As time goes by, and friends move further apart, I'm slowly coming to grips with the fact that if I want to continue playing RPGs, things are going to need to drastically change. Being that leaving the wife, abandoning the daughter, and dropping out of school isn't an option I'm willing to entertain...I've been looking into online answers.
I'm looking at the d20pro website as I type this, and will post questions as they come to me...if anyone familiar with the program could chime in, that would be greatly appreciated.
Features...
How supportive of non-d20 systems are the die roller programs? As in, could you set up a Shadowrun game, and have the program tell you how many successes you got on a number of d6...or would you have to tell the program to roll however many d6, and then manually count them?
With regards to movement, how restrictive does the program measure? Mostly what I'm wanting to know, if I have some housrule where this character (for whatever reason) can move 55 rather than 30, do we need to apply something to the character's file, or could you move him however far on the grid on his turn as you like?
Do the area affect templates relate to specific spells, or are they just empty templates? As in, do I tell the program this area template is for a fire ball spell, so it adds the damage to everyone under the template...or would I tell the program everyone under the template suffers x number of d6 fire damage, and it is applied...or do I just use the template to figure out who is affected, roll the dice, and apply the damage manually?
Still not sure how I feel about HeroLab, but that's a subject for another day. So how does one go about importing info into d20 without using HeroLab? If you don't have HeroLab does it lessen what d20 pro will keep track of?
I've seen mention of Libraries here and there on the site. Is this something d20 stores, or is it info stored on my computer/flashdrives/whatever. What I'm concerned about here, is not having access to my Library for whatever reason (no wifi, servers are down).
With the campaing recording thing...how much is recorded? Every die roll like on Neverwinter Knights? Every keystroke?
Also, what (as far as conditions/hitpoints/whatnot) is revealed to PCs? Are you able to hide monster hitpoint totals from the party? What about conditions/spell effects? How about hit point totals of fellow party members? Could we run a game where you don't know how close your partners are to death?
In the basic system, how do the players interact with eachother (assuming your playing online, in different towns/states)? Is everything typed, does it have some speaker/webcam support?
If/when the Judge is typing out the adventure to the party, how does one go about giving them the long descriptive text? How hard is it to improve encounters with no pregame preparation? I'm imagining fairly difficult, having to type out everything...
Also, with the mapping software...how user friendly is it? I've had programs before, that worked great...but were based on AutoCad, and felt like you needed a programing degree to get anything done on them.
Anything else, I guess I'll just ask later. Thanks ahead of time.