up a copy of the game yet (soon though) so I ask out of ignorance, but how well would Polaris play if all the players were not around the same table?  From what I've heard listening to Paul's sessions (thanks for posting those!) it sounds as if we could pull it off.  We'd need to agree where we were "sitting" were we at a table, and use any number of online dice systems (we're all programmers so no problem there), is there anything else that would need adjustments?

Has anyone tried this or can anyone offer up reasons/areas where it might fail?

[Victor Gijsbers]

I think it could work very well. The amount of die rolling and other stuff that is hard to do over the phone is very small (we roll a die maybe once or twice per session for resolution, and probably no more than 10 times for experience).

[Ben Lehman]

Frank's done this, and I was wondering if he could talk about Skype play in general, 'cause I'm fascinated.

yrs--
--Ben

[Victor Gijsbers]

I have actually been working on a die-rolling tool for Polaris. It is some time ago that I last looked at it, but assessing it now from my work (where I can't look at the PHP source, only at the user-interface) it seems to work (mostly - I found one bug, but I think its a matter of seconds to fix it). You fill in your character's scores and who has the advantage, then the script shows you the roll as well as who won, and writes this away in a database. There is also a page where all past rolls can be looked at, so everyone can see the result.

What you would need to use this is webspace on a server that supports PHP and MySQL. Anyone interested in the source code can send me a PM.

[Frank T]

Yeah, we've been doing Polaris on Skype. There is a write-up in German here.

On Skype in general: it slows my PC down. It's apparently very complex. Even with only three people, we had some problems with bandwidth, leading to occasional crashes. A four person conference call crashes pretty quickly. We have been told that Teamspeak works much better, but you need a server for that.

The conference call is a huge improvement over IRC. We have used it for PtA also. It works pretty well, though no replacement for face to face of course. We still use an IRC channel for support (because the conference still crashes sometimes, and because we have a dice bot in the IRC channel).

Polaris on Skype was kind of tough to us, not improved by the fact that we were only three, which means that guidance is kind of crippled. Also, each of us had to print out all protagonist sheets to look at. The most annoying thing was the occasional disturbance or crash of the connection.

- Frank

[Christoph Boeckle]

How about trying TeamSpeak?

I never used it, but it's frequently used by computer gamers. A friend told me they where up to 40 players on one discussion, without any bandwith problems.

[Joe Zeutenhorst]

I've used Teamspeak and Ventrilo for gaming in the past - once for a roleplaying game. You need a server for both. Don't expect that you will run 40 clients off of your cable or dsl, but 4-5 people on my cable connection seems to work okay. Make sure all the players have any firewall issues worked out before game day.

One advantages of running a game under Ventrilo is using Push To Talk. I have trouble telling people's voices apart when they are recorded by the average computer microphone. Ventrilo highlights your nick whenever you hit your PTT key, which removes any doubt as to who is now speaking and when they are finished.