Our first session of Age of Ashes for Pathfinder second edition started on Sunday, and was a mixed success. The game itself was good – everyone seems to have adapted to the new rules and mechanics fairly well, and the story thus far has everyone engaged. The challenge was mainly with my juggling of the various pieces of technology, trying to add and enhance a variety of areas.
As planned, we are recording with the intent to broadcast the sessions. The basic recording worked just fine, though I forgot to turn on the laptop screen recording, and I forgot my own personal mic. I am working on processing the video we did capture though, and should have the first session finalized by this weekend. Still considering the release schedule, most likely I will actually publish it on the day we play the next session, so that I have a two week time schedule, rather than one week.
At the same time, we attempted to start using Fantasy Grounds, primarily for me to track and manage the game itself. Here we ran into several challenges, the most basic being that I only had a couple of the character entered into the software. In addition, for some reason it caused my laptop to run exceedingly slow, and I was handicapped by forgetting my mouse. So about mid-way thru, I defaulted back to Adobe Acrobat and taking notes on paper for the module.
One of the players brought their laptop, in order to try out the software, which works, but really ended up being irrelevant. The concept was personal perspectives for dungeons and rooms, but since we draw the map out on the board anyway, that doesnt really help much. Plus the power cord limited the options to actually use the computer at the table. Most likely we will drop that piece entirely, though I will continue to try to use it myself for game management.
