Thread by @Dragonharper

A few months ago @roll20app celebrated their "Cheers to 10 Years" event, accepting story submissions re: how the #vtt helped "build an adventure, stay in touch with friends, or meet a new adventuring party."

My entry (below) was 1 of the 10 selected for their prize. 🧵

Lots of families have a "game night." It's often said that "the family that plays together, stays together." Some play board games, some play card games. But me?

I was, quite literally, raised in tabletop gaming.

My parents met in college, where they played 1st Edition AD&D with their friends. By the time I was born, my mother was running her own campaigns in a homebrewed setting that incorporated elements from her favorite books,

from McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern to Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber and beyond. As a toddler, wanting to be included, I would play the familiars of other PCs - my attention span back then wouldn't last for an hours-long session,

so that allowed me to drop in and out in favor of some other activity without negatively impacting the game.

Gaming, specifically tabletop roleplaying games, was how my family spent time together, how we bonded and stayed connected throughout my childhood.

I could not begin to convey, here, the full impact her games have had on my life, or recount all the stories that are still told about them.

As I grew, my mother continued to run games for anyone who wanted to play and, during my high school years and later, we often hosted those games at our house.

Our living room, with extra chairs and folding trays placed wherever space could be found, was filled with friends on a weekly basis, and we had home-cooked meals and desserts available for all.

When my father's work moved us away from those friends - several states away - my mother still ran family games. But eventually I moved out, pursuing a relationship with someone who had shared our tabletop adventures previously and, ultimately, starting my own family.

My wife and I would still play in my mother's game whenever we visited, and when our own children were born they, too, played in their grandmother's game, with characters based on whatever their interests were at the time.

But at our own home we were fairly isolated - not close enough to existing friends to have reliable or regular visits, and living in a smaller community that didn't have the same opportunities to find like-minded gamers.

Even so, gaming remained an important aspect of my life. I tried running games through forums, play-by-post style, but it was difficult for people to post reliably, and the inherent nature of the medium meant that story progression was at a snail's pace.

At a live table, a round of combat might take five minutes. Through play-by-post, that was more like five days. It wasn't until about April of 2013 that I came across Roll20 and made an account, looking into the possibilities of this new "virtual tabletop."

My initial forays into running a game on the site were sporadic and limited to basic scenarios, testing the capabilities of the site with my wife, a friend from high school, and my (at the time) five-year-old son as players.

Three years later, in February of 2016, I started a full-on campaign through the Roll20 site, using my own homebrew system and setting.

I invited family and friends to the virtual tabletop, and when the weekly games first began my players included my parents, my sister, my wife, and both our children - three generations of family, playing and creating memories together.

"Season One" of that campaign lasted nearly two years, ending in December of 2017. Season Two, in which I revealed that my setting was connected to the one my mother had created and ran games within for decades, ran from January of 2018 to August of the same year.

And Season Three ran from September of 2018 until my mother's death in July of 2019.

That was a difficult time for us, as a family. Her health had been deteriorating for a few months before then, even causing vision problems that prevented her from reading - fortunately, Roll20's built-in voice chat meant we were still able to play together -

but she was still begging for more games, making new characters, and playing as much as she could even when she had to rely on others to move her token or make rolls.

After she passed, none of us felt capable of continuing that storyline. It was nearly a year before we felt ready have games again at all.

But in June of 2020, only a few months into the pandemic, I began another campaign. Again, my father, sister, wife, and children made characters, joined by a few other friends as well.

Instead of attempting to finish the previous campaign's story I jumped us ahead in the setting's timeline, some thousand years past an enigmatic cataclysm, but with references to prior characters and events.

I half-realized, as I was running it, that I was using the creation of this new campaign to work through my own grief, writing a farewell to my mother and an homage to her legacy.

The culmination of Season Three, finished in September of 2021, involved her primary character from Season One of the first campaign ascending to divine status. My father called it a "fitting and beautiful tribute."

How has Roll20 helped me?

It allowed me to give my mother the opportunity to be a player again after thirty-plus years of being the "Forever DM."

It allowed my children the chance to spend more time with their grandmother before she passed.

And it has helped my family recover from that loss, remembering her and honoring her memory together.

So thank you.