Advice wanted on tools for online RPGing

[Janx]

Howdy,

I'm looking to getting my gaming group into using an online tool. While I've done some research a few years back, things have changed, and I figure it'll be easier to get some opinions from folks who've used the tools, scoped to account my user requirements.

I've got 3 friends scattered in Minnesota, and 3 friends in TX (2 are nearby, 1 is an hour away).

1 MN friend is on an old dial-up Windows box
1 MN friend is on a new Macintosh laptop (supposedly with a windows VM installed)
1 MN friend has a laptop AND a desktop box

Everybody else has a Windows XP or better client with broad-band (including the Mac guy).
Everybody but the dial-up guy have laptops

I'm looking for a solution that is OS-neutral (Java or web based, or has clients for both mac and windows).

We're also price-sensitive, free is good.

We're also looking for something that is easy to setup technically. It's a pain helping folks do complicated setup over a phone...

Google Talk, Skype, and IRC are possibilities

Other free tools might be good.

It's possible we could do a 2 site video-conference, or have all the MN players meet at the two PC player's house, so all three could sit on the same network with their own modern computer.

My local friends all have Xboxes, and 1 MN friend has one. We could use the Live Party system for a conference call (possibly with video). It's certainly easy to setup.


I've done IRC gaming in the past (I even had some nice scripts for mIRC). It is one of the easiest things to setup for all the players. We could bump that up a notch with Skype so we can get voice/video, but we probably lose scripting/macro support for dice rollers/stat trackers

We could get a more dedicated tool, but I know less about those, and many like Fantasy Grounds and Battlegrounds are not free.

So, based on our situation and requirements, what solutions would you recommend?

 

[Michael Silverbane]

I would suggest Maptool, which can be found at RPTools - Home. It is a free, java-based program. The community is very friendly and helpful, which is a bonus.

I'm not positive that it will run on the old windows machine, but it is definitely good to go on everything else (is java based).

You may want to stick with the current release version (1.2) which has everything that you will need, but is not as feature heavy (or still in development) like the development version (1.3) is.

Maps will load slowly for your dial-up guy, but once a set of maps is loaded, it should run just fine. You may need to have your dial-up guy connect at some point prior to game-time so that he can get all the map assets downloaded.

 

[Janx]

I'll check out MapTool, thanks.

Dial-up guy is the GM, so he'd have all the map files....

All of the MN guys are my old gaming group, they still game together, about once a month. So it's no problem for them to co-locate (1-2 hour drive for each of them). As a whole, we get together with them about once a year (with my new group). I'm looking into ways to get all of us together, skipping the travel part.

Having done IRC, I like how it "organizes" communication with the players and DM. Secret messages are handled within IRC. And you don't have to repeat yourself, because the messages stay on screen. The GM can handle requests as they come in.

Voice/video is nice, but it suffers from "con-call" syndrome of being harder to keep everyone focussed and taking turns. Plus, now and then, the signal goes out, losing communication (not everyone clues in to switch to text during the problem).

Some of the plans I see are:

A) Each player gets their own computer, using text chat/map tools. Probably at their own home (no travel, possibly include voice chat)

B) MN players co-locate, and TX players co-locate and use video conferencing to bridge the two sites together. May have communication issues if network gets glitchy. Could use Skype/Google Talk/ Xbox Live Party.

C) MN players co-locate, using seperate computers, using text/voice/video chat and map-tools. TX players stay at home, using the same.

One quirk I see, is that if the MN players co-locate, they'll have more access to the GM than the TX players. They may skip using the tools, resulting in missed communication. Plan B helps alleviate this, because both sides are actively using a simple conference. If the signal drops, both parties know to wait and resolve the issue before continuing the game. Whereas, with Plan C, the MN players may "forget" and just talk to the GM, bypassing the shared communication system that players at a normal table have naturally. It's not a matter of cheating, so much as missed information sharing, which can cause miscommunication.

Thoughts?

Janx

 

[Michael Silverbane]

All of those sound like pretty reasonable options. I think that Maptool (or another Virtual Tabletop Program) could be useful for any of them.

Here's how I would probably approach each of your ideas.

A) Use Maptool for positioning / text chat and possibly either Skype or Ventrilo for voice chat. Since the DM is the person with the slowest connection, I might suggest going ahead with the 1.3 version of maptool, since it allows the maps graphical assets to be uploaded to a web-server (I'm not sure how this works, but someone from that community can certainly hook your DM up with the necessary know-how). I briefly ran a campaign for some folks spread across Missouri, Kansas, and Illinois in just this manner. It runs a little bit slower than a face to face D&D game, but is still pretty workable.

B) Use Maptool purely for tactical positioning stuff (it also works pretty well for handouts and other visual aids, as well) and either Skype or possibly Oovoo or something like it for video conferencing / voice chat. This may require someone at the secondary location to act as an Assistant DM, or something, making sure that communication from the non-DM location is handled efficiently and noone gets left out or lets their attention drift too far.

C) Would work almost just like A, but instead of each player running their own instance of Skype or Vent (or whatever), there might be only one instance of it at each site.

One thing that you might need to take into consideration, is that most computer microphones are (sort-of) unidirectional, meaning that they are not too good at picking up sounds from all around (such as you might need to do if you are running one instance of a voice or video chat for a group of people). Fortunately, computer microphones are pretty cheap, so you should be able to pick up a couple of different kinds at your local electronics store without putting much of a hurt on your wallet.

 

[DMFTodd]

KLoogewerks would be another java-based option. DM on dial-up though - that's going to be a bit painful when it comes time to send everyone a map.

 

[azhrei_fje]

KLoogewerks would be another java-based option. DM on dial-up though - that's going to be a bit painful when it comes time to send everyone a map.

Yep. Which is why a system that allows the GM to pre-upload his images would be ideal.

With the proper setup, he might not have to upload anything. If he visits the RPTools forums he'll find a user there who is hosting the 2GB+ torrent of "dungeon dressing" images on his web site. If you combine that with MapTool's ability to specify an online repository for images, the players will download their images from the web site and not the GM's server! Of course, he still needs to grab the images himself so that he can add them to the map in the first place, but a buddy in MN can do the download and burn a DVD to send to the GM.

He should watch the video tutorials for MapTool and see how it works. Then he can grab it and try out some of the stuff he's seen during the videos to check it out for himself.

Of course, since there are two other people in MN, perhaps it's best for the GM to go to someone else's house where a high-speed connection is available?

Oh, and regarding a VOIP solution... Both of my weekly games currently use Vent. We tried Skype, but it sucks up CPU something fierce and that was causing the fan to run constantly on my laptop! I usually run two Vent clients on my home network when I'm hosting a game: one is the "open mic" that is running on a laptop near the local players, then I run Vent on my laptop as well (where I can control MapTool as the GM). Just make sure that the "open mic" machine has your GM muted, or the loopback audio (delayed by about 0.5 seconds) will drive you completely batty real quick! I usually mute my Vent client as well and just listen to the remote players through the powered speakers of the open mic machine.

Oh, and I require remote players to use headsets so that we don't get the remake of Echo Canyon via VOIP.

 

[DMFTodd]

who is hosting the 2GB+ torrent of "dungeon dressing" images on his web site.

Care to post the link? Wasn't able to find it on their boards.

 

[azhrei_fje]

Care to post the link? Wasn't able to find it on their boards.

Here's the link to the RPTools forum thread about the torrent. He's posted to that thread once or twice. Check the post dated Aug 7th, 2008 for the torrent link.

There used to be a reference to it from the main RPTools web site under FAQ or the MapTool docs, but I can't seem to find it now (just the link to that thread).

HTH.