Explaining Virtual Tabletops

[The Hound]

I encourage anyone who is interested in virtual tabletops to check out our site, www.rpgtonight.com It opened officially about 4 1/2 weeks ago. It's free, and is a server side implementation that runs in your browser - which means that there is nothing to download and install, and it works with any machine and OS. Features include a die roller, map/grid display, fog of war (map cover and reveal functions) miniatures (tokens or thumbnail sketches), non-map image display, sound effects and ambient sound, customizable character sheets, onsite text and voicechat plus accomodation for people who use Skype, etc., online storage for your own maps, minis, and sounds. plus a growing onsite collection of maps, miniatures, and sound effects. New features are being continually added.

There are some screenshots liked off the main page, but the best way to get a feel for it is to just create a gameroom as a GM (link on left of main page), look at he lite version of the instructions, and just try it out.

PS: We are looking for playtesters - especially GMs - for a future real time online living game.

 

[Hussar]

The Hound - that site looks bloody fantastic. I am very interested in what you've done.

Couple of questions - how much control do I have over the die rollers? For example, in OpenRPG, I usually couple my die rolls with html code to make them stand out in the chat window. Can I do that with yours? Also, can I premake my die rollers and have them ready to go before I play? That is a HUGE time saver in game when I don't have to actually enter in the die roller every time - I just click send and have X number of nodes prepped with various die rollers already created. Is that possible with RPGtonight?

I'm off on holidays shortly, so I won't get around to looking at this in more detail for a while, but, color me very interested. One of the failings of OpenRPG is it has a nasty habit of crashing. While the current version is far more stable than previous versions, I have one player who constantly drops. It would be nice to have an alternative.

 

[Hussar]

A little while later.

I did take a test drive through the rpgtonight tools. It's a good start IMO. There are a number of issues that make it a poor fit for me. The lack of customizable die rollers pretty much kills it right there. If I want to roll a d203, I can't. Nor could I tie together multiple d20 rolls to make iterative attacks at differing bonuses on a single die roll.

The other major issue I have is the fact that none of the windows can be customized. That map window is far too small for what I use. My World's Largest Dungeon maps were usually about 1500x1500 pixels. On that little map window, even at 30 pixel scale, it would be far too large.

One other major problem I had was the fact that the chat message lines aren't erased after sending. I have to send, then clear each line, each time. That is not a good way to run chat.

I think you have made a great start, but, it needs a number of tweaks.

 

[Jupp]

I actually have high hopes in FantasyGrounds II. They made the scripting easier than in the older version so perhaps I'll be able to add a 2e and C&C ruleset to it. In FG1 it was a pain in the neck to hack the code so I didn't make it that far in the conversion to another system. Other than that I think FG2 has all the features that I would want in a electronic tabletop. There is no built-in voice chat but with todays selection of voice chat apps that's not a problem at all.

 

[The Hound]

A little while later.

I did take a test drive through the rpgtonight tools. It's a good start IMO. There are a number of issues that make it a poor fit for me. The lack of customizable die rollers pretty much kills it right there. If I want to roll a d203, I can't. Nor could I tie together multiple d20 rolls to make iterative attacks at differing bonuses on a single die roll.

The other major issue I have is the fact that none of the windows can be customized. That map window is far too small for what I use. My World's Largest Dungeon maps were usually about 1500x1500 pixels. On that little map window, even at 30 pixel scale, it would be far too large.

One other major problem I had was the fact that the chat message lines aren't erased after sending. I have to send, then clear each line, each time. That is not a good way to run chat.

I think you have made a great start, but, it needs a number of tweaks.

Thanks for the feedback. Actually, you can make customized die rolls, so you should be able to do what you want, if I understand you correctly. There are two fields
that let you enter an arbitrary number of faces on the dice. If you wanted to roll 3 d203s, you could. You can also save arbitraty die combinations and roll each combination with the press of a single button after that.

Yeah, the map window on the text chat version is small (although you can zoom in and out and/or pan around a large map). One of the things we intend to do is implement a "floating window" screen where the map display occupies the whole browser window and the other functions are in small windows that can be positioned anywhere, - or minimized when you don't need them.