I GM Star Wars RPG almost exclusively online and the dice roller in Google Hangouts has been perfect. Now that Google is shutting down the API in April, I've been looking for an alternative but NONE of the other solutions I've found even come lose to the experience of the Google Hangouts roller.

Is there any hope that this game is going to remain viable for online play after April? Anyone else out there found a solid alternative to Google Hangouts?

P.S.> It's exceedingly unfortunate that the FFG Star Wars Dice App can't be shared over the Internet so players can see each others rolls.

Roll20's probably your best option for real time rolling, albeit it comes with a price tag. Not sure how it stacks up against the Hangouts API.

My group is using roll20. As long as one person has a pro subscription and is willing to create the session your whole group can use the die roller API and character sheets. Aside from an occasional tech issue with the video chat it's been great so far. I'd definitely recommend it, although you're going to want to hunt down and/or edit some Star Wars tokens for your session as roll20 has little selection beyond the fantasy genre.

Just to add, I've never used google hangouts, only roll20. No idea how it compares to google hangouts.

Tabletop Simulator has some fantastic EotE support, including the dice. Downside is of course that everyone would need to buy TTS*, but it's cheap and phenomenal, so not really a downside

*No, I don't work for them. I just discovered it recently and it's amazing, so I don't mind the free plug.

You actually don't need a pro subscription to use Roll20, as long as you make custom tables for each die type and macros to roll them with. I've been running my game this way for a year without spending a dime on the site. I also made a custom card deck for flippable destiny points. I did eventually end up making tokens for my players just to let them update their wounds/strain in plain sight, but I wouldn't even say that's necessary. I keep track of a lot of things just by typing notes up in the map area.

8 hours ago, Herf Nerder said:

You actually don't need a pro subscription to use Roll20, as long as you make custom tables for each die type and macros to roll them with. I've been running my game this way for a year without spending a dime on the site. I also made a custom card deck for flippable destiny points. I did eventually end up making tokens for my players just to let them update their wounds/strain in plain sight, but I wouldn't even say that's necessary. I keep track of a lot of things just by typing notes up in the map area.

That's cool that you can do that. I'd rather just spend the money to save me the hassle. I looked at custom tables and macros and went... ah, nope.

I too lament the loss of the Hangouts dice. I've been the only remote player in my group since I moved away a little over a year ago. Roll20, FantasyGrounds, and Tabletop Simulator are all overkill for what I need, but forum rollers like orokos.com are underkill. I own FG and TS and I paid for Roll20 for a while, so I feel like I've given them a fair go. A decent tool built into the free videochat client was really ideal. It worked equally well on those "skip" nights where we ran a one-shot from the comfort of everyone's home.

ATTENTION: I MENTION THIS IN A NON-GOOGLE CAPACITY

I'll ask around and see if there are any plans to add in dice rolling functionality in the new program. Mind you, I'm waaaaaaaaaaay down on the totem pole, so they're unlikely to listen to me - but I can ask my boss and perhaps open a design suggestion. No promises or anything, but it doesn't hurt to ask.

Interesting that this would show up on /r/swrpg today:

link to the conversation instead of the gif the forums thought I meant when I pasted this in.

I'm about to be in the same boat. For now my group is switching to rolling physical dice, but I'm hoping an equally easy online option returns. I'll have to check out that reddit link once I'm off a work computer.

We tried Tabletop Simulator. It has promise but it is way clunkier than the plugin in Google hangouts (and the plugin that calculates the dice is presently broken). From my vantage point, Google's dropping the API has set the Star Wars RPG franchise waaaaaaay back when it comes to online play. Since we have narrative dice (which I love), no existing solutions work nearly as well as what we had with Google Hangouts.

Hangouts with the dice plugins made the Star Wars RPG the funnest, most Internet playable tabletop RPG on the market. It's feeling sort of like the end of an RPG era.

FFG should really jump on this ASAP. If the mobile dice roller app were upgraded to allow someone to host a session, and others join and share all rolls with all clients on the session, that would be PERFECT! Then we could roll on our mobiles and see the results while we play over Skype, Hangouts or whatever. This game NEEDS this to remain viable for Internet play and to attract new players.

PS. > New players are almost always turned off by the narrative die until I show them the roller that automatically computes the results and how subsequently each turn goes very fast with creative flare.

I doubt there's much interest in the costs behind hosting this from FFG's point of view, so it might fall to the community. I know we have some smart coderinos around here.

There are dice conversion charts out there if you wanted to go that way.

I'm not sure what I am going to do yet, so I may need some advice from people who have done PbP games of EotE

most pbp games use either Orkos roller or if you are on RPG.net their in client roller.

And so I asked my boss right after the Monday morning meeting - the sad news? The program coming in to replace hangouts doesn't really have the robust app support like Hangouts did. Perhaps later down the road, but for the short term - yeah, the infrastructure isn't really there.

Sorry to break the news.

5 minutes ago, Desslok said:

And so I asked my boss right after the Monday morning meeting - the sad news? The program coming in to replace hangouts doesn't really have the robust app support like Hangouts did. Perhaps later down the road, but for the short term - yeah, the infrastructure isn't really there.

Sorry to break the news.

You did more than any other member here could have. You are a just and honorable penguin.

56 minutes ago, Desslok said:

And so I asked my boss right after the Monday morning meeting - the sad news? The program coming in to replace hangouts doesn't really have the robust app support like Hangouts did. Perhaps later down the road, but for the short term - yeah, the infrastructure isn't really there.

Sorry to break the news.

Thanks for trying.

I reckon I'm going to use http://game2.ca/eote/? and just share my screen when necessary, until such time as my compatriots start using a vtt.

7 hours ago, thegrognard said:

We tried Tabletop Simulator. It has promise but it is way clunkier than the plugin in Google hangouts (and the plugin that calculates the dice is presently broken). From my vantage point, Google's dropping the API has set the Star Wars RPG franchise waaaaaaay back when it comes to online play. Since we have narrative dice (which I love), no existing solutions work nearly as well as what we had with Google Hangouts.

Hangouts with the dice plugins made the Star Wars RPG the funnest, most Internet playable tabletop RPG on the market. It's feeling sort of like the end of an RPG era.

FFG should really jump on this ASAP. If the mobile dice roller app were upgraded to allow someone to host a session, and others join and share all rolls with all clients on the session, that would be PERFECT! Then we could roll on our mobiles and see the results while we play over Skype, Hangouts or whatever. This game NEEDS this to remain viable for Internet play and to attract new players.

PS. > New players are almost always turned off by the narrative die until I show them the roller that automatically computes the results and how subsequently each turn goes very fast with creative flare.

I wouldn't be surprised if this would be stepping on some contract toes. As soon as you make viable online tabletop stuff, you're stepping outside the bounds of a traditional gaming license, and onto the toes of the electronic gaming license, which as far as I understand, is held by EA exclusively when it comes to Star Wars.

Given we don't even get PDFs for this system, I imagine all the contracts surrounding that stuff are a difficult thing to navigate, even if the interest was there.

2 hours ago, Tom Cruise said:

I wouldn't be surprised if this would be stepping on some contract toes. As soon as you make viable online tabletop stuff, you're stepping outside the bounds of a traditional gaming license, and onto the toes of the electronic gaming license, which as far as I understand, is held by EA exclusively when it comes to Star Wars.

Given we don't even get PDFs for this system, I imagine all the contracts surrounding that stuff are a difficult thing to navigate, even if the interest was there.

And yet we somehow got a dice rolling app, go figure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Now a dice rolling app that could share results with others, maybe that's where it becomes a game instead of a tool.

11 hours ago, Desslok said:

And so I asked my boss right after the Monday morning meeting - the sad news? The program coming in to replace hangouts doesn't really have the robust app support like Hangouts did. Perhaps later down the road, but for the short term - yeah, the infrastructure isn't really there.

Sorry to break the news.

What is annoying is the whole time they have been doing this I have been saying I will not be using the product with out this support...

A group I play with via Hangouts ran into the same issue.....

So I built one that doesn't need Hangouts:

https://dice.owenmead.com/

I registered on this forum to share the love as I figured others would be running into the same problem. Will post a new topic about it with more info.

Hello Community. Same problem as most people here.

I was wondering if anyone had a great solution for us. My tiny group is broke as chocolate right now and we already spent about 240$ on the game (book x2 dice set x4) but one of us lives remote now so we wanna play online...

My point is, it is not that we don't want to support the game and give money to the project, in fact we already did, but we can't any more ^^;

Any free solution, even the ghetto-est one, to just be able to skype (or other voice option) and simply simply have a shared view and a roller that everybody could use?

ok I lied cause we already know the ghetto-est way, that is to either webcam your physical dice roll, or use http://game2.ca/eote/? and share screen when it's your turn to roll or roll physical dice and blindly trust people ( and honestly that wouldn't as bad as it sounds we play 100% for fun zero competitive aspect and we trust each other number one hehe ) or having the GM share screen and use http://game2.ca/eote/? and roll for everyone...

BUT , let's says we would like to use something a tiiiny bit less ghetto, like a http://game2.ca/eote/? that we could all see at the same time but where everyone could click when it's his/her turn to roll ... any suggestions on that? ;A; ...

I'm sorry if I sound cheap, this is really not my intention and we are considering Fantasy Grounds, TableTop Systems, roll20 etc... but our needs are so small and our budget as well... I figured it was worth asking

Cheers,

I just gave owenmead's roller a go, it's quite slick. I was planning to use game2.ca/eote in a shared screen but given my slow country internet, I would prefer not to have to share a screen to play. This would appear to work nicely.

that looks very promising indeed! thanks for your answer themensh, somehow owenmead's post went under my radar (i think my tab was open before he posted hehe)

owenmead, you're a very special spaceballs - thanks we'll test this tonight with my group but it looks like exactly what we were looking for!

question: hey owenmead, this is absolutely perfect! right what we needed - thanks! can you tell me how to add dark side destiny point as a GM? i saw people do it in a room called "TEST" but i can't find it myself lol... i'm sorry this is probably quite easy but ..

2 hours ago, lanmarek said:

can you tell me how to add dark side destiny point as a GM?

I posted about that in the other thread but some folks will see it here in a forum search: it's the top left set of arrows just above the green Ability die. You click up to add, down to subtract, and you flip them by clicking them.