Hi there everyone, my friends and I are trying to set up a EotE campaign using SKYPE. The reason behind this is I am planning on moving out of state and I figured that we could still play just use SKYPE to talk to each other and instead of having physical copies of the character sheets, have them in PDF format so we can upload them to Google docs so all of us have access to the files (along with the core book and maps that our DM is making). I'm posting on here to get A. Your guy's thoughts on this idea and B.to get any ideas on how we can make it more seamless and user friendly. Thanks

Yep, you can do it, I do it all the time. I also use Roll20 (I pay for it, but you can use it for free) which gives you some metrics and tracking abilities. If you pay for it you can roll dice in the app (if not you can link it up to google hangouts and use a separate dice roller).

Very soon (and already doable in the Development server) is a in system character sheet option. The sheet in system doesn't work right now, but when fixed it'll let you just enter the difficulty and hit a roll button next to the weapon or skill.

It works really well for me. I've been primarily playing RPGs over Skype for about 5 years now, and roll20 is indeed great for maps and dice (though there are better dice apps for Edge's special dice). I use mostly Goole Drive for my character sheets.

I especially like playing over Skype via text - great to have searchable logs of everything in case you can't remember something that happened the previous week.

I use Google Hangouts with the Roll20 and EotE dice roller apps. Running all of them together take up a lot of space on your desktop, but since we don't use tokens to represent position, there is no need for huge maps on the background. I use tokens to only track strain and wounds. I keep all the NPCs hidden on the GM layer since the PCs don't need to see them. I also use the turn counter to track initiative. Maps are uploaded in the handouts tab and made available when needed. It does a lot of the book keeping for me. I'd be happy to share my current set-up with you sometime and walk you through it.

I ran a D&D 4e game for a few years using Skype and a virtual table top app (RPTool). It worked fine for us. I had one player in Texas and another in Australia and we were all able to play together without too many problems. Just a few caveats:

• No matter how robust the software is that you use, you're going to experience technical glitches from time to time. Sometimes Skype was slow or delayed, sometimes my Australia player had Internet issues and kept disconnecting from RPTools, etc. These can delay the game and make some of your more impatient players frustrated.
• It can be more work for the GM to do this, especially if you use maps and tokens. I would spend hours adjusting my maps to fit into the grid properly, and many times, I had to create the maps by hand. For RPTools, I actually created my own 4e framework that we used, so I had to add all of the monster stats to the tokens, including powers and abilities, which also took a lot of time. Handouts were actually easier, since you just added an image and displayed it for everyone.
• It can make your players a bit lazy if you have a fancy framework for your game system For my RPTools framework, you just clicked a macro button for a power you wanted to use and it gave you the result with all the bonuses and such. Some of my more novice players forgot how to actually play the game, since they were used to just clicking a button
• It can be harder to keep everyone's attention on the game. If you have everyone around an actual table, they're more likely to concentrate on the game, since... well, that's why they're there. If you have remote players, they can be susceptible to a lot more distractions, since they're probably sitting alone in their computer room. It's a lot more likely that their ADD will kick in and they'll start reading their email or surfing the web. I had one player playing WOW during the game, for crying out loud, which really slowed things down and annoyed the people who were at the table trying to play. Another player would want to take breaks every half an hour to cook dinner, or go to the store (yes, this actually happened), or do who knows what. These sorts of distractions rarely happen when you get everyone together around an actual table
• For some people, using an electronic die roller takes the fun out of playing a table top game. I know some people prefer die rolling programs, but for some, having too much computer involvement can make the game seem more like a video game, rather than a table top game.

For the most part, though, it went pretty smooth, although we had a few sessions where we had so many issues, and so many remote people were distracted, that we just couldn't get the game going. The big negative on my part was all of the prep work to get the VTT up and running for the adventure.