Sinking Our Teeth Into It: A Year Of Taking TTRPGs Online (Part One, Because I Have A Great Deal To Say.)

When computers turned out to be more about communication than computation.

Hello! Thanks for joining us on the TEETH journey. There’s going to be a bit more going on here than just the book and adventures: we intend to share some thoughts on the games we’ve been playing, the way we’ve been playing them, and how that ended up with us making our own game. (Weekly, probably.)

The reason you are here is likely that you saw the announcement of the release of NIGHT OF THE HOGMEN. If not, here’s the link.

Let’s start this newsletter business, then, with a look at this—ah—unusual year in TTRPGing.

2020 Visions

This was the year of the online TTRPG. I mean, obviously not just for me and my colleagues at dice-wrangling club: the entire world was at it, and it only took a glance at Twitter to see squads of headphone-clad people streaming their games of Call of Cthulhu or pretending to be a Tiefling. Did you get involved? Was it your first time? It was mine.

And initially, I did a bit of a sigh.

Having long been a sceptic about playing TTRPGs online I was, of course, forced to grasp the socially-distanced D20 in March last year, in order to keep our group running. But I hadn’t wanted to. I’ve been invited to online groups repeatedly, but declined. My PC is for the running and the shooting, or the raytraced bludgeoning of demons, not dice and people’s faces!

My reticence about going online was not simply about wanting to play face-to-face: I was sceptical that the tools would facilitate a good game, and I felt like the raw-feels of dice, pen and paper, and maps thrown on a table would be lost. They were, but I think they were nevertheless replaced by something else which is useful and intriguing.

I got over that. Rapidly. Not only did we get stuck in with gusto, but I was almost immediately invited to a second group and ending up with me playing RPGs on consecutive nights for most of the year.

It kept me sane.

What A Project

My primary group, with whom I’ve been playing a regular session of Blades In The Dark for quite some time, moved online as the lockdown loomed, laughing nervously, and postponed our next game as the news rolled in from Italy and Spain. We had little idea about what lay ahead. Fortunately the proposed solutions for remote nerdery worked well from the first session. If it had not… well, I fear for the Jim Rossignol of that timeline.

Anyway, as it was we used a hybrid system of the usual tools to get the game played: Roll20, Discord, a streamed version of Sophie’s Dice, PDFs liberally shared. The key trick was the Roll20 implementation of Blades, which has the scripted character sheets set up to roll straight from the sheet and do the trickiest parts of the game for you. This, delightfully, made things feel new and novel, and also allowed easy management of the assets we would have otherwise used in play (such as Ryan Dunleavy’s incredible Blades In The Dark mapping project, which I feel like I will do a whole other post on at some point, because ye Gods what a project).

For video-conversation we’ve used our Discord channel, which definitely isn’t the best option in terms of video and audio quality (Streamyard neatly trumps it, as I’ll try to remember to mention later), but it is at least better than the system built into Roll20. I have never been as thankful for being a dubious dual-monitor nerd with an expensive microphone.

Blades In The Internet

As it was, though, we had been playing Blades for a while by that point – I’ll write in some detail about our favouring this system enough to actually build a game around it soon enough! – and so we soon began to mess around with the format of the campaign, introducing an nightmarish nautical excursion to sea using J. Walton’s Leviathan Song to mix things up and send the players out on a hunting vessel.

What I liked most about that was the “Dreamer” leviathans, which, unlike the other immense demons that are being hunted in the Void Sea, have some sort of psychic effect, sending everyone into a trancelike unconscious state.

The playbook suggests playing a short scenario to explore this, and we used that as an excuse to play the marvellous and delightful Troika, which ended up being as weird as I could make it. A dream sequence of one game within another game. A first, for us. Troika, in case you have missed that while you made a healthy lunch, is a marvellously written, rules-light science fantasy game of Pratchett-style flights of fancy, and a Fighting Fantasy styled ruleset. (Which I ended up tweaking to allow my group to use the Luck attribute a little more like the stress/resist ecosystem from Blades. Yep, we can’t leave it alone.) It was absolutely ideal for such a purpose, and I am tempted to return to it in its own right, not least after picking up a copy of the ludicrously handsome Acid Death Fantasy…

For Wilderness Travel

I digress.

At some point during that summer campaign, we observed that the best part of the Blades background is the detail that mentions it is fashionable for wealthy people to eat caviar from a small wooden shoe. This led, naturally, to me tweeting about how I’d like to take the rule direction in a more more gothic/grotesque direction, as is my wont. “If I could conjure up the opportunity I think I'd like to do a Blades In The Dark gothic monster hunters reworking of the rules. Plunging into haunted mansions, searching woodlands for demon dogs etc.”

The influences here are clear.

But it led to myself and Marsh starting work, almost immediately, on precisely such a project. A project that will become TEETH. That’s not finish yet, but when it is it will look something like this:

Wrapping the Blades campaign up – I didn’t have a strong enough storyline for us to want to keep powering on with that one, I suspect! – we did our first test of what will become the main TEETH system. At the time it was still a fantasy setting, as per Blades, and it took several months before we realised it needed to be set in the real world, and in the 18th century. By the point of the first playtest, Marsh and I had been plugging away at it for a while, and we wanted to see if the tone, setting, and additional rule systems for wilderness travel and monster-fighting worked as intended. The feedback was useful, and more rigorous playtesting of the changed systems is about to commence.

We began to realise, too, that we had more ideas than would fit in a book, and, indeed, many of them were best suited to one-offs and standalones: a format that other successes in the standalone Forged In the Dark area encouraged us to explore. Hence HOGMEN, and the things that will follow soon.

Back at dice-club however, we decided to try something a little more esoteric: playing Warhammer 40k’s Dark Heresy setting with the fan-authored Genesys system conversion. Yeah. Now that’s interesting. I’ll come back to that as the story unfolds.

And while all this was shaking down, I was also beginning to play that Band Of Blades campaign, masterminded by James Hewitt, and attended by my occasional partner in crime, Kieron Gillen, as well as Failbetter‘s Chris Gardiner. A powerful coven. One that provided me with much more to think about.

And that is what I will talk about NEXT TIME.

Love you! x

—

Why not tell your friends and family about NIGHT OF THE HOGMEN? They’ll surely love its anthro-porcine catastrophes.