I was hoping that someone could point me in the direction of a few good virtual table-tops. As the years have gone on my good friends have scattered to the winds and many pine for the old Friday night game. I really want to run with a vtt and I am currently looking at Roll20 and RPG with me. I do have some preferences but I am very flexable.
Some features I am interested in:
A non-browser client. Browser based programs have had a history of being a pain in the ass for me.
Internal character sheets. Roll20 doesn't seem to have character sheet support, and RPG with me requires players to use herolab. I am not opposed to buying hero lab, I'd rather use my books though.
Fog of War. Visability has always been a tough rule to manage at the table with minis and the like, so a fog of war would be wonderful.
in client mapping program.
If someone could point me in the right direction that would be wonderful.
I still think Roll20 is the best site for a combination of simplicity and a good range of features. Save your character sheets over Google Docs and pull them up whenever you need to (also allows everyone to look at everyone's sheets so they can point out discrepancies or play for missing players). I can send you a link to a good character sheet template for online use if you want, it's an Excel based sheet but it's pretty solid for what you need it to do.
Sorry if this was unhelpful to you, I just really like that site.
Also, why do you find browser based programs to be a pain?
Mythweaver is a nice site for character sheets.
Roll20 has fog of war and paid members have dynamic lighting. I love dynamic lighting.
I use Mythweavers for my character sheets and then I link those sheets to the Journal Character sheets. Others use fillable character sheets and place those sheets on a file hosting site.
I have also seen players who use Herolab dump the Herolab statblock into the Journal character sheet.
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Obsidian Portal is nice for Organizing the campaign as well. Not really a VTT but still a nice site.
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Combat Assistant works for the mapping portion and is a standalone client, not browser-based (like Roll20). It's designed to be simple and lightweight, (unlike Maptool).
Character sheets are really better off as not part of the mapping program, and I don't know any VTT that includes them. Myth-weavers is good, we store on-site ones at www.pfrpg.com.au as well, in either uploadable text format or save-in-your-browser HTML, which looks near-exactly like a fill-in version of the Pathfinder character sheet.
You can load a background map and line up the lines that are already there, you can cover up areas for fog-of-war (though this is all manual; it's not line-of-sight based). Keeping it simple, minis are represented (usually - use whatever you like) using coloured dots, not tiny images.
Character sheets are really better off as not part of the mapping program, and I don't know any VTT that includes them.
Maptools with the lMarkus framework has a pretty much full character sheet in the program. When my players level up, they update Maptools and don't bother with a character sheet. The advantage being that all of your dice rolls are there in Maptools. No updating a character sheet and then needing to update the VTT.
Maptools meets all of the other needs of the OP.
Personally I use d20Pro. Most people don't like it because you have to pay for it, but as a VTT that was built from the ground up to support the d20 system, and the recent addition of options to run the pathfinder system specifically, it makes running combat a freaking BREEZE (though your up front prep time can be a little heavy, what with creating each creature). You can use as much or as little of the rules integration as you want though.
It is a separate client, not browser based.
It has a character sheet function that is part of the rules integration.
It has fog of war (draw on and click to reveal, not dynamic, but that's something they're working on).
It has tiling and square by square color or image painting. It's no Dundjinni or Campaign Cartographer, but it gets the job done.
The thing that I really like about it is the rules integration, and they're making that more and more powerful every day. I love the fact that I don't have to pay such close attention to math and stats, and can just concentrate on telling the story while still being able to use the rules correctly.
Fantasy Grounds isn't bad for its price.