When the mind is overwhelmed, so is "the theater of..."

Well, here we are. What is it? 4 weeks into shelter-in-place? I really don't know. Neither does anyone else I know. The weather has changed decidedly toward spring. I am actually socializing more now than ever, just remotely. My days are busy. I've made pickled asparagus and cauliflower. I sewed a quilt top and matching pillows. There has been devastating personal news about people I know well, and merely distressing news about people I love dearly. I'm personally affected by this COVID-19 phenomenon even as I do what's rational and shelter in place, and wear a mask when I go out.

And yet, the days blend together.

There is something about occupying a small defined area - even if it is a large single family home - that is so familiar that it leaves me devoid of markers. It is difficult to make note of the passage of time even when I am consciously making an effort. I cannot remember if I had quarantinis by Zoom with Randy last Wednesday or the week before... and I bet he can't either. All I know is it was a good time, whenever it was.

I've played two sessions of D&D online with Discord and Roll20, and another session is scheduled for tomorrow. And I find it interesting that those dates and times I can remember. It's gotten me to think about why.

Sure I love the game. But I love pickling cauliflower, too. I do that a lot less frequently than I play D&D and yet I can't remember which day I pickled the cauliflower unless I look at the jar labels I used. And it's not about the personal interaction, either. I've had tea or cocktails with a half dozen friends over the last week or so, but blast me if I can remember what day it was I spoke to whom. Why is virtual tabletop D&D different? I can remember the dates and times of both game sessions without even breaking a sweat. We don't even have the videochat on - it's all voice and maps.

Actually, I think that's it, right there. Something about this particular combination of visuals and voice is compelling.

I'm finding the virtual tabletop experience fascinating. There are definite detractors - I didn't realize how much I key into other people's body language for communication until that information was taken away. Even with vocal inflection available, you just can't give people non-verbal cues on a one-on-one situation... and that would be true even if we opted to have video on during the games. For example, I was having a Zoom dinner last night with family, and I desperately wanted to make eye-contact with one relative after another said something wildly inappropriate. I found myself staring at her square on the screen instinctively trying to communicate with that simple, unobtrusive moment of  one-to-one eye-contact that Zoom cannot give us. I would have had to make a subtle gesture - far more likely to be picked up on by others. It couldn't be done. The frustration was palpable. I miss the connection of the unspoken. Both of us would have gotten a little bit of relief through humor in that missed moment. But in this case, Zoom is better than nothing, even with its limitations.

I really didn't get settled in to Roll20 until the second session. I followed the tutorial, but it's organized the way an engineer would organize a tutorial. (Not that there's anything wrong with engineers. I grew up around oodles of them. But most of the engineers I know are not studying the human end of the user-interface of devices or software. People who study user interfaces are their own thing. A thing Roll20 could benefit from, to be blunt.) Boom boom boom, down the list they go, following the menu. Now, the menus do make sense, but it's not the only way you can organize a tutorial. In this case, I would have loved the tutorial to have an option to group information by how you might use it in running a campaign. Like, for example, a "Let's run an encounter!" video. Where first they show you what an encounter might look like. And then they break it down and show you... how to upload a map to the backround level... how to use a grid, or turn it off... how to use 'fog of war', how to upload a token and modify its stats, how to roll dice as a player, or as a DM,... etc. Instead we get "this tool does this, that tool does that," without putting it into the context of how those tools get used in a real game.

But I quibble. Clearly, you can muddle through and figure it out. And the same goes for Avrae, the bot I've used on the Discord server. I mean, we're not making max usage out of either system, and there's a lot of redundancy between the two. We all seem to prefer Avrae's dice rolling and initiative management, and we also prefer the voice chat for Discord. I figure it's the best choice right now if only because Roll20 has come out and said that they are struggling with the high volume of users. Discord seems to be just fine. We're still keeping track of some things on paper, but it is really nice to use the status conditions and hitpoint bars on Roll20.

But the plusses and minuses of this new system go well beyond the nitty gritty details. Working with Roll20 and Discord has a fundamentally different feel than the tabletop in-person version of D&D, and some of what's good about the new system has been fascinating.

I love nothing more than the feel of dice in my hand (heck I've got an instagram account solely devoted to the beauty of dice) but I am finding the digital dice rolling to be satisfying, and oddly helpful. The fact that people have to type in the dice rolling formula seems to be helping them remember what they need to include. And the fact that Avrae can make attack rolls for characters and saving throws also seems to be helping people remember what goes into making those rolls as well. While we're not using Avrae's ability to track rounds and hitpoints lost, it's really nice to be able to set up initiative order through Avrae, and call up the list as often as we need to. Which is, well, fairly often. We all seem to have the attention span of gerbils.

A character token from our current
game. Each player's color is distinct.

Fundamentally, the digital version of the game has a more graphical aspect to data management, and not surprisingly, this seems to favor the more visually minded players. For example, having an icon that represents your character with a bar representing current HP/total HP above your head and graphical labels indicating status effects summarizes a lot of information in one little square that is easy to digest. Yes, when we play in the flesh I write down status effects on the whiteboard where we track initiative, but this is much more seamless and integrated. Of course, we can and do use wet-erase battle-grid game maps in our in-person games, but just as the character tokens contain more information than a mini, the digital maps have much more visual information to them than I can draw on the fly. And no, I'm not willing to throw enormous amounts of time into building real-world sets for our gaming session. (Hats off to those who do.) Digital assets are just much easier to get and implement quickly.

You want immersion? Having your characters' icons positioned on an image that actually looks like a road through a forest, or a top-down view of a castle, certainly pays the salary of the set-designer in that "theater of the mind". And the 'fog of war' method of revealing a map gives a much more realistic approach to how a character would learn about their environment (even without dynamic lighting). And despite that, "keeping it simple" doesn't break immersion, either. I decided to go with minimalist tokens for our player characters, much as I did for the physical battle-grids. The simple graphics mean you can identify each player by color whether you're zoomed in up close or looking at the map on a small device. I use monster tokens depicting art from the monster manual for combat... and it all works organically. If players have seen the critter before, they can identify it visually. And if it's new to them, they get a visual without getting stat information. So much can be said succinctly using visual media.

In fact, I'd go as far as to say that the new system is friendlier to people who have atypical learning profiles. "Theater of the mind" is all well and good - but if you struggle with translating verbal descriptions of distances and relative positions into a mental image, it's an arduous task to be immersed in a game devoid of visual aids. I've sat on the sidelines in fora where grognards bemoan the use of battle-maps, whiteboards, and digital media, as if keeping it all in your head is somehow an indicator of creative ability and intellectual worth. To them I say a hearty "screw you and your gatekeeping". If a token and a map free up a player to concentrate on other aspects of the game (like roleplay or creative strategy), that's fabulous. And if it levels the playing field for people with different processing styles, all the better.

Looking ahead (possibly very far ahead, depending on whether we ramp up viral testing or not), I wonder how we will integrate our digital experience back with actual game play. I think I would enjoy going back to physically rolling the dice, but I might find myself pulling my monitor and laptop into the dining room... that fog of war gizmo is pretty fantastical and I'd be sorry to see it go.