My 3yr old D&D group has been split up by career moves and various other details, but we'd like to continue the campaign virtually with some type of digital game table and vent voice server.
Last weekend we tried OSU-GT, but I apparently asked it to do too much, and it died, taking my hard work with it.
What I'd like, is some suggestions for other products, free is best obviously, but for pay (with a great feature set) is also welcome.
GT was just so incredibly frustrating, I'm interested in just about anything else.
Thanks all!
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Free:
TTopRPG (currently Windows only, I'm the author! My preference, of course.)
Maptool (runs in Java, very popular free one, lots of functionality if you dig deep)
Pay:
d20Pro (runs in Java I believe)
Fantasy Grounds (not sure which platforms this one supports)
I use Skype or Mumble for voice typically.
What is the level of difficulty of Maptools for an average non-technical gamer?
I'm very savvy with all of this, but some of my players are not.
Will I need to worry about dice macros/set up and what not for those guys?
Just a note on Fantasy Grounds - The map building/execution made me want to bludgeon my own skull in. However you can import maps so if you have a mapmaker you like - use it and import.
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What is the level of difficulty of Maptools for an average non-technical gamer?
I'm very savvy with all of this, but some of my players are not.
Will I need to worry about dice macros/set up and what not for those guys?
For basic stuff in Maptools, such as rolling dice and moving the characters across the board, that part is fine for a non-technical person. Personally I've never used the macros, but I can tell you that the macros are not required for the gaming experience.
The players will pick up Maptools pretty easily.
-Perry
Great! Thanks all!
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I have experienced d20 pro. I like it a lot, and you can import characters from herolab.
d20 Pro has the nicest user interface, and getting up and going is quick for the DM. Being able to import from HeroLab is a plus.
d20 Pro doesn't have vision and lighting like Maptools. Thing is, at a real table top most DMs don't strictly adjudicate vision and lighting anyway (I know I can't), so it's not a real loss.
-Perry
EDIT: Oops, got ninja'd by the OP.
Don't overlook Ttop. Easy to use and free. *fist bumps Pygon*
Looking at D20Pro, I'm really put off by how expensive a GM+5 party members is going to be.
Unless it's light years ahead of Ttop and Maptool, then it's far too expensive to be a viable option.
If you go the Maptools route and are playing 3.5 or Pathfinder, you'll want to look into the iMarkus framework (or is it lMarkus?). It requires a little work in setting up characters, but gives you big payoffs in then having buttons that do everything quickly and easily - attacks, saves, skill checks (and secret GM skill checks), initiative, applying stat damage and having all the numbers adjusted, hit points, etc.
I don't know about the other software, but it's easy to sit in on a game of Maptools if you want to see it in use.
Try:
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups#!forum/pathfinder-soc iety-online-collective
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Looking at D20Pro, I'm really put off by how expensive a GM+5 party members is going to be.
Unless it's light years ahead of Ttop and Maptool, then it's far too expensive to be a viable option.
There were three things that D20 Pro did not have that made it not worth the investment:
1. Dynamic Fog of War. This is coming, or so they say, but it doesn't have it yet. MapTools does, and its free.2. A pointer tool. Something so simple, yet it's not there in D20 Pro, it is in MapTools.
3. Support for spells. If I am going to pay a lot of money for a VTT, it very well better be able to apply most core spells on the fly with a single click or two. D20 Pro does not do this. Neither does MapTools, but MapTools is free.
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I will say that as a huge fan and user of D20Pro (I will never switch to another VTT)Map tools is probably better at handling some things but the learning curve is steeper and it is plain , I cannot bring myself to sit and look at the horribly ugly UI while playing my games. I would rather have a small level of less functionality and have something be more pleasant to look at.
I use Fantasy Grounds, and while it lacks the map capabilities that MapTools has, it looks and works great with PF, has libraries for most of what's on the PRD available, and dice you can throw. :D
Also it allows for import of characters from Herolab or PCgen, if you use either of those.
It costs money, but not more than the price of one or two AP issues.
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I use TTopRPG. It does everything I need it to and it has ran flawlessly through all of the games I've used it. I don't even use miniatures any more. We sit around the living room on the big wrap-around-the-room sofa with TTopRPG running on the 50" flat-screen. We've had gaming sessions where we're split between local and remote with skype usage. Works well with a dual audience.
It's as beautiful as the time you put into the maps and tokens, which for me is a lot easier than painting and toting miniatures and battle maps all over the place.
I asked a very similar question a while back and got some really terrific advice. I'm going to go bump it for you, so you can take a look.
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Fantasy Grounds tries to provide a complete replacement for gaming around the table. It is great for GM prep, campaign tracking, creation of adventures for sharing with others and for running a game real-time with connected players. We've been told that the combat tracker alone was worth the price of admission, but we've recently added in a bunch of new enhancements like a game calendar to track the passage of time and log events in your campaign, a party sheet which allows a quick party at a glance view for GMs, party-wide rolls such as Saving Throws or Skills checks, party inventory, Experience distribution and tracking for encounters and quests, easy to use pre-placement of tokens and monsters on maps for encounters, import of PFG characters from HeroLab and many more features.
Here are two links to screenshots of the new party tracker screens.
http://www.fantasygrounds.com/images/screenshots/Screenshots/SWK01/Screen3. jpg
http://www.fantasygrounds.com/images/screenshots/Screenshots/SWK01/Screen6. jpg
Before you go with another solution, you should check out the demo for FG and play around with all the tools available to GMs. We've got tons of videos out on our site and on youtube as well. We have almost 24,000 users and over 18,000 forum members who are always looking for new converts.
Regardless of which solution you choose, playing online is very doable these days.
Fantasy Grounds tries to provide a complete replacement for gaming around the table. It is great for GM prep, campaign tracking, creation of adventures for sharing with others and for running a game real-time with connected players. We've been told that the combat tracker alone was worth the price of admission, but we've recently added in a bunch of new enhancements like a game calendar to track the passage of time and log events in your campaign, a party sheet which allows a quick party at a glance view for GMs, party-wide rolls such as Saving Throws or Skills checks, party inventory, Experience distribution and tracking for encounters and quests, easy to use pre-placement of tokens and monsters on maps for encounters, import of PFG characters from HeroLab and many more features.
Here are two links to screenshots of the new party tracker screens.
http://www.fantasygrounds.com/images/screenshots/Screenshots/SWK01/Screen3. jpg
http://www.fantasygrounds.com/images/screenshots/Screenshots/SWK01/Screen6. jpgBefore you go with another solution, you should check out the demo for FG and play around with all the tools available to GMs. We've got tons of videos out on our site and on youtube as well. We have almost 24,000 users and over 18,000 forum members who are always looking for new converts.
Regardless of which solution you choose, playing online is very doable these days.
Your product is GREAT but useless to me because I'm on OS X. These other solutions including MapTools are platform independent.
I JUST eliminated the Windows 7 install (via Paralells) on my mac and got back several GB of much needed space and I dont want to have to buy another piece of software (like say Crossover) just to run FG. You guys have been pretty admant in your choice NOT to have a mac version so that's been my main issue with FG.
It's a great product but I'm not going to run Windows JUST so that I can use it. And I'm someone who doesn't mind paying for a product if it's useful (i.e Hero Labs).
Your product is GREAT but useless to me because I'm on OS X. These other solutions including MapTools are platform independent.
I JUST eliminated the Windows 7 install (via Paralells) on my mac and got back several GB of much needed space and I dont want to have to buy another piece of software (like say Crossover) just to run FG. You guys have been pretty admant in your choice NOT to have a mac version so...
Seconded. Almost verbatim.
Maptools and Skype here.
I don't use any of the Maptools tricks or interface, other than setting up maps with grids and making tokens. My players still roll their dice physically (we're a pretty trusting group) and I don't know jack squat about macros, but it makes the game much easier simply by providing a game grid and player tokens so things like movement, LoS, etc. can be seen rather than simply estimated.
We've just started doing a virtual game using Skype for our voice chat. Adding a VTT to the mix would be nice. In the past though playing with a few of the free ones (don't recall which) I wasn't having any luck trying to set up a session that I could then connect to (getting all of the router settings right, etc.).
If people could recommend a free product that has the following two features, virtual whiteboard/mapper and dice roller, that is easy to setup as the host and get others to connect to OR that provides room creation on some other host server that we all connect to, which would you choose? Being able to save off IM notes and picture files of maps from the VTT window would be nice too.
L
We've just started doing a virtual game using Skype for our voice chat. Adding a VTT to the mix would be nice. In the past though playing with a few of the free ones (don't recall which) I wasn't having any luck trying to set up a session that I could then connect to (getting all of the router settings right, etc.).
If people could recommend a free product that has the following two features, virtual whiteboard/mapper and dice roller, that is easy to setup as the host and get others to connect to OR that provides room creation on some other host server that we all connect to, which would you choose? Being able to save off IM notes and picture files of maps from the VTT window would be nice too.
L
MapTool will do all of those things out of the box. It can do a lot without scripting, it can just do a lot more with scripting.
Yep. Just need to make sure your router (if any) has all the appropriate ports forwarded and you (or one of your players) can serve as host.
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It is still a beta right now, but works surprisingly well. Roll20 has been working wonderfully for our group to mess around with.
Its purely web based, very light weight if you want simple but holds a lot of features under the hood.
Its in open beta at the moment so well worth checking out.
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Your product is GREAT but useless to me because I'm on OS X. These other solutions including MapTools are platform independent.I JUST eliminated the Windows 7 install (via Paralells) on my mac and got back several GB of much needed space and I dont want to have to buy another piece of software (like say Crossover) just to run FG. You guys have been pretty admant in your choice NOT to have a mac version so...
Not at all. We love Mac. It just isn't something that is easy to completely switch to after you have a large and solid code-base. Instead, we've explored other options to deliver it to our Mac user base and we now have a growing number of users who successfully run FG on Mac and Linux without Parallels or any other paid add-on. We specifically write code and test on Mac through Wine to ensure that every new version is fully compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux.
We've recently dedicated an entire section of the FAQ on how to run on a Mac with detailed steps to set up and run over Wine, WineBottler or Crossover. The third option requires a third-party purchase, but the first two do not. Furthermore, we've recently been experimenting with wrapping everything needed to install and run Fantasy Grounds as if it was a native OS X app. The app version includes all of the Wine re-distributable model. The only problem with that approach is that it inflates the initial download to around 250MB, which is a bit much for some users. It's still probably something we'll be doing soon though because it is relatively small compared with other full-game downloads like you will see on Steam, XBLA or PSN.
I use WineBottler personally on OS X for FG and for a number of other Windows-only games that I enjoy. We brought a Mac with us to Gen Con last year to show how smoothly it runs and we've been bringing one with us to various conventions since then.
Here's a link to FAQ:
And the simple instructions for getting WineBottler running. I highly recommend it even if you use it to run games other than Fantasy Grounds.
The easiest way to get the latest WineBottler release installed onto OS X is to use either MacUpdate http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/33367/winebottler or directly from the developers website http://winebottler.kronenberg.org/.
Installing WineBottler 1.2.3
1. Open the download WineBottlerCombo_1.2.3.dmg file to mount it
2. When the disk image window opens, drag the Wine and WineBottler apps to your Applications folder
3. Close the and unmount the disk
That's it, nice and simple.
For anyone who is a Mac user but who is unfamiliar with Wine, the application behaves exactly like a native app.
The boring technical details:
Wine translates all the Windows and DirectX specific calls into native calls that run on OS X and Linux. Not every Windows or DirectX call has been added to Wine support at this time, nor have .NET binaries. We specifically limit all code (current and planned) to those calls which are supported directly in Wine.
I've been running it like this for over a year and a half. A number of our top-posting forum users have been as well.
Not at all. We love Mac. It just isn't something that is easy to completely switch to after you have a large and solid code-base. Instead, we've explored other options to deliver it to our Mac user base and we now have a growing number of users who successfully run FG on Mac and Linux without Parallels or any other paid add-on. We specifically write code and test on Mac through Wine to ensure that every new version is fully compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux.
Okay I will try this. Thanks for sharing. I had no idea about using Wine as a solution.
Use Maptools for my group. It was a bit complex at first, but after a week we all had a pretty good grasp on it. Three months later I had modded the campaign a bit so everyone could do their saves and skills and some other misc rolls from the campaign macros.
It's not perfect but the price is definitely right and I have to give it my nod.