Last week I jumped into a tabletop RPG with complete strangers, played over the internet using only audio. It went surprisingly well!

The game I joined was a stand alone session of Lasers and Feelings - the excellent one-page science fiction RPG by John Harper. I found the game through a Discord community. Discord is like Slack but for game communities and has a few tailored features, like audio chat rooms. I saw someone posting about a ‘pick-up game’ that had a couple open slots and was starting in a few minutes - I was free so decided to jump in.

Five of us played over audio chat and I didn’t know anyone’s real name or any particular details at all. The GM did a great job of facilitating a space adventure and the players were funny and collaborative.

I was impressed with how smooth it went, given how rocky things can be with anonymous strangers on the web. My guess is that we’ll see lots of interesting experiments with collaborative storytelling among strangers in the coming years and I’m mostly optimistic!