Convention prep

[petrea_mitchell]

Now that there are conventions on my schedule, I need to actually get ready for them. First up: PaizoCon is being held on a variety of virtual tabletop systems. For RPGs like Pathfinder, there are two main ones, Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds. Roll20 is faster to learn and set up, but you have to do a lot of things manually. Fantasy Grounds gives you a ton of help executing things according to the rules, but the tradeoff is a longer setup time.

The high-level game I've signed up for is on Fantasy Grounds, which is how I wound up spending two hours this morning entering the details of my level 10 wizard including all 156 spells in her spellbook.

I have my second-edition wizard signed up for a couple of 2-hour quests, one of which is listed for Roll20 and the other on the popular new entrant, "Unknown virtual tabletop product".

For AmazingCon (and later Worldcon) I need to find an appropriate Zoom background and either locate my standalone webcam (my laptop doesn't have one built in) or get a new one. Which I'd better do soon, given how slow delivery is these days.

There's nothing specific I absolutely have to do ahead of Origins Online other than to register, but I have a reminder set for when registration opens a few days hence because I've decided to sign up at the limited edition T-shirt level.

Comments

[joseph_teller]

Does Fantasy Grounds do things for Non-Pathfinder/D&D/D20 based games?

[petrea_mitchell]

Yes, although you have to buy access to them separately. See their front page for a list of the big names they include.

[delosharriman]

Most of the time, when streaming or videoconferencing, I use an IP security camera with pan-tilt-zoom functions. (There's a nifty little piece of software which goes by the clunky name "v4l2loopback" which I was able to use to make this appear to be a local device, for programs such as the Zoom client which don't support grabbing input from the network.) For an event I appeared in commemorating the 50th anniversary of Apollo 13, however, I used a monochrome CCTV camera with plumbicon tube image pickup, NASA surplus property from circa 1970, connected via a cheap USB video capture device.

[petrea_mitchell]

Cool! And there are Moon backgrounds available out there for Zoom...

Probably more elaborate than I'm ready to tackle right now, though.

[delosharriman]

Of course, the background I used was a large cloth banner (the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project version of what was briefly known as the "Photograph of the Century", an unplanned low-angle shot of Copernicus taken to keep the film from sticking in the mechanism) which I had printed for use at conventions. I'm a little more into the physical Stuff than most folks today, I guess.