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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?"

1 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.