Virtual Tables and Tools

Like many people, I have friends in other cities. Friends I miss. Friends I would love to just hang out with and even game with.

However, I don't have the cash to buy a plane ticket for a weekend in another city for a couple of RPGs. I'm sure most of you don't, either.

In these days of powerful computers and broadband Internet access, there should be ways to do remote games, right? Well, I set out to see if there were.

I decided that I needed to come up with several tools. They should all be free or low cost. They should be readily available and they should be platform agnostic (I'm a Mac guy and I have friends that fall all over the OS spectrum).

To start with, I will need to communicate with my friends and they will need to communicate with each other. This need was going to be the easiest to fulfill. I have chat accounts on AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Skype and Gmail. Most of those have conferencing capabilities and even voice & video chat. I prefer Yahoo. It shouldn't be difficult to get my friends into the same chat room.

Next, we'll need a common database. As a GM, I will want a way to give out information to my players and, in turn, I want a way to see their character sheets and what not. So far, I'm very impressed with Obsidian Portal (I wrote about them recently). I have had a lot of fun putting together my new campaign. The great thing about writing in this wiki format is that it is addictive. Every time I mark something as a link - it stays red until I write the page. (Maddening!!) I keep finding myself marking links, thus I have to write more pages! I think I'm going to write myself silly!

Not only that, but I can mark info as "GM Only", so I can write material on the wiki before it will be used in the game. So, when I am on a roll, I can just keep going! If something happens in the game that invalidates that material, I can simply update it or never remove the "GM Only" check-box or just delete it - the players never have to know that something they did made me change my mind on a bit of material but I recycled it later because I needed something and was out of writing time!

Next, I needed a "table" - a virtual table. A place where I could load and share a map. Where I could roll dice and see my player's dice rolls. There are a few tools out there, some are for pay, some are free but offer premium content. The first one I tried was RPTools. This is a set of five different tools, programmed in Java (very cross platform!) and ... FREE!

Their MapTool is impressive. It has an internal chat program and dice rolling capabilities. It has tools for drawing maps. Then, you can load up pictures to act as figures for the PCs & NPCs. The whole tool is game system agnostic, easy to use and easy on the eyes.

I was very excited about this tool. However, I've not been able to get it to work for me. The program requires you to set up one machine as a server. When I tried to do this, I could list my game on RP's site, but no one could join it. I'm a pretty tech savvy guy and I had other move savvy guys have a look and we couldn't figure out the issue. As far as we can tell, my ISP is blocking the port that I need. So, as impressive as the tool is, I cannot use it.

However, I have had a blast working with the TokenTool. I've decided to use that format for making the figure-replacements I will use in whatever game I run. I've even begun making similar tokens in Photoshop.

(Speaking of Photoshop, I have been drawing maps like a madman. I've got enough material for a whole other post - look for it soon!)

The next tool I tried is RPGtonight. It, is also Free, so already I'm in love! It's web based, so no messing around with my router or trying to set up a server or whatnot.

RPGtonight has similar functionality to RPTools. There isn't a map drawing tool (but, you probably already have MS Paint or can find something better. Have I mentioned how much time I've spent on Photoshop lately??) However, the rest of the expected functionality is there. You can store and share maps and figures/minis/icons/tokens. You can even choose from maps and tokens on the site! There is a dice rolling application and there is built in text and voice chat.

However, I wish I had found RPGtonight before I found RPTools. I'm a visual guy and RPGtonight is ... messy. They aimed themselves at D&D players and there are fake wood grains and other medieval touches, that, had they been done by a better artist, might not be so obtrusive. The size of maps and tokens that one can up-load is quite small as well. They give one PLENTY of room for uploaded content, but at 500k for maps and 25k for minis, well, it's been a challenge. (I built a large and detailed map in Photoshop, shrank it down to what I thought was a reasonable size, 1.5 MB, and tried to upload it. Of course it failed. All of my shrinking work has had less than desirable results. I will likely have to cut up this map and my maps in the future will be smaller.)

I haven't yet run a game with RPGtonight, but I will soon. For free, it's certainly not a bad deal - I'm willing to compromise and I hope things will improve as money rolls in for the owners.

I'm still looking for other tools. When I find them, I'll review them here.