Virtual gaming table recommendations?

[tuftears]

As some of you may know, jordangreywolf ran the first Avatars campaign a couple years ago. It was fun, and great to get the gang back together.

Avatars was the most popular virtual reality game of the 2060s - a game in which children and adults would create their own avatars, imaginary friends that they could take on quests in a virtual world overlaid upon the real world. That changed in 2065, when a series of brutal murders culminated in a reality-shattering explosion in their California park on the eve of its grand opening, and Avatars was shut down for weeks. People told strange stories of holes opening up from reality into VR, of falling into the strange worlds of the Diadem, or being attacked by monsters that had somehow escaped into the modern world. But how much of it really happened? Only a few people know, and they're not telling.

Now I'm looking at running the follow-up for the group. But one thing that Greywolf did for the first campaign was to illustrate battles by providing JPGs with a map and players (and NPCs) placed on a grid on the map, giving everyone a good idea where exactly they were. That's something I'd like to do for this campaign as well, but it seems to me like there must be a better way than making maps in MS Paint, saving, and uploading them repeatedly.

A little Google-fu brought me here, a list of "virtual tables". I investigated a couple, but I'd like to know if anyone's tried any of these and what their opinions are.

Here's what I looked at:

RPGTonight. Web-based, hooking into standard forum software.

Pro: players wouldn't have to buy or download a client to use it.
Con: ugly interface, slow response.

RPTools. Required download or Java Webstart launch.

Pro: client responds quickly, looks pretty good
Con: drawing controls are primitive (freeform line, straight line, rectangle, oval)

I haven't yet verified if my players are going to be able to use RPTools yet, but it seems like there'd be a definite learning curve.

I'd definitely prefer that players don't have to pay for client software. It's almost tempting to implement a virtual table of my own... But having played with RPTools a bit, I can see there are a bunch of features that would be nice, yet would greatly increase the 'all you have to do is move pieces around a map, right?' implementation time.

So what about you guys, have any of you tried a virtual gaming table?

Comments

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

That's a bad sign!

Firewalls?

[rowyn]

That might've been it. It was almost a year ago so I don't remember what we tried by way of debugging. Since Terry and I were the most motivated regarding making it work, i kinda felt like if it wasn't easy for us, we weren't going to get the rest of the group going with it.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Well, that's sad to hear. I really, really hoped this sort of thing would work.

[rowyn]

Tufty got it to connect to other people, so maybe it was just a firewall problem for us. And maybe Tufty will come up with a good solution for the virtual gaming table issue overall. =) I would love to have something more functional than a Google spreadsheet.