a discussion about the best practices for running online games, alongside some of my own opinions and preferences for which you, the fledgling online referee, should follow exactly.

The Foreplay

This section is about the nuts and bolts behind the game. Things like platform, sharing of text, and software. If it doesn't relate to the conduct of the game itself, it's probably not in here!

Communication Platform

The first decision is probably the most crucial one: Where (and by what method) are you going to speak to one another?

For both voice and text-based games, Discord remains the top dog, precisely because of its healthy number of features and widespread use. People are already familiar with this (probably) and the various text channels allow easy segregation of information. If you're playing a voiced game, great! Discord has you covered. If you're playing a text-only game, Discord still has you covered.

For people who aren't familiar with Discord, it's essentially Slack or Microsoft Teams for Friends instead of Smelly Coworkers.

Teamspeak, an older competitor to Discord, has similar features... I'll pass it over to an expert on the matter, someone who runs games in teamspeak regularly.

There are a few things to keep in mind when choosing a platform to play your game on. Consider the relative familiarity your playing group has with the software (this will be a recurring piece of advice through much of this blogpost). Consider also the price point; if the application costs money, who is paying it? Can you justify the cost to your players?

My current vocation being Broke College Student, and my current identity being Straight White American Guy, I primarily play and run games on Discord. I assume many of you do the same, so I won't linger too long on this point.

Game Materials

One of the hobbies adjacent to TTRPGs is book binding, and for good reason: more copies of RPG books are profoundly expensive, and it's often easier to print copies of what you need and bind them yourself. The benefits of this beyond money are nice, too. Often, having only one copy of the book at the table means lots of time is wasted waiting for the book to make it to you. Handouts and other bound materials are good for alleviating this problem, since a referee can bind multiple copies of say, the equipment/arms/armor lists, and people can shop and discuss simultaneously without waiting. Another benefit of this approach is that the referee can curate the material visible to the players and reserve other material for the referee's eyes only (certain bestiary monsters, or adventure notes, for example).

I mention all of this because the same statements apply pretty directly to online games, too.

There are two ways to present rules to your players online. The simplest is to link them to an online reference for the game you're running or upload a PDF that they can use to view the rules.

This approach sidesteps the problem you have in physical space with one copy of the book; multiple people can reference the file or the online reference. There are three problems created by doing this, though.

Depending on the people you play with, reading, understanding, and retaining key information in a 100+ page PDF file is next to impossible. To this group of people, the type of reading you'd expect them to do is much less than the normal person. If you throw, say, the free version of Worlds Without Number at them, they'll be hit with way too much information all at once and probably won't be able to navigate the file efficiently (I'm speaking from experience).

You can solve this problem by creating guides to using/referencing the PDF or using session time to run through the PDF together. You'd think that the Table of Contents would be enough here but, having chaperoned clueless gamers for many long hours through paragraphs without number, I can assure you that it is not.

The second problem with this approach is that, like handing the physical book around the physical table, the entire text you're using is visible to players, which may not be what you want. This is only a problem if your players can actually read (rare) and derive pleasure in reading RPG texts (even rarer).

You can always "solve" this problem by playing with adults who will listen to your requests not to read the sections in question. Barring that (we are talking about gamers, after all) it's reasonably straightforward to remove pages from a PDF. Plenty of online services exist that do this for free.

The last and most damning problem is the inevitable house rule or additional content you wish to codify into the rules of your game. Sending an email to the person hosting the online rules reference arguing that your home game's changes should be reflected in the reference has a (as of the time of writing, I'll get you one day Gavin Norman!!!) 0% chance of success, and changing a PDF in any meaningfully complex way is about as painful as wedging ten toothpicks underneath your biggest toenail and kicking a door frame.

This is where we start to bookbind.

Digital "Bookbinding" usually comes in the form of collaborative documents, the gold standard of which is currently Google Docs. It's concurrent for all users, which means that you can tinker and bicker over rules and your players always have an up-to-date copy. It's also got rudimentary version control, so if someone's "cat" accidentally highlights the section on Death and Dying and changes the rules to benefit their "owner's" character there is a record of that and an easy way to revert to the original version. If you want to sidestep that problem entirely, you can also set permissions on each document such that all visitors can only read the document or leave comments, leaving the text sacrosanct and free from feline fuckery.

The degree to which you bookbind digitally is ultimately up to your preference and what makes life easier for your players. This is also not solely on the shoulders of the referee; encourage your players to make and share references that help them play the game more efficiently!

For my own games, I opt for a mix between the two extremes and often switch my approach based on the goal I have in mind. For 1000 Statues, I refer to Delving Deeper's v4 online rules reference and having a pinned message in a Discord channel mentioning any deviations from the text. In the short Line-Ways game I ran, I wrote a system entirely in Google Docs, because I was pulling the rules from one source, the setting from another, and needed a way to unify them for player sanity.

Thinking about how to present your game materials is probably one of the more important things to do before a campaign actually begins, since it influences the mouthfeel of the campaign to your players. If everything is easy to refernce and smooth, the game feels nicer. Balancing this with the limited time and energy you have as a human being is the hard part. When in doubt, enlist help from your other players!

Scheduling

Aptly named "the final boss of RPGs," scheduling is maybe the most-cited reason why that one friend hasn't run his epic campaign. It is also one of the most exaggerated problems in the scene. If your players want to play games, they will make time for it. If they don't, then they don't. It's totally normal not to want to pretend to be an elf for hours at a time.

Digital tools like when2meet and lettucemeet allow users to schedule meetings across time-zone differences. If you're on Discord, they have a custom timestamp feature which lets you specify the date and time in your timezone but automatically converts the time to others in different timezones. Either way, choosing players who truly want to make time to play in your game will go farther than any tool or softwaare I can recommend.

Speaking anecdotally, sessions in real life are less taxing than online ones. This is for a variety of reasons; being in a screenless environment with your friends can be exhausting but is ultimately rejuvinating while staring down a laptop screen for 4 hours is torturous on the best of days.

This is why I recommend scheduling your first handful of sessions to run for a shorter time than your usual IRL time. If this is your first game, shoot for 2-3 hours. The smaller timeslot makes it easier to fit into busy schedules and if this feels too short you can easily extend, allowing players who can't continue to play to hop off and continuing on with the brave souls that remain. As always, this is a balancing act between the stamina of your gamers and the material you can easily prepare between sessions. When in doubt, shorter is probably better online. It's better to end when everyone is in a good mood than to push through and end the game feeling drained.

For my part, 3 hours is the maximum length I'll run in games, though occasionally I've run for longer. Usually, though, I'm just happy to fit in a 2-hour delve once a week.

In terms of frequency, it's good to be consistent. Biweekly and monthly or bimonthly sessions, while much less of a time commitment, can sometimes create problems when one addled player forgets that this week was session week or accidentally booked a dentist's appointment during game time. This hurts a lot depending on your attendance policy; if you go two months without playing, that's a sixth of your whole year gone!

Generally, I try to run weekly. I make and follow my calendar by week, so this works best for me. It's less of a big deal if I have to cancel one week for something because I have three other weeks in the month to run, too.

Attendance Policy

I think you can get away with being a little stricter with your attendance policy online than in real life. All sorts of transit problems can affect your player's ability to come to the physical table, but that same player is likely not inconvenienced at all by having to sit down at a computer in their home for a few hours.

That being said, being a hardass about attendance is the quickest way to having no players. Life happens and the more accomodating you can be without compromising the game, the better.

In most of the games I run these days, I run for any number of players greater than or equal to two, and the news that a player can't make the following session does nothing to my cortisol levels. One day, you too may reach my level of chill.

Asynchronous Gaming

Sometimes, it may be better to handle certain game actions outside of session time. Most commonly, these actions are shopping and downtime actions.

Defining the preferred format and honor policy for these actions is important. How involved are the procedures? Is the referee scheduling sessions with one player to play out an adventure they do in downtime, or is it a handful of text messages exchanged while you're on workbreak? Establishing what kind of culture these sorts of asynchronous actions exist in is important to avoid alienating players who don't have as much time to dedicate to RPGs outside of session.

In terms of best practices, I tend to do downtime in a text channel and trust players to handle bookkeeping-adjacent tasks like shopping on their own time and without any sort of honor policy. I have enough going on without having to price check a steel nail for Craig at 2pm on a Tuesday.

Dice Rolls and Character Sheets

These two topics are grouped together because it's mainly a matter of trust and preference. Are dice rolls public or private? Are they done with real dice and the result then conveyed or are they done with digital tools?

The gold standard for Discord dice bots is Rollem, which is soon to be in Version 2.0. According to the patch notes this will make it even easier to use than it was already. Other alternatives include Dice Maiden, which is a discrete dice roller, and the extensions to other, general purpose Discord dice bots like Dash Delta and Helpful Modron.

Character sheets follow a similar logic. Where are you keeping them? Are they public or private? How do you ensure players are keeping their records correctly?

Unfortunately, Google Sheets is the standard for shared character sheets. There's even a whole blogpost/spreadsheet on it!

For my own part, I typically don't care that much about how players record their character, but I do ask that they share any new characters they make so the group can ensure they didn't accidentally make a mistake in the process.

The Act Itself

This is the section for all the tips of conducting the game at the (virtual) table.

Focus and Attention

Managing focus and attention is a problem to keep in mind throughout the online campaign. Finding what works for your group that allows you all to pay attention to the game for the allotted time is a little trickier online than it is offline, since playing online is like putting a toddler in the toy room and telling it to only play with the blocks; lady, I got all these Hot Wheels to play with too!

It's worth noting here that this should be a group concern and not something that keeps the referee up at night. Everyone should desire to participate and be present, and if one player is too distracted playing bullet chess or League of Legends to participate in the game then online gaming probably isn't for them.

In my own experience, having a shared whiteboard or other resource the players create and keep themselves is an excellent tool for driving focus. The goal is to give them a task that's related to or at least tangential to the conversation happening during play. Maps are awesome for this because they are created through active listening and maintained through paying attention to what happens and marking notes accordingly. For session report freaks, you can even label the order in which you visit rooms during the session and refer to the map later as a tool for writing your reflections.

I've grown stricter on it, but in the past I used to be much more loose with videogaming at the online table. I trust people to only do these activities when there is a true and serious lull in the gameplay or an issue doesn't need their attention (the decker hacking into the matrix is the classic example). Obviously this isn't always how it's used (in one case, a dear friend of mine interrupted my narration to ask if we could be quiet until his bullet chess game was over) so it might be worth putting an explicit ban on the activity at your table.

Some people find cameras necessary to running online; others find it ultimately distracting and unhelpful. I bring up cameras this late to say that the function of cameras is largely for reasons of focus and attention than for any other reason; if cameras are distracting, there's no need to have them on, likewise if they're a necessary part of paying attention. Work with your group's comforts in this regard. Not everyone is comfortable being on camera, and I certainly don't want to see gamer skid marks if I can help it.

Crosstalk

Maybe the most frustrating element of gaming online is crosstalk. Depending on your platform it becomes either a minor annoyance or a game-ender. The following is a handful of tricks, tips, and a general discussion on things that eliminate the negative effects of crosstalk.

Having a hierarchy of speakers (that is, who is allowed to speak or who gets priority when speaking) creates less moments where everyone feels the need to contribute to a situation. This has the downside of feeling very unnatural, as many players will have no experience having conversation in such a structured manner. Congresspeople, Model UN enthusiasts, and formal debaters probably jive with this really well. The most common example of such a roll is the Caller, who is the only person allowed to give actions to the referee.

Utilizing another manner of communication in addition to voice is super helpful, also. For me, this looks like the sidebar channel in discord, but it could also mean raising your hand on your webcam or wiggling your token seductively on your VTT of choice. The point here is to signal for attention in a manner that doesn't involve voice, leaving the voice channel free for other (often ongoing) business.

It's helpful as both a referee and a player to think about the rhythms of conversation that happen throughout a game. If you notice one player speaking first always, it might be wise to wait until they've spoken to try and get a word in edgewise. Likewise, if you notice your referee tends to pause before the last sentence of their narration, it might behoove you to give them time to ensure they've spoken their piece in its entirety. Consciously keeping an eye out for these patterns lets you be a more attentive player and create less crosstalk.

When things are particularly hectic, having an established order for people to speak in is a good trick. Combat is a good example of this sort of problem, when everyone wants to do something and there's no initiative system to guide them. On Discord, you can use the order of participants in the voice channel as a list to go through and collect responses. It would be trivial to create a list manually or through some other method.

Information Processing

Regardless of whether you're using physical dice or virtual ones, it helps to have a record of rolls you can use to parse results from, since you can't see everyone's dice totals or ask them to repeat their total (see Crosstalk). Labeling your dice rolls when done virtually, or writing the purpose and result of your dice roll in a text chat, can all help the referee and the player process rolls faster.

In general, since attention and focus is a bigger problem in online games, you want to make sure you can process any rolls you make quickly and effectively as a player and a referee. Making physical aids is very helpful, nearly moreso than in-person since the physical aids don't take up the ever-valuable computer monitor space (which should have whatever maximizes attention and focus on it) and can be annotated and changed on the fly without any computer hiccups (leaving the voice call, closing your browser, etc.).