It seems my buddy will be moving about 400 miles away sometime next year, so I'll need to finally figure out how to run games online. I've never cottoned to the various game tools that are out there, but I've done a few solo sessions over Discord (which is apparently easy to add new dice to, so that's rad), and played a little bit of X-Wing: Heroes of the Aturi Cluster using Tabletop Simulator. That worked well enough.

I'm curious what sort of remote solutions people are using. We'll probably have myself and 2 others at the table, so I'll probably be using some sort of mix between high and low tech.

I've heard good things about fantasy grounds, but it requires the DM to pay for a subscription, but then the group gets access to everything afaik. I don't know if they have l5r stuff yet.

roll20 is a solid free option, though I don't know if they have l5r 5e yet either. They also hit some PR snags and some racey news came out about them. It's a solid platform but if you care about the folks that run companies then I'd advise looking the fiasco up before making a decision.

Other than that I've heard real good things about discord as a whole, especially with the the dice feature you've mentioned

So far Discord has worked more than well enough. There are bots for the dice roller, and a number of other useful tools (music bots, archive bots). It does take a little work to make it function, compared to tools designed to work automatically, but not that much (maybe 20 minutes of messing around with the dice roller, and making some channels, is the minimum).

My group has used Tabletop Simulator for a long time as a virtual table top. It's not specifically designed for RPGs like Fantasy Grounds is, but it does do a decent job of approximating the actual feel of sitting around a physical table. Also it has an extensive library of user created content. The downside is everyone needs to own a copy of TTS. Though you can also play board games using TTS. For voice I always use Discord or a Teamspeak server. We continue to use Teamspeak only because it's never given us any issues. It's hard to walk away from a program that's that reliable. Discord is also fine.

5 hours ago, phillos said:

My group has used Tabletop Simulator for a long time as a virtual table top. It's not specifically designed for RPGs like Fantasy Grounds is, but it does do a decent job of approximating the actual feel of sitting around a physical table. Also it has an extensive library of user created content. The downside is everyone needs to own a copy of TTS. Though you can also play board games using TTS. For voice I always use Discord or a Teamspeak server. We continue to use Teamspeak only because it's never given us any issues. It's hard to walk away from a program that's that reliable. Discord is also fine.

I've used TTS before, and I'd say my only problems are ones based on connectivity. It's a game, and commonly run through Steam (I don't know if it can be purchased separately), and as a result is affected by server downtime in a way that chat programs are not (because their ability to provide reliable up-time is literally a selling point). It has also crashed on me, and others, for some dumb reasons (it's just not the most stable game), like someone at my game using the table-flip option for the lulz.

That said, it does have excellent resources, and isn't too hard to use to make/upload your own. It's dungeon-making tools are also good, if a little clunky to use, and its drawing features are reasonable enough to mock together some area layouts, and mark where characters are (which can even be done with in-game models/cutouts).

On 12/21/2018 at 5:34 PM, Isawa Miyu said:

I've used TTS before, and I'd say my only problems are ones based on connectivity. It's a game, and commonly run through Steam (I don't know if it can be purchased separately), and as a result is affected by server downtime in a way that chat programs are not (because their ability to provide reliable up-time is literally a selling point). It has also crashed on me, and others, for some dumb reasons (it's just not the most stable game), like someone at my game using the table-flip option for the lulz.

That said, it does have excellent resources, and isn't too hard to use to make/upload your own. It's dungeon-making tools are also good, if a little clunky to use, and its drawing features are reasonable enough to mock together some area layouts, and mark where characters are (which can even be done with in-game models/cutouts).

That's why we keep using Teamspeak. It never goes down for us. If we needed to we could easily use some other dice roller if TTS goes down, but honestly the worst is we need to reconnect and load the last autosave on the TTS table (which is usually pretty close to where we were). You can shut off the flip table option.

Found this in the MapTool Forum.

https://forums.rptools.net/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=28057

Maptool is like roll20, but completely free. Used it for years to play Pathfinder.

On 3/23/2019 at 5:24 AM, Toppe said:

Found this in the MapTool Forum.

https://forums.rptools.net/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=28057

Maptool is like roll20, but completely free. Used it for years to play Pathfinder.

This is great free and powerful customizable software that incorporates many aspects of dundjini battlemap creation software and many of the whiteboard options of roll20. I used it extensively for in person grid mapping, but it also works remotely. I loved the fog of war, personal vision, and shadow effects (which are available on roll20 with a paid subscription plan). Major downside of maptools was that everyone needed the same version of the software and it wasn't as easy a learning curve compared to well supported subscription services (battlemap rpg, roll20, etc).

Personally I use a few different websites, most notable is a friends awesome massive site that is always growing, https://www.roleplaygateway.com is the link. The owner is a nice yet cryptic fellow yet the site is robust and tools are readily available, though you might need to ask him to maker a die roller for L5R and the like. {though we do have a custom die roller in the chat system}

Plus its free!

I use discord for voice and text chat. I.ja e used roll20 for maps.

Discord has a dice bot for it.