Running a game for 6 Players

Roleplaying & GM-ing discussions
1

I’m fairly new to Foundry/Forge and am going to be running a game of Traveller next weekend with 6 players using the Twodsix game system, with a few modules.

I’d like to run everything, including full player AV in Forge/Foundry for a fully integrated experience. I’ve loaded the Jitsi module, though I’m not running a custom server for it.

Although it’ll be hard to say definitively, and local network capacity applies, will this in theory work? Or am I pushing the bondaries having six players and me on and running webcams and audio? What are peoples experiences with large numbers of players with webcams running?

2

For me personally, it works fine, but it gets buggier the more people, and if one has to reload everyone has to kind of deal.

Interested to hear how it goes if that is what you’re going for ^^

1 Like
3

Thanks @Kevin we will see. I like everything to be together if possible. If necessary I might look at a custom Jitsi server if this doesn’t work too well. I’ll also prepare a backup on Role and I have a bit of Discord to fall back on.

4

I doubt the servers will be the problem.
It is an underlying issue in Foundry, that a different server won’t fix. But It isn’t bad, it is usually only a problem if your players feel like reloading a lot ;p

5

I personally always liked to do audio over Discord and video on Foundry. Other than having the videos inside Foundry as being an obvious advantage, I think using Discord for the audio has many pros and very little cons.

  • Discord is known-to-be-stable and works well for large groups
  • Voice activity detection has much better algorithms and will function without having the first word cut off in the sentence
  • For those using push-to-talk, Discord, by being a native application, will let you use push-to-talk globally, but Foundry will require you to have the foundry tab focused, so if you use D&D Beyond in another tab or something causes you to unfocus the tab, your push-to-talk wouldn’t be working anymore, which can be annoying.
  • If a user reloads the page (on purpose or by accident, or if you enable a module so it reloads for everyone, etc…), you don’t lose that audio connection to them
  • If one person fails to connect or their connection is slow due to the video bandwidth needed, it won’t affect the audio stream
1 Like
6

Yes, perhaps I should leave the audio on Discord. Thanks for the tip. It is what we do when I play on Roll20 and it seems to make that more stable.

7

The game went pretty well with 7 of us on. I kept the AV full on Foundry using the Jitsi Module. One player had drop outs but that was at their end. I noted some video boxes had ghosting images from time to time, but otherwise it held up and I will use it again, though not with 7 of us on!

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