giving in

[reverancepavane]

It's actually getting pretty tempting to get something like Fantasy Grounds II to run games over the network. Much as I like face-to-face gaming, it's getting more and more difficult to get people face-to-face to meet (or maybe it's just me). And I haven't had a decent old-fashioned dungeon crawl in such a long time. <grin> Is anyone interested? Besides, creating the modified rulesets required to run a lot of my games looks fairly trivial in this system.

Comments

[maelorin]

i'd be interested to try this out.

[zogwarg.livejournal.com]

Hack & slash? Online sounds interesting.
Admittedly, face-to-face works better for me.
I can usually pick up when to run from subtle physical cues not evident in the online environment...

[scurvy-platypus.livejournal.com]

Personally, I looked at Fantasy Grounds and was left feeling pretty bleh by it.

If you're wanting some sort of virtual tabletop that's going to enforce game rules, then it's not a bad way to go. Just make sure you're up on your coding, because you're going to have to try and code up the game rules yourself, unless it's d20.

And there isn't documentation for it last time I looked. Users have posted bits in the forums, but nothing official.

It's possible that FG2 doesn't suffer from these problems now, but last I saw it was d20 and Savage Worlds only.

If you're wanting something basic and straight forward, it's hard to go wrong with Map Tool:
http://rptools.net/doku.php?id=maptool:intro

They've got some other handy bits too, including a token maker and a dice roller.

If you want to go _fancy_ then I'd look at Battlegrounds:
http://www.battlegroundsgames.com/

Both Battlegrounds and Map Tool are "system neutral". They're an interface to display a map and have folks move around on it. So they don't have Character Sheets or restrictions on how people can move and so forth.

Battlegrounds has some really nice and slick options. Of course, having a good map makes a big difference too. It's a bit pricey though, unless you don't mind having folks get booted every 45 minutes using the demo.

Something that's cheaper would be Screenmonkey:
http://www.nbos.com/products/screenmonkey/screenmonkey.htm

Honestly though, I'd say Map Tool is going to be more satisfying than Screenmonkey. Screenmonkey I thought was ok, but the development is really slow, and I felt that it just wasn't worth the money compared to Map Tool (free) or Battlegrounds (pricier, but nifty gee-gaws).

[reverancepavane.livejournal.com]

One of the reasons that I liked Fantasy Grounds was the existence of the rule sets. It seems like fairly standard Lua scripts combined with XML definitions of objects. The only problem being the clumsiness of the database handling the objects and the amount of Lua interpreter they have incorporated. One nice possibility I think is hiding much of the game mechanics in a custom ruleset. It's an idea that appeals to me. And it certainly beats using the Torque or Panda engine to create my own system, which was something I was contemplating. Admittedly this would have the advantage that it could be highly asynchronous, although on reflection, it would be more of a disadvantage. Then again, an interesting project some of us were contemplating some years ago was converting a lot of our older stuff into Neverwinter Nights dungeons. I stopped when I realised that I was attempting to create a full-fledged AI through the scripts by covering almost ever opportunity. Not something the engine was designed for. My big problem is that I can't draw for peanuts. Well, that's actually a lie, but then I've spent the last few years associating with professionals in digital media, which leaves my work in invidious comparison.