I've been playing RPGs over Google Hangouts for a while, and recently
several people have asked how to go about this as their regular groups
move on-line. So here are my notes.
You will, alas, need a Google account. Also an up-to-date web
browser and some sort of camera and microphone. Headphones are
strongly recommended but not usually essential; echo cancellation
usually works reasonably well.
Start at https://hangouts.google.com/ and select "video call". Log in
as prompted. That'll spawn a new window, but the important thing is to
copy the call URL (e.g.
https://hangouts.google.com/call/XoCxXRTXB47HXLB1-SSkAEEI) and send
that to the other people. It should be valid pretty much indefinitely.
(You can invite people within Google, but yuk.)
That puts you in a "lobby" screen where you can check settings, and
from which you can join the actual conference. The cogwheel icon lets
you select camera and audio devices; the camera and audio output can
be tested there, but for some reason they've never set up a way of
testing audio input other than joining a chat and finding out
whether people can hear you.
People should be ready to adjust their microphone input levels (don't
ask me how to do this in Windows or MacOS). If one person is much
louder or softer than the others, that's the only way to fix it.
Once in the actual hangout, the main part of the screen switches to
whoever's talking; everyone else is shown in the bottom right corner.
If you want to lock onto a particular person, click their icon; click
again to unlock. (I hardly ever do this.) There's also a text chat off
to the left, useful mostly in emergencies though I've sometimes used
it to give URLs for handouts.
The system copes very poorly with multiple simultaneous speakers.
Everyone has to learn to back off if someone else is talking. (There's
also quite a bit of lag, which makes this harder.)
There's no built-in dice roller or anything of that sort; I just use
dice.
If someone's connection drops, their icon will usually freeze and stay
that way for several minutes before it vanishes.
To leave the hangout, just close the window/tab.
I find that the video transcoding is fairly hard work for the CPU, and
I tend not to use the Hangouts laptop for anything else at the same
time.
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