Playing Pen-and-Paper RPGs Online with Friends?

MotorMachineMercenar wonders: "My friends and I have almost 200 years of combined pen-and-paper RPG experience. As my gaming group has drifted apart (moving to different cities and countries to pursue careers and love) our game time has diminished to just a few nights a year during vacations. We've toyed with the idea of playing online but never got far. Now, I'm not talking about MMORPGs, NWN or anything like that. Just regular, open-ended pen-and-paper RPGing with old friends, not restricted by computer game mechanics. So we'd like to recreate the good ol' tabletop experience as much as we can. We've thought about using Netmeeting (or similar) to communicate with voice and maybe video, to share maps, character sheets, etc. What about throwing dice securely so everyone or only the GM sees the results? Does Slashdot have other ideas or better tools? Has anyone done this successfully?"

Comments

Re:IRC

[Lendrick]

One thing I've noticed about the IRC games I run (been doing this for about five years now), they tend to be a bit roleplaying-heavy. Turns out, it's easier for everyone to get into character because you're just seeing words on the screen, as opposed to looking at your friends. It makes the experience flow a lot more like a book.

Of course, one thing you give up using this method is the ability to conveniently draw maps for people. As some people mentioned further down, there are programs like OpenRPG which allow you to use a miniatures map and the like, but I've never had much luck getting those programs to work (people's connections kept dropping, for one thing).

The big downside, of course, is speed. Waiting for everyone to type can get a little slow. On the whole, though, it works fairly well.

Play by email

[Unknown Kadath]

You didn't mention what games your group is interested in. For online play, my friends and I ditched the dice mechanics entirely and I started GMing a play by email game. It doesn't require the time commitment and scheduling of an IRC session, and tends to have a smoother and somewhat more leisurely feel. We take turns writing sections of narration, and we tend to back-channel a bunch so that the players can ask each other clarification questions, or speak to me as GM privately. The system we're using is Amber, which is already diceless, so that helped. I don't think PBEM would translate well to d20 games, since they're so stats and combat-intensive. PBEM may be more like collaborative writing than you're really looking for, but it's some of the coolest world-building I've ever done. If you have a mature group of players who are interested in story more than killin', you might give it a try.

-Carolyn