Will you DM or play in pick up games?

[Graf]

Would love to, but no Windows PC.

This would be awesome, if I were in a position to carve out blocks of time to play.

Good on people for doing this though!

I know what you mean about OpenRPG, Sphyre. I used it a few times, but it was like pulling teeth.

For the past couple of weeks, I've been running 4e preview adventures for a couple of friends online using MapTools for our virtual tabletop and Skype for voice chat.

It's working great. I'm really impressed with how close you can get to a tabletop experience using those tools.

Honestly this seems like it would be more workable for me.
Any particular good/bad points about MapTools?

 

[Dathalas]

Hey, Graf.

I like MapTool because it's simple, does only what it needs to, and is stable.

It lets you load up an image as a map, view a grid over it, and adjust that grid to match that on the map.

Then you slap some tokens down on the map and they stay within the grid lines. Any of the players can move the tokens just by dragging them.

It's also got a fog of war feature that you can use to hide parts of the map until the characters can see it.

It works great for us. I can create a nice looking battle map using GIMP, slap a 1 inch grid on it, open it in MapTool, toss some tokens on it ... and we're ready to play.

MapTool also has a text chat box and a dice roller that you can use by typing in a command.

We use Skype for our voice chat and it works fine. I just invite everyone that's playing to a conference call.

It's the closest I've ever come to the feel of sitting around a table and moving tokens on a real battle map.

The downside for me is that there's no built-in initiative tracking tool. That would've been great. I just use a spreadsheet, but I spend a lot of time flipping through screens while I'm DMing.

Check it out at:
http://www.rptools.net/doku.php?id=maptool:intro