I’m thinking of running a Mothership campaign in the near future, but my group typically plays over Zoom and not everyone has a device that can support a VTT, so all of our games tend to be “theater of the mind”. No complaints, I’ve played this way for years.

If you’ve played Mothership, do you think it would be runnable without a TT/VTT, or is that pretty essential?

  • Zikeji@programming.devEnglish
    6·
    1 month ago

    Definitely runnable without it.

    I’ve only played Mothership for a oneshot (over multiple sessions) while waiting on a party member to become available.

    We did not have TT/VTT. We had some visual aids, like the layouts of ships were sent in chat for us to look at. I don’t think it really hampered the experience, and I have aphantasia so “theater of the mind” usually doesn’t help me much lol. It was more than serviceable.

    • anticonnor@lemmy.worldOP
      3·
      1 month ago

      That’s really good to hear! This is a game I’ve been hoping to run for a while now, and there are some games that just don’t play well without a TT of some sort. Thanks!

      • Zikeji@programming.devEnglish
        2·
        1 month ago

        You’re welcome! My group enjoyed it for sure, I will say the companion app is a huge helper. We particularly liked how the rules aren’t overly complex and easy to homebrew.

  • INeedMana@piefed.zipEnglish
    5·
    1 month ago

    I haven’t played it but in general to me the rules seem rather in the OSR direction, so I feel there’s nothing in the rules that would necessitate a VTT.

    Also, there’s https://www.owlbear.rodeo/ it’s browser based and if you can fit under 50M per image it’s free. I would guess a device would sooner have problems with zoom than this. One of our players does use mobile with owlbear.

  • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
    2·
    11 days ago

    I’ve run a dozen sessions of Mothership and never used any kind of minis or tokens to track movement.

    I do highly recommend the official mobile app though as it has a character sheet tracker and dice roller and can join people together in a game session.