This past Wednesday night the Lords of Tyr started a New tradition! The weekly summer game night. I had been thinking about this for quite some time. Mostly because some of our members' life and work schedules have kept them from being as regular as they would like. So I finally got my butt in gear and got the first few encounters ready from the H2 Thunderspire Mountain adventure.

I figured we would get maybe 4 or 5 players tops. Instead I got 7 players! I had thought, incorrectly, that this would be our small nimble game... nope! Because this game was during the week, it was going to rely heavily on Skype and MapTool. Skype just released beta 5.0. This version allows up to 5-way video conferencing. That means that at least 4 of our players can have 2-way video. That will certainly help with some roleplaying.

MapTools usage means that I really needed to focus on visibility lines and lighting to really help get a more immersive experience. Overall I was very happy with the results.

One thing that did surprise a few of us was the seemingly greater focus we seemed to have. There was less cross talk and distraction with everyone being remote, save my wife and I. This was an unexpected but welcome result of remote gaming.

We will have to see whether we can keep up a weekly pace after the summer is over. I hope even if we cannot do it weekly that we can continue the mid-week game night in some form at least to accommodate the couple of Lords of Tyr that cannot always make the weekend games.