magic missiles never miss.

Hi,

So about a month and a half ago we generally stopped playing our current campaign. The reason behind this was due to a combination of poor planning on my part in regards to the module we're playing, and also because of the fact that using voice and roll20 isn't really shaping up to be in line with my vision of how I feel we should be playing our tabletop games.

I've been a DM for close to 8 years now, and in all that time I had never ran a game using voice - which is the method that the vast majority of D&D players prefer in real life. I thought that it'd be interesting to give this a shot with a prewritten module, just to see if it was up to par.

After about 5 sessions, I had concluded that it is not what I want for our games. It was a fun experiment and I had an enjoyable time with the few sessions we did have, but it just isn't what I feel is best for how we've always liked to play our sessions.

First and foremost, roleplaying takes a direct hit on the nose from the change to voice. It just doesn't happen as often. The storytelling and roleplaying aspects of D&D instantly take a backseat to the metagamey "play it like it's a video game" style. I really don't like that, it's just not what I want to participate in and I feel that we've always strived to tell and take part in interesting stories when we play these sessions. The voice chat method directly hinders our progress toward that objective.

Secondly, I am just not good at improvising things over voice. If I'm typing, I get a few more minutes to plan something out or refer to my notes. I'm better at writing than I am at public speaking. I can't really roleplay NPCs seriously over voice. It's cringy and embarrassing. I just don't like doing it.

Thirdly, it's just exhausting to run sessions like that. In all my years of running these games, I took it as a fairly relaxing experience, where the most difficult work came from mediating rules related discrepancies and figuring out where I'm trying to steer the story for the biggest and best payoff for the group. When you add in voice to that, it becomes incredibly stressful and difficult to manage on the fly. The quality of my writing and storytelling capabilities take a very large hit because of it.

So, instead of just giving up, I've taken all of the notes I have, as well as the rest of the material in the prewritten module book we've been running, and I've adapted it into my own campaign. It's taken me the time between deciding to stop the sessions and today to finish that task.

We will be continuing our campaign through text roleplay and removing the voice. We will be moving from roll20.net to a program called Fantasy Grounds, which holds a lot of sentimental value for us as a group. It's what we started in, and we attribute a lot of our long nights playing tabletop games to Fantasy Grounds as an environment for playing these games.

Please reach out to me if you'd like to continue playing our campaign, with these changes in mind. I'd like to get a general idea of who's still up for it, so that I can talk to each of you and figure out a time when we can all play.

Thanks for reading!