The experiment

Welcome to the experiment. What exactly it is I will not reveal (you may suspect a kind of fraud here. Or maybe you will guess by yourself?). Its goal is to find out if I can write good enough English texts. At the same time, the subject of the post itself is slightly less important (I'll decide if I'm able to write in an interesting way later - as long as the result of this experiment is satisfactory). So let's begin!

Online hell(ish)

Playing online is a popular topic in the RPG world recently - everyone dispute why is it... Let's say screwed up. And how to fix it. Every single time I want to join in and scream: what do you mean? Playing online is awesome! First of all - you can play at all in the first place. I live in the countryside, my closest RPG friends are a few kilometres away. We all work, have families and other responsibilities. Gathering several people in one place and time is like a miracle. You also have to take into account the space that needs to be allocated for the session (with limited access for children) and the fact that after these few hours it would be good to return home. And all this late in the evening (otherwise when?). This upfront limits the length of the session - and there's not much to be done about it. I do not even mention access to the bathroom and water/snacks/etc. Everyone can imagine the difference.

And online? Yes - the problem of gathering several people at the same time remains. But it is much easier for everyone to find even four hours at home than to organize a trip and a return at a reasonable time. This automatically shortens the time available for the session - everything still in the evening. But how much easier it is to end the game at midnight and walk a few meters to bed (hitting the bathroom on the way) than to go back home even a dozen minutes by car, right? Right?

And the session itself is also much easier to reconcile with everyday life. Something unforeseen happened and you need to stay with the children (independent but still in need of supervision)? Playing live is a mess - you have to cancel. In the online session, at some point, you apologize to everyone for a few minutes and put children to bed. Anyway, you are home the whole time, and you can intervene in case of any problems. Of course, there are many such examples - and yes, there will be people who will complain that screaming children in the background break immersion, disturb others and such crap. Maybe - if the kids are screaming, you are taking care of them, not playing. But under normal circumstances, you have headphones with a microphone and the background noise doesn't disturb anyone at all. Listen to my sessions, at least once the player had to tell the child something (;) And what happened? And nothing happened, the session went on and no one lost the will to play or something.

Another thing - no eye contact between the players. OK, this is an argument. Only that not for everyone. As a person with (in fact, officially undiagnosed) Asperger's Syndrome, I don't... Well, don't care about "body language". It matters what one says, not how he waves his hands. At least one aspect matters - without seeing each other, you don't know when someone wants to say something. Hence, there are times when we interrupt each other. This can also happen on live session, but when playing online, it is certainly more frequent and harder to master.

To sum up - playing online is no worse than playing live. Or rather - both forms of gameplay have their advantages and disadvantages. And one cannot point to any of them as objectively worse or better. Some people prefer one or the other, but these methods are equivalent.

Enough.