Best VOIP gaming programs? (was Ghostorb?)

[Heathen72]

Occassionally pimp the product as well.

Thanks - I didn't think anyone was going to respond

 

[Hussar]

Honestly, I took a look at Ghostorb when it was supposed to be coming out, but, the price tag scared me and I was immedietely thinking that there would be some serious licensing issues if DM's started getting paid. That it turned into vaporware is not really all that shocking.

There's a pretty decent rundown of the various programs here. Seems pretty straight up.

 

[Frostmarrow]

We use Skype when we play DDO, at least if we are five or fewer. If we are six we use Ventrilo instead. Both are good.

 

[Painfully]

I've used Ventrillo with great success. It does everything a voice chat program needs to do--and it's free!

 

[Arkhandus]

For the past 4 or so years now, I've roleplayed almost exclusively on OpenRPG. I've tried play-by-e-mail campaigns 2 or 3 times now with little success. I've had only a few very brief chances to do face-to-face tabletop RPGing since moving to Arizona 4-5 years ago. My experience with OpenRPG has been similar to Hussar's and his groups' experience with it. Kinda tough to figure out at first if you don't have someone helping you out, but adequate for most tabletop RPGs once you learn the basics (some people make it out to be harder than it really is, people who are utterly lacking in both Windows familiarity and mere common sense). I largely figured it out by guessing and clicking on things, and it really wasn't hard to figure out the most basic stuff.

OpenRPG gets buggy sometimes, and disconnects can happen frequently if using a public server or if you have a poor/laggy/unreliable internet connection (as I do; Cox Communications SUCKS at providing internet service, I say! I had similar internet connection reliability back in Michigan, years ago, when it was coming from a company totally new to internet service; Cox just plain SUCKS considering how much more experienced and financially-capable they are by comparison; my connection's only stable about half the time, and slow about half of the time that it's working). Anyway.... OpenRPG works well enough though for running weekly games. I run my own temporary server for my campaign sessions, and my group only suffers occasional disconnects, easily reconnecting to my server, and having relatively little lag most of the time (and hardly ever more than intermediate lag). Occasionally though, with my unreliable cable connection (*grumble grumble*), once in a while I get disconnected and can't reconnect for hours, because of my stupid ISP. Same happens anyway when I'm not running OpenRPG, so it's not caused by the program.

Finding images for 'minis' can be a nuisance, though. The few sites I've tried to use have disappeared, except for DM Silverglass' (to my knowledge).

 

[Hussar]

Arkhandus - there still are a number of minis sites around. Although, to be honest, because I play with a 30 pixel grid, I just make my own. It takes a couple of seconds to grab an image, trim it, resize it and host it on Photobucket.

If you are looking for images for use with open, try:

Mini Mayhem
Fantasy Miniatures
Minis
Nazaire
Destiny RPG

Those should set you up nicely.

 

[SgtHulka]

OpenRPG is likely, in the long run, to bury the competition for two basic reasons:

1) It works great.
2) It's free.

Might as well jump on now, because who knows how long competing programs will last.

 

[Heathen72]

Thanks for that guys. I will look at Open RPG in more depth