Online play - what do you use?

Cat Moon · Jun 28, 2008

I've had good experiences wth OpenRPG.

FalcWP · Jun 28, 2008

Byronic said:
What does everyone think of fantasygrounds? Is it worth it? Does it give anything above maptools?

Fantasy Grounds is fine, but Maptool is good as well. Given that one's free and the other isn't...

The one thing I miss is having actual dice to roll in Maptool. I'm not a huge fan of typing out dice rolls. When I DM, I roll my own dice, just because I find it to be much quicker and simpler than typing things out. When I DMed with Fantasy Grounds, I used their dice.

Other than that minor quibble, there's very little to recommend Fantasy Grounds over Maptool, and we've not used FG for months now. This is despite the entire group having FG licenses - Maptool has just been the better program for us.

We've been doing the online thing for a couple years now - between either FG or Maptool and Skype for chatting, its become a very workable system.

Emryys · Jun 28, 2008

Achan hiArusa said:
I wanted to try out GRIP, but it seems to have become abandonware.

There was some discussion with the developer a few months back about GRiP4 at the GRiP Forums...
GRiP Forums

A GRiP Wiki for info, demos, manuals and the GRiP webring...
GRiP Wiki

A place to find online players... including GRiP...
Four Ugly Monsters

edemaitre · Jul 10, 2008

Virtual tabletops

In the past year, one friend in Brooklyn, N.Y., another in St. Louis, Mo., and I (in Boston) have tried a number of things for online role-playing. Fantasy Grounds had a sweet interface, but getting access to the host server through our firewalls was a problem. RPGtonight is a bit simpler, but we've also had refresh issues.

Skype and Whiteboard work fine for most things, but a dice-rolling utility and simple map function would be nice. At the moment, I'm hoping that the D&D4e Insider will be what we need. Recently, RPtools and D20pro have been recommended to me. I'd be interested in learning what those of you who have limited bandwidth and who have tried multiple programs would recommend...

rvalle · Jul 10, 2008

Byronic said:
What does everyone think of fantasygrounds? Is it worth it? Does it give anything above maptools?

We've been using FG to run WLD one night a week for about 3 years now. That plus Skype for voice.

FG gives virtual dice to roll, on-line character sheets to track your character and some adventure/campaign organizational things (a place to enter npc's, items (though this doesn't work very well atm), and story text. There is also a nice 'Combat Tracker' that tracks HP's, conditions and init order.

FG is one of those things that you'll get more out of it if you put more into it. You can create NPCs, maps and encounters and link them all together with story links and even links on the map that show up as pins.

I'm a bare minimum kind of guy. I just put in the map and tokens and then run the rest out of the WLD book and using the dice.

rv