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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Michael Silverbane" data-source="post: 4763980" data-attributes="member: 38016">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 <a href="http://www.oovoo.com/" target="_blank">Oovoo</a> 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.</blockquote>

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