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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yair" data-source="post: 3350612" data-attributes="member: 10913">I'm going to start up an Ars Magica game using a virtual tabletop. It's my first time with such a thing, and I'm at a loss as to which program to use and how. I'd really appreciate any advice on this issue.What I'm looking for first and foremost is a program that will allow us to easily run the game - easy to install, easy to run, easy to game with. The system is not d20, and miniatures aren't as important in it. (The combat is more free-form, the exact positions aren't as relevant.) Having the character sheet available for rolls would be very nice, however, if it could be made easily. (Otherwise, I guess I would use only the dice thrower and the sheets as pdfs or something.)I don't want an ugly interface. We'll be staring at this thing for hours, I want it to be nice and fun.Unlike most games, ArM uses a "rotating GM" model. Each player can, pontentially, serve as a DM for a short while. For this reason, I suspect the free virtual tabletop softwares would be best, but I'm worried that their quality would be lacking. I want, specifically:* Drawing tools, for the DM to draw a "map" as we go along when needed.* Displaying maps and measuring distances on it, placing tokens on it, and so on.* Chat, with option to save session.* Dice, especially the need to define the very special "Stress Dice". A stress dice is rolled as follows: roll 1d10+modifiers; on a natural 1 pick up the dice and roll again multiplying the result (pre-modifiers) by 2; on another natural 1 do this again (multiplier is now 4) and so on. On a natural 0 on any of these rethrows, you count the roll as ten x multiplier. On a natural 0 on the initial stress die throw, you throw a certain (DM-determined) number of Botch dice - the program needs to say how many of those came out zero. All this is very complicated, but having a stress dice thrower will be grand. We can do without it, by just throwing d10s. * Custom-defined (i.e. non-d20) character sheets, preferably linked to the dice-bot. Having the ability to custom-define global or regional variables (such as "Magical Aura") would be grand, so would be being able to create interactions between sheets (character A attacls character B, does damage Y...). All this will only be relevant in the future, if we decide to invest in building such sheets and systems, but having the infrastructure to construct such mechanisms (perhaps with Visual Basic or something - I'm not afraid of a little programming) is certainly an advantage. We can make do without character sheets at all, if needed.* Easy to install and run, preferably allowing high communication rates (little lag).* Pretty. We're going to look at it for hours, it should be nice. Having the possiblity of using ambient music and sound effect is a bonus too.So, any suggestions?</blockquote>

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