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Try Fantasy Grounds first though. It's got realistic dice, tools, maps the works for pretty much any major pen & paper RPG since there are quite a few rulesets available.

Why try proprietary software when there's an excellent Free Software option that you can customize to your needs?

Try Fantasy Grounds first though. It's got realistic dice, tools, maps the works for pretty much any major pen & paper RPG since there are quite a few rulesets available.

Try giving Fantasy Grounds a try. http://www.fantasygrounds.com/

The online play is an attempt to catch up to market demand and existing 3rd party products like http://www.fantasygrounds.com/ it's hardly an innovation on their part. As a company Hasbro seems to be very conservative, moving safely behind the market and then copying what works for others rather than leading the way with market trends. I guess the main difference with Scrabulous is they got caught in a licensing web.

Our group uses Fantasy Grounds. They released version 2 about a year ago, and it's highly customizable now if you know how to use XML and Lua. Unfortunately, they still don't have a demo of version 2 on the website yet - the difference between the two versions is like night and day.

Or they just bring their Tablet PC to the game and use Fantasy Grounds to roll their dice.

Here's a list of all the virtual tabletops I know of
http://gametable.galactanet.com/
http://rptools.net/doku.php?id=maptool:intro
http://trisrpg.bronzeforge.com/index.htm
http://users3.ev1.net/~mem5000/
http://www.battlegroundsgames.com/index.html
http://www.codemonkeypublishing.com/index.php?modu le=htmlpages&func=display&pid=21
http://www.enworld.org/RolePlayingMaster/
http://www.fantasygrounds.com/
http://www.geocities.com/trainz_ca/ID/
http://www.ghostorb.com/
http://www.kloogeinc.com/
http://www.nbos.com/products/screenmonkey/screenmo nkey.htm
http://www.openrpg.com/
http://www.opnpw.com/
http://www.tabletopmapper.hpg.ig.com.br/
http://www.travellerrpg.com/Catalog/software.html
http://www.triaxe.co.uk/dnd/index.php?page=Online% 20Chat
http://www.viewing.ltd.uk/viewingdale/index.htm
http://www.webrpg.com/gamesystem/

I've been looking for this kind of software for a couple of years now. OpenRPG is as user frindly as open source software was 10 years ago. I'd given up until I stunmbled upon Fantasy Grounds. It is almost every thing I've been looking for. I've paid up and converting it now so I can run SLA industries. This along with Teamspeak and MorphVOX I'm looking forward to running some great games.

There are several ways to go, but for my money, the best product is FantasyGrounds.

Fantasy Grounds is a "virtual tabletop" complete with d20 rules, character sheets, dice, a chat window, the ability to share images with your players, and to mask/unmask maps as your party progresses.

The current version is 1.05, but a major revamp has been in the works all year, with a version 2.0 due out "soon". Speaking of GenCon - the SmiteWorks guys (who make FantasyGrounds) will be sharing a booth with the guys from Code Monkey Publishing (makers of the E-Tools software for character creation).

Other tools to look at include OpenRPG and Klooge.

I'm not, personally, a fan of those, but everyone has their preferences.

Also, to aid in communication, I strongly suggest running a TeamSpeak server, so you can actually talk to your fellow players, instead of typing everything manually.

My friends and I hoped that DDO would allow us to relive our D&D pen and paper days, but as others mentioned, DDO falls far short of that. We did however search the net and found a couple of programs that did a better job of it.

My personal favorite is Fantasy Grounds (http://www.fantasygrounds.com/, which mimics a table top with dice and such. There's no real automation in it, but if you know XML you can customize the rulesets and such.

There are a few others, Klooge (http://www.kloogeinc.com/) is a bit more complex, but you can tweak the heck out of it if you know what you're doing. OpenRPG (http://www.openrpg.com/) is another one.

To each their own, but these programs (combined with voice comms) can really help ya relive the tabletop experience if your friends are long distance like mine.

H

• GRiP.
• ScreenMonkey.
• Fantasy Grounds. Excellent graphics, but mostly just for D20.
• KloogeWerks. Java-based, with lots of neat features.
• OpenRPG. My favorite -- it runs on Linux and is open source!