Tabletop Gaming w/friends who've moved.

[CubicleGestapo]

Hey all,

This post is aimed at the tabletop AD&D crowd.

Background
A while ago a group of my old friends got together and started to reminisce on our old gaming days in college (yes we played AD&D in college – I’m a bit of a geek, what can I say, really).

These days though, most of us have spread out across the country, have jobs, got married etc but clearly still greatly miss playing with our particular gaming group. Pretty quickly the conversation changed into “Ok, we all have Cable or DSL connectivity at home, so what can we use application wise to start up an online version of a tabletop game”? The general idea was to mimic the tabletop aspects as much as possible even though we'd all be separated by thousands of miles once we all went back to our homes.

Here’s what we’ve been using with a decent amount of success:

- For In Character (IC) talking, posing, and die rolling we use a Mushclient – by luck one of the group happened to be running a server. I suspect any chat application would be ok, but you’d still require some tool for rolling dice that everyone can see. Alternatively you could also just give the GM full control of dice – which is kind of sucky in my opinion.

- For OOC talking/joking around etc, we use Ventrillo (or Teamspeak, etc) in addition to the chat application. Now we can chat, pose, roll dice, and bullshit in a way very similarly to as if we were all in person at a table. This of course requires a microphone (usually not a problem though, most of us had headsets used for other gaming)

- Next up you need a decent “board” tool, or a place where the GM can display an encounter room or scene. This isn’t 100% necessary, but it’s certainly convenient. In our old tabletop games we used a simple whiteboard and some miniatures. In our online version we’ve used two approaches, neither to be honest are that great though.

(1) Use a Webcam pointed at a whiteboard w/minatures (lol). The advantage is it’s most similar to tabletop, because well it’s just a webcam between the players and the table. What not so hot about it is the picture quality is just not good, which so far we’ve never been able to improve. Even zoomed in close a group of minatures looks blurry and it can be hard to tell who is who.

(2) Use a drawing tool (photoshop, etc) to draw up the encounter map and just post it on a web page. This is the method we usually use, as it gives us a very clear picture of the encounter (including a nice grid) and the DM can usually generate the map in advance. The problem is that it’s annoyingly slow to update. In a tabletop game you’d just move a miniature as actions take place, but this method doesn’t really allow for easy real time changes. We often see 10 minutes of delay between combat rounds (for example) for the DM to make simple changes to update the map.

Anyway, sorry if this has gone a bit long but that’s the background and we’ve been running with that setup for a while (we game 1 night a week roughly, with occasional cancellations). It's worked pretty well, but I have a feeling there's some improvements that could be made in mapping, etc that we just haven't explored properly.

My question: What would you do differently? If you have any comments or recommendations I would love to hear them.

Thanks!
Cubi

[Keevan_Colton]

Arent there a variety of online whiteboards these days?

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

One word, OpenRPG.

[Vehrec]

I just mostly ignore the issue of who stands where and run adventures in rooms/buildings that aren't so cramped as to necessitiate a specific mapping of such things. Instead, I just tend to keep notes and maybe draw a few sketches on graph paper.

[Darwin]

We've been using Gametable to good effect. It's java, so it's rather memory hungry, but it gets things done, and you can use it in conjunction with teamspeak or other voice comms software, or just use the text.

[CubicleGestapo]

Thanks all - I appreciate the leads.

OpenRPG and GameTable came up in another discussion recently. It sounds like you're putting me on the right track for what we're shooting for.