Virtual Gaming - How To?

[DMFTodd]

How would you go about playing a virtual game of Paper & Pencil D&D? A game where the DM and all the players are online.

There's the Neverwinter Nights route but that is just way to time consuming to make maps and it really restricts what you can do (want to throw a new monster at the group?). And besides, NWN doesn't really feel like P&P gaming.

Text chat software is way too slow. You'd need voice chat software. I've used Teamspeak which seems to work OK. Everyone playing could be on Teamspeak.

Dice rolling: Maybe you need something to roll dice. At the beginning, I'm willing to just trust people so not a priority for me right now.

Map and figures: How do you handle this one? A real simple answer might be a webcam for the DM that shows the battle map and figures. Would get a little tedious maybe moving things for the players (no, no, the other side of the orc!).
Maybe software to show maps and figures that let's the players move it. OpenRPG, ScreenMonkey or something like that?

How would you do it?

 

[Cergorach]

there are programs that handle the mini movement and maps, as well as the dice rolling. RPM was also working on something like this...

 

[andargor]

How would you go about playing a virtual game of Paper & Pencil D&D? A game where the DM and all the players are online.

There's the Neverwinter Nights route but that is just way to time consuming to make maps and it really restricts what you can do (want to throw a new monster at the group?). And besides, NWN doesn't really feel like P&P gaming.

Text chat software is way too slow. You'd need voice chat software. I've used Teamspeak which seems to work OK. Everyone playing could be on Teamspeak.

Dice rolling: Maybe you need something to roll dice. At the beginning, I'm willing to just trust people so not a priority for me right now.

Map and figures: How do you handle this one? A real simple answer might be a webcam for the DM that shows the battle map and figures. Would get a little tedious maybe moving things for the players (no, no, the other side of the orc!).
Maybe software to show maps and figures that let's the players move it. OpenRPG, ScreenMonkey or something like that?

How would you do it?

OpenRPG or WebRPG have just about everything you are asking for, except for voice and/or webcam. However, they need Java and/or Python (if I recall), and that annoys me. And the battle map is kinda restricted.

Teamspeak is good, we use NetMeeting with our remote player. We use the NetMeeting whiteboard for combat, but that is definitely not optimal, since there are no hexes/squares and the interface frankly sucks (do you want to use an MS-Paint type interface? Not me).

I've been working on a shared whiteboard app with hexes and squares, and the ability to get "miniatures" off the net (kinda the same thing OpenRPG is doing), but with a better interface and Visio-like objects. We've played with it a couple of times, but there are a fair amount of bugs still. I'll probably pick up the project again next year.

We've tried the webcam approach for battlemaps, and according to our remote player, the best view is top-down. Theres a "candelabra" type light above the table, so we just put the camera on it, and point it down (we don't hang it by the wire, that moves too much)

Andargor