Doing Pen and Paper RPG's Over the Internet: advice wanted.

[Raj Ahten]

I'm about to travel across the country for ten months for a job and want to continue GMing for the group I currently have, at least for a few sessions until the current arc I am running finishes up.

I know we have quite a few role players on this board and I'm trying to figure out all my options. AIM has been used by GM's I've run with before. It seems though as long as you are typing out everything playing by post on a message board is also an option. Using Skype or another voice service could also work quite well I think.

Am I missing any big options here that are relatively inexpensive? I'd appreciate any advice from others who have run games like this before and would love to hear what has worked well for you all in the past.

[B5B7]

If you have not already done so, I recommend that you ask this question on geekdo, which is the RPG offshoot of boardgamegeek, where there should be a lot of people with experience in doing this.
Another possibility you can check is ti3wiki which has a lot of people playing pbem, and although it is a boardgame there will be some similarity of technical aspects such as dicerolling sites one can use.

[rhoenix]

One option being used with good success right now is Screenmonkey as a game board / dice rolls, together with Skype for real-time communication. It's worked nicely for the Star Wars: Saga game I currently play in for more than a month now, getting together once a week.

[Old Plympto]

I've played in a Star Wars D6 on an IRC channel before. Proper campaign and all. We used a dicebot to roll dice and had two windows open, one for in character and the other out of character. Later I also GMed the same group in another campaign. It was great.

Also, I've always wanted to try Galaxy Games Online out in a game. You can create your own GGO files as character sheets and quick dice rollers and such. I've tried chatting and rolling dice with it, unfortunately I've never actually played a game with it. I think development for it has suspended so no real support there.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

My group has used several interfaces but the best I've found so far is OpenRPG (aka Traipse) for dierolling and map and Ventrilo for voice.

[Joviwan]

Skype for communication

Maptool for the gaming aspect. I've used it in several online campaigns so far. There's a bit of a learning curve, but it's very robust.

[Hotfoot]

The nice thing about Screenmonkey is that only one person needs to get the program working, the GM, and it works with other NBOS products pretty seamlessly, which makes making maps on the fly and posting them super easy. The players log in via a web browser, and you go from there.

It's hardly perfect, but it is damn handy.

[Psychic_Sandwich]

It's entirely possible to do things over IRC, but it's highly dependent on the ruleset. Some are intolerably slow, and some work just fine. White Wolf systems, for example, don't seem to work very well; I've been in sessions of an Aberrant game where it took us two hours to do a single small fight with only one notable opponent, and I'm told that Exalted is even worse. Stuff like Eclipse Phase works really well, though, because the actual mechanics are ruthlessly simple.

[Raj Ahten]

Thanks for all the replies so far. Looks like I'll have to give screenmonkey, maptool and the rest a look see.

[McC]

I've played in a Star Wars D6 on an IRC channel before. Proper campaign and all. We used a dicebot to roll dice and had two windows open, one for in character and the other out of character. Later I also GMed the same group in another campaign. It was great.

This.

I've been involved with IRC-based RPGs for 12 years. Hands-down my favorite way to game, after proper tabletop.