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Tabletop Gaming Over the 'Net?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the better-than-an-MMORPG dept.

kebes asks: "I'm the GM for a group that has been gaming together for about 12 years. We're starting to move away from each other, and want to switch to playing our tabletop RPG online. So far, we've been using a combination of TeamSpeak and IRC. It works, but is not ideal. What protocol/chat service and applications would make for a great online gaming solution? The voice and text chat abilities are crucial, but having a collaborative white-board would greatly help. Ideally, the solution would be integrated (one app), allow logging of the session, run on multiple platforms (Mac OS X, Linux, Windows), work with web-cams, and permit file-transfers. What service or app (or combination thereof) would work best for our needs? Anyone else have stories of success or failure?"

7 of 79 comments (clear)

  1. A variety of tools. . . by WolfStar76 · · Score: 5, Informative
    My friends and I are all D&D fans (looking forward to GenCon next week! Woot!) and all live in separate states, so we were looking for a similar solution as well.

    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.

    1. Re:A variety of tools. . . by Raleel · · Score: 4, Informative

      I can agree with just about everything the above poster wrote. I have not run with FantasyGrounds, but I keep hearing good things. I don't have quite enough of a reason to invest in it yet. The documentation seemed a little light, but when I demoed it, I didn't look really hard.

      I've used OpenRPG for a few years now and have been pretty happy with it. It has a solid whiteboard, and it runs on my mac and on another player's linux machine, as well as windows boxes. It also has a dice rolling mechanic that is nice for other game systems. In particular, it's shadowrun support is solid. While I personally don't play much SR, I have players who do.

      I strongly second the teamspeak, ventrilo, or whatever application to do voice. If you are all familiar with each other, you won't get any wierd feelings talking to strangers, and you'll be able to verbally abuse each other much more easily :)

      --
      -- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
    2. Re:A variety of tools. . . by sckeener · · Score: 2, Informative

      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/

      --
      "Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
  2. Try OpenRPG by castle · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://www.openrpg.com/ - wx?Python based online virtual tabletop.

    1. Re:Try OpenRPG by kebes · · Score: 2, Informative

      We experimented with OpenRPG last night... the good news is that it integrates a bunch of useful things (chat, whiteboard, and automated dice rolling). It's a little rough around the edges, but overall a great concept. However it's been a real effort to get it running on OS X, which some in the play group use.

      I would have thought that the combination of chat+voice+whiteboard would be so generic that it would be easy to find a bunch of applications (especially OSS ones) to do exactly that... however it's been hard to find a stable app that runs on all platforms.

  3. Neverwinter Nights? by fragbait · · Score: 2, Informative

    I don't have experiences doing this, but trying out Neverwinter Nights GM functionality is the first thing that comes to mind.

    Have you tried that?

    -fragbait

  4. Viack Via3 by genedefect · · Score: 2, Informative

    Another interesting option I found is a product called Via3 (www.viack.com). I use it for other work, but it has some nice features that could work quite well for remote tabletop sessions.

    It has pretty solid Audio and Video, doesn't require you to host your own server, has built in Whiteboard and a feature called LiveView that you could use to show another applicatio (or battle map) to the players.

    One other nice thing is it provides online storage tied to the app. You can use to store all your game note, maps, and such in so that everyone can view them when they want to outside the game. You can even set access rights on the files and folders to different players to view or edit. So one player might have rights to a secret letter from the king or the ransom note, while the others don't even know they exist.