Pen and Paper D&D over the PC?

[JoeBlank]

I regularly game on OpenRPG and WebRPG. While it certainly falls short of emulating face-to-face play, it has kept my group of friends gaming together through marriages, divorces, children, and cross-country relocations. The biggest advantage to me, a married father of 3, is that I can put the kids to bed on a Saturday night and settle down at the computer for 4 hours or so of pure gaming. No commute time, and I can head straight to bed when we're done, although usually I my mind is too preoccupied with the game to sleep right away.

Just like play-by-post games, if you only know your group over the internet it becomes far too easy for people to come and go on a whim. That is not a problem for me, since my online group includes people I have known since pre-school.

My group is pushing for a switch to Fantasy Grounds, and I am one of the ones holding us up. Be sure to download the demo and try it out, as my 3 year old computer needs some upgrades before I can run the program properly.

 

[Seeten]

I posted this recently on another thread, but here it is again. Teamspeak is an outstanding, free, voice over IP software program. It uses codecs that sound better than your wireless phone, and uses virtually 0 bandwidth. IRC is awesome for playing also. You use one room for ooc info and another for IC speech and descriptions. A program with a grid and a diceroller is also a great idea.

Beyond that, you need a time and a number of interested parties and you are good to go. If anyone needs a teamspeak server dedicated to this, I would be happy to host a dedicated D&D Teamspeak server. I'd be happy to play in online games, also. Just like the OP, I prefer to game from home. I am going out to my buddies place tonight, and it feels like work, eat superfast supper, drive over, game, drive back, and get a poor sleep from being up to late. Online gives you so much more for so much less. Cut out the travel times, the super fast supper and get to sleep an hour or more earlier? Awesome. Plus, since you cant see each other, you can't associate the players face with the character.

 

[DragonSword]

Welcome, Nalfien, to the madness that is ENWorld. I think you'll fit in just fine...

 

[rvalle]

I've used FG for a couple of small games and it worked great.

FG is still pretty new and the fan base is, so far, small. Most people are using it to play with their 'old' groups or others they already know. Right now there are more people looking for games then people running them.

Some of us are trying to get more of a FG community going with modules dm's can dl and use to run games and trying to get dm's to run 'one-shot' games for folks with the software and a hankering to play. We are also talking about trying to have a group of dm's work on adventures, shared worlds ect. Still VERY early and looking for ideas. And people!

If anyone is interested post either at FG's website http://forums.fantasygrounds.com/index.php or msd's fan site at http://www.adventuresomedreams.com/index.php

rv

 

[Orcus]

I really am digging this software. We are looking into creating or having others create FG-modularized versions of some of our print products and making them available.

I am a huge fan. I love the idea of a virtual table top and this really seems to be the only one that does what I want. But I have yet to give it a full test run.

Clark

 

[rvalle]

I am a huge fan. I love the idea of a virtual table top and this really seems to be the only one that does what I want. But I have yet to give it a full test run.

Clark

Clark, msd is looking to run a game soon. Maybe this weekend though, of course, its up to him and don't blame me if he doesn't!

Anyway it would be a nice test run for you from a players side.

rv

 

[sunbeam60]

I've tried both WebRPG, OpenRPG and kLoOge.Werks and while I find them worthwhile tools, worthy of praise, I find that FantasyGrounds (FG) is leagues ahead of them all.

The other tools might do more in terms of features, but the way FG does things brought our old group straight back to the table despite being 6000km/3750mi apart. Running a session, as GM, on FG is so effortless that I'd use the tool even if we were sitting around a real, physical table.

A word about TeamSpeak. We generally found that Skype offered much lower lag than TeamSpeak, a little less than half. To do your own trials, hook up with a friend, and start counting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. From 6 and onwards, your friend will have "synced" to your pace and count with you on 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. As his 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 comes back to you, you will notice the lag your voice connection offers.

Skype, with 5 people running a conference from Denmark, the UK and Brazil, had about 0.3-0.4s lag. TeamSpeak had about 0.8-1.0s. This might not sound like much, but it's a vast gulf between having a conversation and jerking around on ham radio. I don't know what it is Skype is doing, but it sure works.

 

[Malovech]

FG is amazing

I am just waiting for a couple of tweaked features (the token box is not well organized mainly), other than that, this is the single best way to play RPGs short of in-person PnP. It looks good, you can share images, you actually roll dice, you can mask maps and slowly reveal them to players, you can drop whole descriptions into the chat box for the PCs to read.... I could go on and on about this program forever, it is that cool. Couple it with Campaign Cartographer and Dunjinni and you have a really cool experience. Not to mention the costs you save on printing.

Also, if you can get past a little XML it's not to hard to install a totally different ruleset (ie GURPS). The entire interface can be reskinned if you want to spend the time, you can create your own Character Sheets, man I could talk about this program forever...

Folks get behind this thing if you have to play remotely, it doesn't get any better than this.

 

[Seeten]

Does the program come with voice over ip technology?

If not, I stand by my offer to host Teamspeak as well. Just from the testimonials on Fantasy Grounds I am considering purchasing it. Sounds like it would be a great idea.

 

[rvalle]

Does the program come with voice over ip technology?

If not, I stand by my offer to host Teamspeak as well. Just from the testimonials I am considering purchasing it.

No, but you can easily run it in the background. I have seen posts from some players who use voice software and it seems to work well.

As such, your offer should be well recived.

rv