Farcaster
Monday 01-29-2007, 10:41 AM
I find myself in an interesting situation--gaming wise, that is. In the next couple of months, I'll be packing up and moving from Dallas and on my way out to Seattle. There are a ton of gamers out there, and I definitely plan on starting up or joining a group once I'm there. But, the campaign I am running is far from over, and my players and I definitely want to finish it. So, we've been exploring ways that we can keep the game going even after I leave.
The plan is that they will all still get together at our usual gaming location, and I will run the game from my home computer. We're going to hook up a quality webcam and mic at both ends and video conference using a tool like Skype (http://www.skype.com/). Our normal gaming room has a large screen TV, so they're actually going to run a s-video cable from one of the player's laptops to the TV which will make it easy for everyone to see me. I'll also have a pretty good view of the players. Being able to see each other is critical to the success of the game in my mind, since so much is lost when you take out the component of body language and facial expression.
Of course, one of the biggest problems we will run into is combat situations. We've been using a grid map and miniatures at our games for years, and we don't want to start trying to manage combat without it. I also don't want to have to try to describe how to move the baddies around on the board King-to-Rook-Four chess style. Ideally, I'd like to have a tool that will let me scan in a map and then have a virtual table-top that the group and I can use.
A google search yielded two excellent candidates - KloOge (http://www.kloogeinc.com/) and OpenRPG (http://www.openrpg.com/). OpenRPG is completely free and open source. Klooge on the other hand is a commercial product, albeit very reasonably priced. I downloaded and tried both of them, and thus far, I'm pretty sold on Klooge. Both had far more features than I was ever looking for, actually. Both have the capability to handle almost all of the D&D rules AND a number of other systems as well. I probably won't use anything past the interactive player map (and the cool fog-of-war feature Klooge has), but I was impressed at how far Internet gaming had come from the days of using dice-bots and trying to run a game over IRC.
I'm saddened to be leaving my gaming group behind, but I'm excited about the possibility of being able to still game with them even though more than a thousand miles will separate us. Anyone else here ever tried something like what my group is planning on doing, or running a full fledged game using one of these tools? I'm interested to hear what your experiences were, and any advice you might have.
The plan is that they will all still get together at our usual gaming location, and I will run the game from my home computer. We're going to hook up a quality webcam and mic at both ends and video conference using a tool like Skype (http://www.skype.com/). Our normal gaming room has a large screen TV, so they're actually going to run a s-video cable from one of the player's laptops to the TV which will make it easy for everyone to see me. I'll also have a pretty good view of the players. Being able to see each other is critical to the success of the game in my mind, since so much is lost when you take out the component of body language and facial expression.
Of course, one of the biggest problems we will run into is combat situations. We've been using a grid map and miniatures at our games for years, and we don't want to start trying to manage combat without it. I also don't want to have to try to describe how to move the baddies around on the board King-to-Rook-Four chess style. Ideally, I'd like to have a tool that will let me scan in a map and then have a virtual table-top that the group and I can use.
A google search yielded two excellent candidates - KloOge (http://www.kloogeinc.com/) and OpenRPG (http://www.openrpg.com/). OpenRPG is completely free and open source. Klooge on the other hand is a commercial product, albeit very reasonably priced. I downloaded and tried both of them, and thus far, I'm pretty sold on Klooge. Both had far more features than I was ever looking for, actually. Both have the capability to handle almost all of the D&D rules AND a number of other systems as well. I probably won't use anything past the interactive player map (and the cool fog-of-war feature Klooge has), but I was impressed at how far Internet gaming had come from the days of using dice-bots and trying to run a game over IRC.
I'm saddened to be leaving my gaming group behind, but I'm excited about the possibility of being able to still game with them even though more than a thousand miles will separate us. Anyone else here ever tried something like what my group is planning on doing, or running a full fledged game using one of these tools? I'm interested to hear what your experiences were, and any advice you might have.