Cergorach
The Laughing One
I'm a 47 year old IT consultant, neck deep in security... I can totally manage messing around with a router/firewall, but I also know the risks of that. And why bother when you don't have to?
Let's talk Virtual Tabletops!
Thomas Shey
Legend
This is a common reason; I've had two different remote groups, and one routinely used Discord and one Skype for similar reasons.
Thomas Shey
Legend
Because it allows you to do things you can't the other way, like not being dependent on a third party server?
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Well, back in '08 I started a long-running 4e game using Maptools. It's a great VTT in many ways, but getting all the player's machines working right every week sucked up a lot of time. There were some weeks we just had to give up. It did have an option to handle the initial handshake via a server, and then clients didn't need to open a port. Most of the issues were either with Java, the MT version, or just general network quality of service. I'd guess nowadays this stuff is a bit better.
Thomas Shey
Legend
Quite a bit. The biggest issue I've seen anyone have in the last couple years is one new player where it doesn't seem to like him moving tokens, but its been a long time since I've seen the kind of problem you're talking about (which, to be clear, very much did used to be a thing). The commonest thing I see now is people sticking the executable where it won't work or trying to install it over an old installation (which usually goes badly).
Of course we don't get into some of the fancier functions either; maps, tokens, a few dice macros and basic fog-of-war is about it.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
It is probably mostly just beefier CPUs and more RAM then, since MT itself has barely seen a release in the last 10 years, maybe one or two bug fixes. There was a fork that was active for a while, but I guess it eventually died off.
Oh, and the macro stuff in MT is GHASTLY. lol. As a programmer I marvel at just how terrible non-professional devs can make something like that. The 'language' it uses is literally a hodge-podge of three different interpreters layered on each other each trying to handle bits of syntax. Debugging anything is basically impossible.
Wepwawet
Explorer
I've been using Owlbear Rodeo on my in-person games and I love it so much!
In my games i have owlbear rodeo (player mode) opened on a tablet in the centre of the table, and i control it from my phone.
I use it to share pictures of where the party is, as it helps with immersion. And THE MAPS! It has fog of war, with my phone i reveal the areas the party is exploring, and it's so simple and so easy
The campaign books are full of really good illustrations, and beautifully designed maps. But in the past when running games i would draw a crappy version of the map in graph paper. It's a shame to have a beautiful map and not being able to share it with the players.
The same with the illustrations, just opening the book for a few seconds to show a picture to the players is very little. So instead, when setting a scene, i share a scene of the village/forest/landscape of where the players are, to give a general impression of where they are. When they meet an NPC, on my phone i drag a picture of the NPC into the middle of the scene/map.
That way the player can have a good look of everything, they can zoom in on details as they prefer, etc. I feel it has enriched my games immensely.
I love the simplicity of Owlbear Rodeo, you really don't need much when playing in person. We use pencil and paper character sheets, real dice. And the beautiful images from the books (most of them downloaded from the internet though
)
I never had much use for a tablet before, so i'm using my mother-in-law's old tablet which is good enough to run it in player mode. Now i'm thinking of investing in a big tablet just for this.
This is a video i shared with my players when i was getting excited about it. I haven't used minis with this setup yet (i rarely use them), but that was one of the reasons i wanted to have a nice digital board.
In my games i have owlbear rodeo (player mode) opened on a tablet in the centre of the table, and i control it from my phone.
I use it to share pictures of where the party is, as it helps with immersion. And THE MAPS! It has fog of war, with my phone i reveal the areas the party is exploring, and it's so simple and so easy
The campaign books are full of really good illustrations, and beautifully designed maps. But in the past when running games i would draw a crappy version of the map in graph paper. It's a shame to have a beautiful map and not being able to share it with the players.
The same with the illustrations, just opening the book for a few seconds to show a picture to the players is very little. So instead, when setting a scene, i share a scene of the village/forest/landscape of where the players are, to give a general impression of where they are. When they meet an NPC, on my phone i drag a picture of the NPC into the middle of the scene/map.
That way the player can have a good look of everything, they can zoom in on details as they prefer, etc. I feel it has enriched my games immensely.
I love the simplicity of Owlbear Rodeo, you really don't need much when playing in person. We use pencil and paper character sheets, real dice. And the beautiful images from the books (most of them downloaded from the internet though
)I never had much use for a tablet before, so i'm using my mother-in-law's old tablet which is good enough to run it in player mode. Now i'm thinking of investing in a big tablet just for this.
This is a video i shared with my players when i was getting excited about it. I haven't used minis with this setup yet (i rarely use them), but that was one of the reasons i wanted to have a nice digital board.
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Thomas Shey
Legend
Uhm, I think you haven't been paying attention, man. Its gone through multiple full releases and a number smaller ones in that period. They went from version 1.12.0 in September 2022, to 1.14.3 currently, with numerous smaller releases. I'm guessing you've never looked around again since the fallow period they went through a few years back.
Eh, with the simple dice macros its no worse than any number of other RNG and loop programs I've seen.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
I'm an actual developer and I find it easily 10x less productive than pretty much any scripting language. As far as releases go, yes I have seen the minor point releases. They're just that, VERY minor bug fixes and such. Even those come out with glacial slowness. Not to complain, it's OSS, but when I reviewed the code base my core conclusion was that it's pretty much a mess of huge proportions. Given that the rest of the world has moved on from desktop apps it just doesn't feel worth sorting out. There's a huge amount of really serious functionality there but the form factor just isn't compelling.
