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Gaming online. . . what to use?


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I've looked into things a bit as I'm setting a virtual game up too, my first one, and I just wanted to add that I've found that since my system has little memory running applications like Battlegrounds and MapTools was prolematic. OpenRPG run easier.

I've got no experience with how it runs in pratice, this was just trial runs to see how the program works. OpenRPG worked, but MapTools got hang up and barely functioned, as did Battlegrounds.


I've obviously chosen to go with OpenRPG (and Skype). I've decided free is a must, for the players' sake, and I like the fact that I can program OpenRPG, at least in theory, so can make dice and so on (I need special dice to run Ars Magica - stress and botch dice); now if I only knew how to program in Python...
 

Ion said:
Our gaming group has been scattered over the country for a couple of years now. Recently we've started using RPTools Maptool and Skype. It works pretty good. The games move about as fast as a regular table top game. I think that's about as good as it gets for online gaming.
Thanks for pointing that out - that's the first contender that might actually beat Screenmonkey for my needs. Do the other players see the tokens moving in realtime or is it a "wait for screen refresh" kind of deal?
 

I've been playing almost exclusively online for a little more than a year. My group used Klooge for a while, but had problems with the program crashing, losing data and failing to connect.

We've been using d20pro for about two months, and are satisfied so far.

We use Skype or Teamspeak to talk while we play.
 

My group has been using Fantasy Grounds for over 2 years now and it works very well for us.

I've been running the the WLD during this time and I can drop in the map for the whole region, mask it, zoom in and drop the player tokens onto the map and play the whole region from that one map. As they move from region to region I drop in the needed maps. I've used some pretty big maps (3+ megs) with no problems. This used to be a problem in the older version of FG but now works in FG II.

I've also had about 50+ tokens on a map with no problems. I did run into a problem when I tried to add more (FG would crash on start up till I removed those tokens).

We use Skype while playing for voice comms. We've been playing just about every Thursday night for the last 2 years and 4 months. I generally have 6 to 8 players each night.

The players are very close to getting out of WLD. After this I'm hoping to run a Savage Worlds (the rules set is available for FG) game and if the players like SW enough I'll run 1 or 2 campaigns in it.
 

Thanks for all of the input , folks. Right now, Open RPG is looking like the best option because it seems to be the one virtual tabletop (thus far mentioned) that is geared toward easy end-user creation of mods, which is a bonus for me because I play lots of different games that don't have native support under other VTs (Blood, for example, doesn't have native support in any virtual tabletop that I'm aware of).
 

I would second Fantasy Grounds II but there is that cost component. I have recently taken to using FG2 at the face to face game table to track spell effects and initiative order.

I'll actually be looking forward to trying out the Wizards DI when it comes out, but it better be worth the money... it's going to be tough going up against FG2.

Let us know what you decide to go with and your experiences with OpenRPG and the like. I recall one of the sites (Battlegrounds I think) had a comparison of all the different options (including the free ones).... aha, here it is: http://www.battlegroundsgames.com/links.html
 

I personally have used Fantasy Grounds (I and II) and Teamspeak for my online gaming needs. It works well, looks pretty, and comes close to matching a face-to-face session.

Hope This Helps,
Flynn
 

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