RHIT Homecoming 2008 - D&D

D&D

I've recently been participating in a weekly 4th-edition Dungeons and Dragons game with a number of RHIT alumni. Since we're distributed around the country, we generally play our sessions over the internet, using MapTool and Ventrilo. However, since both of our DMs and all but two of our players were attending homecoming, we scheduled the session for Saturday evening in my hotel room that week.

Since we did have two players who were not there, though, we still needed to use MapTools and Ventrilo. The original plan was to have everyone run their own instance of MapTools on their laptop, and one of the DMs would host the server on theirs. However, we found that due to the network configuration in the hotel, although our away players could connect to the server, laptops on the hotel's network could not connect to the server in the same room as us.

Attempting to get our clients to talk to the server

Although it might have been possible to resolve this with proxies, it was deemed easier to simply hook a DM laptop up to the hotel room's TV's VGA port in a dual-screen setup, displaying the client for the players on the TV screen while allowing the DMs to see their functions on the laptop's own screen. The only issue was that none of us had thought to bring a VGA cable to the hotel (we fail as nerds), so a few of us had to make a quick run into town to buy one before we could start. Fortunately, this also gave us the opportunity to get snacks and drinks, too.

The room did not have a refrigerator for the drinks we bought, so we had to get creative.

We soon got the laptop set up to display all of the information for the players on the attached room TV. The DM stuff was on the laptop's own screen. All players in the room watched the TV; the two away players used their own clients on their own computers.

We set up a USB microphone in the center of the room and disabled push to talk in Ventrilo, thus allowing everyone in the room to share a single voice chat connection with the two away people. In that configuration, they probably got a bit of echo if we tried to talk at the same time as one of them, but for what we had to work with, the setup worked reasonably well.

Preparing to play. The communal microphone is seen at the right.

The session begins.

I don't think we had nearly enough laptops in that hotel room.

My stuff. Hooray for Excel character sheets.

Awesome shirt

Hiding in the curtains

Other than one of our characters dying, the session went well. We ended at about two in the morning.

Nerd bling. What else were we going to use our new VGA cable for when we finished our session?

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