Online play during COVID time

Hello forum!
Which platforms do you guys use to run your Burning wheel campaigns on?
I previously used hangouts but that option is not as good as it was. Please tell me what you guys use.

We’ve been running our game on Roll20 with Discord for chat and Google Docs as a backup for our beliefs and some other things we want to refer to repeatedly.

As a player, there are a couple of minor niggles with the automated character sheet that’s been created for Roll20 but there are also some things that might be easier depending on each person (for example, it tells you whether a test was Routine, Hard, or Challenging so you don’t have to think about it). Overall, it seems to work well.

@Mark_Watson will have a better idea of how it feels for GMs.

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I’ve been running on Roll20 too. Hopefully tonight will be the final game of a 14 session campaign for 3 players. The sheets have worked really well, I wouldn’t have been able to do it without the built in character sheets.

In terms of Subsystems we’ve just done Sorcery nearly every session and a single DoW. Fate has accumulated but Persona is still scarce. I’ve awarded 4 deeds points over the course of the campaign, one last session!

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Just roll20 or do you use another application for “talk and video”?

Just Roll20. It’s great having everything visible in one window I’m not sure why people keep suggesting I use another video and voice service. People say it’s better without really explaining why and I just don’t see any benefit when we’ve done it differently.

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I’ve been summoned!

As @DaveHiggins! said, Roll20 and the Burning Wheel character have been a boon.

From a GM’ing side, I set up a few rollable tables / macros when I first tried out Roll20 for Burning Wheel.

Specifically, I set up the following buttons for us all:

  • Spend Fate (handy for when you’re opening up those 6s)
  • NPC Dice Roller (for a quick “roll X dice”, either for me or the players)
  • Armour Roller (in case you want to spend Artha on your armour roll)
  • Failed Casting / Garbled Transmission / Unwanted Summoning (for those “what did the spellcaster do this time?” circumstances)

We’re using Discord for voice/video, just because we’ve had issues with the Roll20 inbuilt stuff, and GoogleDocs for a centralised repository for our BITs (especially handy when doing Artha at end of sessions, or when looking for fun Traits to play a Consequence of Failure into).

I’m GM’ing for 4 players, and tend to have all of their character sheet open on a second screen (although do be aware that they’re shared documents, so when you move between panels, that affects both of you!). Having their full sheets to hand at all times is a lovely bonus!

We’ve been running pretty much weekly since late March and, other than the time it took to me initially key in everyone’s character sheets, it’s been fairly painless.

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I’ve been using Zoom for audio/video and roll20 for character sheets, turning their audio/video options off.

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Discord for Audio and Roll20 for video and gameplay. Just had a session zero with my newly-formed group last night and we had very minimal technical issues.

So excited to play next week!

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Discord for audio and gdocs for sheets. I wrote a Discord bot specific to Burning Wheel for dice rolling that I’ll share soon.

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Looks like discord is pretty popular. Diceroller would be much apprechiated.

Gdocs; what template do you use for the character sheets? I found pdfs on this forum but formats that are editable in gdoc?

Honestly? I really love the roll20 character sheet (as it’s got the various dice-roller bits built in, and takes into account modifiers).

Not for play, but for character creation, I’d also strongly recommend Charred (by the excellent @kanobe as a really good tool for putting characters together, and checking out the various possibilities.

As an alternative, there’s a downloadable character sheet on there (when you create a character), and you can also upload back the other way (both as PDF and in a format that Charred can read).

That might allow you to use Charred for “holding” / updating character sheets?

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I use Charred Black because it’s more up-to-date. Is there a reason to use Charred instead (other than the greater diversity of randomized names! :grin:)?

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Not that I know of?

Time to update my links!

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Glad I could help!

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Each player picked a different solution, depending on what they wanted. :laughing:

  • Flat text file in gdocs
  • Editable pdf on gdrive
  • Spreadsheet in gdocs

They were all linked from one shared campaign gdoc where we kept notes.

We’d paste beliefs/instincts into the discord chat at the start of each session after discussing changes.

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