How do you simulate a tumbling block tower online? Does a game that relies on Jenga® become impossible to play when you can’t meet face to face? The answer is no, of course, but getting to yes took a little work - and calling in some experts. 

We asked two friends who have actually thought about this a lot: Dana Fried, who created the “D20 Tower” to play Epidiah Ravachol’s Dread, and Gerrit Reininghaus, who was already playing Star Crossed quite successfully over video chat. 

Dana’s original solution involved rolling the D20, marking each time each number was drawn - the tower “falls” after the same number is rolled four times. Gerrit (in my opinion, the expert on Live Action Online Gaming) coupled that with a responsive spreadsheet character keeper, and an ingenious mechanic to replace touching the tower during character dialogue - instead, touching the other player’s face on your screen. 

In the end, we’ve included two options in the book - a straightforward adaptation of the D20 tower (for online play, or for anyone who can’t or doesn’t want to pull bricks!) and a more complex spreadsheet-driven version that emulates the uncertainty of the tower in interesting ways. 

If you’d like to see Star Crossed Online in action, we recommend this recent episode of Roleplay Retcon, where Alex and RR host Jensie retcon the should-have-been-great Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever. Jensie called it “the best online character keeper I’ve ever used.” Listen to the episode here!

<3
Alex