What's your favorite way to play D&D over the net?

[Mystery Man]

Other: I don't. I prefer face to face real live people.

 

[Jdvn1]

Play by Post is the only format I've used. If I could coordinate my players for Open RPG or something similar, we'd just get together face to face.

I have to say I've been pleasantly surprised by the online experience. I really didn't have much faith in the idea until I tried it and now I'm hooked.

Yep, same here. PbP is the best way to go now.

 

[mikedidthis]

PbP for me. I've been playing in a homebrew campaign for about 2 1/2 years now. It's got a one-post a day limit, so it's not too time-consuming, but it does mean things move slowly. However, most everyone takes the time to write deeper characterization in thier posts than you might ordinarily see in a game, which is a nice trade-off. The site I play on also has OOC boards where everyone has a chance to get to know each other a little better, which helps facilitate a little of the face-to-face feel.

 

[Kid Socrates]

I voted by IRC -- I use the Psionics server to run my old tabletop game. I greatly prefer running in person, but having one of my two players in that game be in Virginia while the other two of us are in Kansas City eliminated that possibility. The benefit of IRC is that it's much easier to do NPCs -- just have a different log-in be the NPC. We're also big into theme music and setting music, and mIRC lets you play sounds if everyone has a copy named the same in the sounds folder. It's not a perfect solution, but it gets the job done remarkably well. Plus, having exact logs of a story-heavy session makes my life as a GM much easier.

Plus, you know those moments when you spring a surprise on your players that you've been building to for a year and a half, and it's been something that's been under their noses but they just haven't quite figured it out yet, though they've almost guessed it over and over again? If your players can't see you, it's much more acceptable to dance a victory jig. It's kinda rude to do that at the table.

 

[IronWolf]

PBeM....

 

[driver8]

I like PbP, but I voted Fantasy Grounds. I love the program and the dice are great. If ya cabt have face to face it pretty nice.

 

[Steve Jung]

I'm a Play by Post guy.

 

[Aeric]

Email. I send one to all my players, arrange a time and a place to play, and then we meet and play.

 

[tarchon]

WebRPG probably worked best, but after it became a pay service we mostly used Yahoo Messenger with Netmeeting for mapping and a dice rolling client/server that I wrote.
We briefly tried IRC and OpenRPG but most of our players couldn't get them to work.

 

[Legildur]

PbEM for me. I've been playing in a very rich game for 10 years now. Taken my 1st level elven fighter to 12th level (Ftr7/Pal5). Was a 2nd Ed game, migrated to 3rd, and now lookingh at 3.5E. We use YahooGroups. Used to just use individual e-mails, but occasionally someone would drop a name off the list and they'd miss a whole thread!

I also PbP here on EnWorld. It seems okay so far, but very difficult to outdo my PbEM game as the DM does a fantastic job - plenty of big picture stuff and some hack and slash to balance. Great players all over the world as well (US, Canada, Portugal, Australia).

But I wouldn't mind trying one of the RPG clients, but will probably save that for when I move cities and can't play live any more with my buddies.