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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arc" data-source="post: 2953969" data-attributes="member: 12184">I've been playing in an online campaign run by demiurge1138 for the past two years, and it's gone swimmingly. We use <a href="http://www.mirc.com/" target="_blank">IRC</a> for dialogue, actions (/me does XXX), and combat. A seperate client running an excellent <a href="http://richards.sdf1.org/dice/dnd.html" target="_blank">dicebot</a> (the Standard version is preferable to the D&D version, imho) makes combat and general dice rolls fast and easy, and the already mentioned <a href="http://gametable.galactanet.com/" target="_blank">Gametable</a> works splendedly. It's also very easy to make new minis in Gametable with some basic Photoshop knowledge - one of our players is fast enough now that he can turn almost any image or photo into a good looking mini in under 2 minutes. Combine that with the <a href="http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/arch/ag" target="_blank">Wizards.com Art Gallery</a>, a semi-legal .pdf version of the MM, and you've got minis for almost every monster in the game.In many ways, I prefer IRC gaming over pen & paper, simply because of the seperation between in character and out of character. It's much easier to create a complex character when you can play with your dialogue for a few seconds before you say it. The ability tocommunicate non-verbal actions with /me makes for a deeper character - subtle habits and mannerisms are a lot easier to portray with text than an attempt to act them out. Of course, having everyone pay attention becomes much more difficult with the ability to Alt+Tab, but it's easier to catch up when you can just scroll upwards. As a final note, make sure to enable logging with mIRC (it's off by default), or any other program you use. When a player misses a session, we send him the .log for it, and 10 minutes of skimming later, he's caught up. It also helps with remembering NPCs/plot details from many sessions ago - a simple search of the logs gets everyone up to speed.Playing online does tend towards a different sort of game structure, at least for us. We've been treating the campaign like a TV series - everything is episodic, and most adventures last a single session or two. Demi runs a great detective campaign set in Sharn - each episode is a mystery that needs to be solved by the party, and most sessions consist of a few hours of gumshoeing it up (looking for clues, gathering information, tracking down witnesses), and an hour or two of climactic combat. It's great fun, and Demi really needs to get up and write us a story-hour sometime, I swear.</blockquote>

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