The FUTURE Is Now!!1!

I played the 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons module Keep on the Shadowfell (I think) Sunday night. We used this fancy program called Map Tools that I thought was pretty neat and would love to use, if all of my gamers didn't live within thirty minutes of one another. Our means of communication was Skype, which worked surprisingly well. I actually had no experience with Skype, and had kind of expected it to be a somewhat janky and unreliable means of communication. There were some spots where our words were garbled, but those seemed to be a bug, rather than a feature, and overall it operated quite well and I enjoyed the whole experience.

It was Shawn's first time DMing and I think he did super well, he even went so far as to say that it was fun to run things. I had fun as well, despite my Bard getting two critical failures in a row, and then a third later in the same combat. I started out strong with a natural twenty for my initiative, but apparently that used up all my luck for the day. Or maybe the fact that I was using the dice I normally DM with to roll stuff as a player was the problem (I used a dice roller on Map Tools to get my twenty for initiative). I dunno, there are a lot of myths and legends regarding dice and the potential luckiness they may or may not have. As I was saying, I had some fun.

We played for about two and a half hours, long enough to introduce our characters to each other, fight off seven kobolds, and get to Winterhaven. Our group is composed of a Halfling Rogue, an Eladrin Bard (me), and a Shifter Warden. Certainly an eclectic collection of characters. There seems to be some pretty easily flowing role-playing going on and that is pretty cool. I enjoy the in character dialogue and goofiness.

We all discussed and have agreed to go forward with an email-based post between sessions thing to keep us in the game and prevent us from forgetting all the details of the previous session. So basically our characters are bumming around Winterhaven and we will use dice rollers and posts to kind of fill in what's going on while we're waiting for a schedule to appear for me at my place of employment and we can find a time to game again. Seems like a really good idea to me, and I am very interested in seeing what kind of trouble we can get into just wandering around a town.

Good times. I'm really interested to see how this all goes.