Our Shadowrun campaign started off a bit rough on Friday. As expected, we of course had a number of technical issues, but we also had several unavailable players, and unfinished characters. The intent to stream worked well enough, though it had it own problems as well.
The biggest issue we ran into seemed to be more on my side – the audio just wasn’t very clear. As we added more players, the group video call on Discord progressively worsened, to the point that it was a lot of static and noise, but still (barely) able to understand the players. I killed the background scene music, which at least stopped the distractions, but overall, I was not impressed with Discord. I spent the rest of the evening troubleshooting, but without success – from what I could tell, Discord video group chat just isn’t able to handle it with more than 2 or 3 members.
For the next session, I am going to experiment with going back to the Roll20 built in tools, which I understand are based on Google Hangouts. It does provide the benefit of a fixed camera location for the players, which will help with the stream layout, but I have heard mixed reviews as to the quality and stability as well.
For the group, we ended up with only 2 finished characters out of the 7. Of those, we found a small tweak here or there, but nothing major. Due to various issues, the other characters were not available for review at all, though I have the chosen picture for most of them at this point.
Our next game session is scheduled for Sunday, July 22, from 2 PM to 7 PM EST, at which point we will see if this will be a workable option for gaming.
