Playing D20 D&D Online. How do you do it?

[Eudaimic]

Hey there,

We're a group of friends, all scattered across the globe who'd like to play some good 'ol fashioned D&D with each other, so we're currently looking into what the alternatives for doing that are.

I've had a look at various programs and stuff like that out there, but what I'm really interested in, is hearing from someone who's done it, who can tell me about the ups and downs of doing it and which if any programs we should try out.

One other thing: Can it be done properly over IRC? I mean are there any die roller scripts for IRC? And how about maps and 'miniatures'?

 

[Darius101]

Grip Vs IRC

I use Grip to run a weekly online game.
I like grip because it allows me to prepare ahead of time and I don't have to type in room descriptions on the fly as much.
The player software is a free download but IGM costs about $20 if you can find it in closeout at the Hobby shop near you.
It is somewhat buggy if you are not used to it but it really has worked much better for me because in IRC I ran accross people who were able to cheat the dice rolls really easily.

Advantages of IRC are that you can moderate it better than instant messages.
You do get stragglers and lurkers from time to time that can disrupt your game.
There are three other programs out there that you can also use to run games online and I have tried one or two of them but I like Grip the best for my games.
E-mail me at
dragonknight_33@yahoo.com
If you want to sit in on a game some Saturday. I have players from all over the world (Spain, Scotland and Florida).
Later,
Darius

 

[AereonBlaze]

I played online in a 3-person game for 6 months or so. We played using AOL Instant Messenger. I know, there's a lot of better ways to play online than using AIM, but their chat rooms do have a nifty hidden dice rolling feature (type //roll-dice1-sides20 for rolling 1d20 for example). We used http://3ep.rpgprofiler.net/ for storing character sheets online and having access to everyone else's ingame. Very useful site.

The ups? You can get a good handle on most situations simply since its all written out. It also makes the DM's job easier if he prepares room descriptions/encounters beforehand and copy/pastes. The downs...sometimes its a bit slow moving and hard to stay focused. Make sure your group members aren't doing other things at the same time.

Still, if your DM prepares ahead of time, slow gaming probably wont be a problem. There are some nice programs out there specifically for D&D online (OpenRPG and WebRPG for example - I think) which allow maps/miniatures etc., so you might want to check those out if you havent already.

Despite the downsides, it was fun since it still gave us the oppertunity to game with each other despite not being able to meet for games IRL.

 

[Emiricol]

OpenRPG from www.openrpg.com. Available for both Windows and Linux. Free. It as fully-functional as anything else I've used, and I've used probably all of them.

An objective look at the features and quality of the various options available showed OpenRPG to be easily the best available for real-time gaming pen-and-paper games online.

For games that don't run in real-time, of course, there's PlayByWeb.com and RPOL.net. There;s others but I feel those are the two best.

 

[kobold]

Personally I had very bad experience with GRIP and recommend against it. I have serious issues with their tech support and business practices. Unless things have changed dramatically, stay away from GRIP. I have used IRC and die rolling scripts and although it was short lived it worked well, slow, but well.

 

[Darius101]

There is tech support for Grip? lol
They are really bad about that i agree.
Darius

 

[SteelDraco]

I've been running a game for about three years now with OpenRPG. I'd recommend it to anyone who wanted to do chat-based gaming. There are bugs, of course, but in general, they're not too terribly intrusive. I prepare my maps ahead of time with CC2, and use minis found on the web. It works out quite nicely. The map is incredibly useful, and that alone makes it better than IRC, as far as I'm concerned. The game tree - with all its usefulness - is just an added bonus.

 

[garyh]

If you're open to other methods, I'm always one to pimp the In Character forum here at ENWorld for Play By Post gaming.

 

[Eudaimic]

I think the group as a large would prefer as close to realtime as possible, thanks though.

I've looked a bit at OpenRPG, I'm looking forward to testing it properly soon.

What about something like NetMeeting? Would that be possible perhaps to use?... hmmm...

 

[Wolfspirit]

When I was running online games, I used a combination of IRC and NetMeeting. IRC was used for the chatting and rolling, Netmeeting was used for the Maps. We'd looked at trying out OpenRPG when WebRPG went pay, but it was giving kernel errors to a couple people trying to use it and various other unplayable bugs, so we had to ditch it

For IRC, yeah, we got a couple stragglers comming in when they saw RPG, but you can get around that by making it a private and hidden(? darn I forgot the term, but you can hide it from view) You have to register it, which I'd reccomend any way if you continue to use it.

Not the most elegant solution, but we made due with it. Most annoying thing would be when Netmeeting would loose connection to someone (really bad when it was me the DM), and then people were like "why did you stop changing the board?).

Oh, and you might try posting this in the electronics forum as well