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

RPTools, definitely.

[traveller-blues.livejournal.com]

I've recently started a D&D 4e game, and I'm using RPTools as the user interface. The connection problem depends on what your internet connection is like, but since my game's a sitdown, I'm using the LAN connection setup, which works just fine.

The best thing to do is import a map from another tool (right now I'm using Dungeon Tiles as my drawing tool, which a lot of the 4E community seems to use), and screenshotting the finished map to pull into MapTools. From there, you just adjust Maptools' grid to match the grid on the Dungeon Tiles screenshot, and there you go.

So far, I've run one half session with the tool, and I love it. Tokens can be set up with visual ranges and line of sight, so that I put critters behind bushes and inside tents, and they didn't see the ambush coming. I use the drawing tool to make splash effects from spells, halo critters to show special effects (blue=slow, pink=asleep) and it even has a built in initiative tracker that shows who is next.

The reason I can't seem to connect to outside servers has to do with the way our home setup is through a Linux box with IP sharing, but most folks ought not to have that problem.

-Trav

Re: RPTools, definitely.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Got a link for Dungeon Tiles? It, er, is pretty hard to do a Google search and not come up with a lot of general dungeon tilesets. };)

Re: RPTools, definitely.

[traveller-blues.livejournal.com]

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dnd/20061121t

Use the downloadable version, turn it to Freeform mode, and have fun. It takes a little bit of time to get used to the controls.

-Trav