Life has made it seemingly impossible to get a good game going on a regular schedule with friends. I want to put together a weekly online game but I have almost no experience doing so. I ran a few EOTE games on Google Hangouts a few years back but I’m not sure if that’s still an option.

I’m lookin for something cheap(ish) that my players won’t have to pay for. I also don’t want something that takes forever to learn. Built in chat would be awesome.

I know there was a podcast recently that covered this topic but I was curious about the wider opinion and especially ease of use.

What’s the quickest way to get a game going online with the least hassle?

Thanks.

Discord is awesome, if you’re interested I can show you the server I use, there’s a dice roller, initiative tracker, wound/strain tracker, and Story Point tracker.

but it’s obviously audio/text only, no video so no maps or anything, and there’s no good character sheet option other than sharing pdf’s

in fact online character sheets are one of the major missing items in the Genesys world. There’s an absolutely incredible one that’s fantastic for making characters, but you can only share the character by exporting to a PDF and sending it to the gm, you can’t just give them the URL.

Check out this episode of Finding the Narrative for a good run down on the current options out there:

https://overcast.fm/+Levttxqqs

6 minutes ago, Richardbuxton said:

Discord is awesome, if you’re interested I can show you the server I use, there’s a dice roller, initiative tracker, wound/strain tracker, and Story Point tracker.

but it’s obviously audio/text only, no video so no maps or anything, and there’s no good character sheet option other than sharing pdf’s

in fact online character sheets are one of the major missing items in the Genesys world. There’s an absolutely incredible one that’s fantastic for making characters, but you can only share the character by exporting to a PDF and sending it to the gm, you can’t just give them the URL.

Check out this episode of Finding the Narrative for a good run down on the current options out there:

https://overcast.fm/+Levttxqqs

Maybe this evening. I need a nap.

Just follow this link whenever you have time I’m in Australia so I’ll be asleep for the night within 3 hours, awake in 11 or twelve from when I post this. There’s a general chat channel there to talk on

https://discord.gg/ExK7zwW

My group uses Roll20 for character sheets, dice rolling and background images. On those rare occasions where it helps to have a better idea of where everyone is in relation to each other we can drag our character icons out onto the tabletop and move them around. I also use the initiative tracker.

For audio chat we use Discord, which we have found much smoother than Roll20's built-in chat. Discord also serves as a place for OOC images and text chat, jokes and the like.

Discord is free, but in order to use Roll20's APIs (and therefore the dice roller) one person in the group will need a Pro account. That'll run you about $100 a year.

While I agree with most of what @Richardbuxton said, there are a few things I’d disagree with.

On 9/29/2018 at 6:02 AM, Richardbuxton said:

no  maps  or anyt  hi  ng

You can easily make a map using Google Draw and share a link to it, so your players can see it, and being Google it’ll auto update for them when you change something. It’s worked great for me in the past when I bothered with maps (I don’t use maps anymore, full theatre of the mind).

On 9/29/2018 at 6:02 AM, Richardbuxton said:

and  there’s no good character sheet option other than sharing pdf’s 

In all the games I play, each PC has their own character channel where they keep their character sheet. No need to export PDF and constantly upload a new one. Granted, it’s text-only and linear—only one column due to the chat-based nature of Discord—but it serves its purpose.

12 hours ago, c__beck said:

In  all the  games I play, each PC has their own character channel where they keep their character sheet. No need to export PDF and constantly upload a new one. Granted, it’s text-only and linear—only one column due to the chat-based nature of Discord—but it serves its purpose  .

Actually that’s exactly how we run it on my server too, but typing out an entire character can be tedious to some and isn’t exactly what people think of when they think of a character sheet so I didn’t mention it. I agree it’s actually the best option on Discord thought, especially with the dice/symbol emoji pack