Tabletop Software: So many choices so confusing

[halfpintgamer1976]

I finally got enough players to do my fairy campaign online, but I am having a difficult time trying to find the right software to use. In our sunday game, we use Maptools on a projector, but after trying to use it online for the last couple weeks, It doesn't do some of the things that I would enjoy such as managing initiatives and even some character stuff.

It seems that all the demos I test out, something is missing. I tried fantasy grounds, but I could not import a map for the life of me. It seemed very difficult to do. Battlegrounds rpg seemed good, but the dm of my current game told me that they are very restrictive with their license and you can only use it on one computer and can never transfer it to another computer unless you get another license. DM20pro has some really neat features with the visual HP and on screen magic spells, but they seem to have no customer support and their wiki is pretty light. You also have to resize every map to the "right" dimensions and I"m no math wizard. You also can't get rid of a map, which sucks because most of my maps have a grid all ready.
What do you suggest.

What i need
A nice fog of war
The ability to import maps
ease of use for incorporating tokens
initiative tracker and ability to roll in game
ability to resize a grid or place my own grid

what i want
visual hp
ability to pass documents and other information
drag and drop pictures
statblock importing
Can someone give me some advice and tell me about your online gaming experiences with the software?

 

[tenkar]

I personally like Battlegrounds myself.

There is a work around for the licensing restriction. The license is actually assigned to your hard drive (at least in Windows... not sure about Macs). I installed to a portable / external HD and it works fine and i can use it from either my desktop or my laptop. Not sure if you can do the same with a flash drive, but those are small and i would hate to misplace it.

Also, you can swap the license to another HD if needed, but swapping back and forth would be a problem, as Heruca would have to deactivate and activate your license each time.

BTW, i bounced this off Heruca (Mr Battlegrounds himself) a while back on the forums and he had no problem with my solution.

 

[DMFTodd]

Kloogewerks does all you're looking for - except that stat block import part. Klooge can import PCGen characters, not sure what Fairy campaign would be.

Automatic or manual fog of war (DM reavels as you go), visual hit points if you want it, really slick tool to convert any image into a nice token, use any graphic for a map (long as the file size doesn't get too big), drop images/text/url's directly on the map.

 

[Arkhandus]

Hrm. OpenRPG is free and pretty much does the stuff you want, though with a few minor issues. It's a good program IME, but does have the occasional hiccup or shortcoming (frex, my game tree file gets corrupted once in a while by some fluke, so I have to keep a second copy of my 'game tree' file just in case; and the default OpenRPG character sheet for d20 characters is really buggy, so I always use my own character-sheet node instead).

To upload a map or a character-miniature image, you need to have it on a webpage somewhere, like I do for my games with my Geocities webpage to host the images. The fog of war function is currently unuseable as far as I know (it worked before AFAIK, but hasn't been fixed to work with the more recent versions of the program; I'm not sure if they've fixed it yet or if they're still working on that problem).

You can make the default map grid disappear when desired (and you can replace the default green map background with an uploaded image of your own), and you can choose whether or not to have minis snap into position on the default grid, but you can't resize the grid to fit with whatever one you may already have on your own map image (you'd have to resize the map image instead, and upload it again to the webpage you have it hosted on, then upload it to the OpenRPG map frame again, though the latter only takes a few seconds).

I'm not sure what you mean by visual HP, but in OpenRPG each person in the same 'room' on the game server (you can host a game server on your own computer or use a public OpenRPG server) is listed in one corner of the window and has a 'status' line next to them, in which they can type their AC/HP/etc. if they want to (normally it just displays whether or not they're idle, or typing at the moment).

OpenRPG has a decent virtual-dice-roller built-in, one of the better ones AFAIK and from what I've heard. The chat-window-frame displays any dice rolls, but you can 'whisper' a message to yourself in the program and include a set of dice rolls in that message, so as to keep the results to yourself if you want to (or 'whisper' a message to someone else such that the dice rolls contained therein are displayed only to you and the receiver of the 'whisper'). The chat log can be saved by clicking on the proper button just above the chat-input line, so you can have an HTML-file record of what was said and done during the session (you can read it in Internet Explorer or similar programs, since it's an HTML file).

There's a 'game tree' frame above the player status frame, in which you can keep text nodes, dice macros, and suchlike. You can save nodes, load or remove them from your game tree, and send them to other players in the same 'room' of the server.

 

[heruca]

Battlegrounds rpg seemed good, but the dm of my current game told me that they are very restrictive with their license and you can only use it on one computer and can never transfer it to another computer unless you get another license.

It's not all that restrictive, really.

True, you can only use a Player Client license on one computer, but if you want to switch computers (say, if you upgrade, or your old hard drive died), you can simply request a new license code free of charge (and your old code gets disabled).

The GM Client is even less restrictive, because you can get a free second license (you simply need to ask for it), so you can run it on two different computers. This is handy because some GMs like to prep their games on one computer (say, a desktop), but actually run the games on another computer (say, a laptop).

 

[trevorscroft]

Maptools ... doesn't do some of the things that I would enjoy such as managing initiatives and even some character stuff.

On a side note, MapTool is in crazy active development. There's a companion InitiativeTool that you can drag-drop to/from. Integrations are expected RSN. Have you tried the 1.3 development version ? It has support for simple character sheets, and more improvements are on the short list for development.

 

[trevorscroft]

really slick tool to convert any image into a nice token

Or you could use TokenTool from http://rptools.net which does the same thing, but it's free

 

[halfpintgamer1976]

On a side note, MapTool is in crazy active development. There's a companion InitiativeTool that you can drag-drop to/from. Integrations are expected RSN. Have you tried the 1.3 development version ? It has support for simple character sheets, and more improvements are on the short list for development.

We use maptools in our homegame, but was not aware of the initiative tools interaction, which is why i began exploring other programs. How does it work? How easy is it for me to create npcs in both.

Does maptools do in game rolls?

 

[trevorscroft]

How does it work? How easy is it for me to create npcs in both.

It's crazy simple to create them in either tool, then you can drag-drop between the tools. The InitiativeTool even looks up images from the srd website automatically if you happen to be using d20 to create the tokens.

Does maptools do in game rolls?

could you be more specific ? It has a very powerful parser and expression evaluator. The development version (1.3) also supports token based macros and rolls.

 

[halfpintgamer1976]

It's crazy simple to create them in either tool, then you can drag-drop between the tools. The InitiativeTool even looks up images from the srd website automatically if you happen to be using d20 to create the tokens.



could you be more specific ? It has a very powerful parser and expression evaluator. The development version (1.3) also supports token based macros and rolls.

That last one went over my head. Parser??

Sorry not really good with computer lingo. We only use maptools for the projector and he just started letting laptop players connect in. Say I wanted everyone to make an initiative roll. Can they make it based off of the stat on their sheet or do they have to write a macro for it? Does the macro need to be updated when certain stats change?