I miss my old roleplaying group.
Granted, we hadn’t been gaming as much in the past few years, and often went months at a time between sessions, but it’s one thing to say, “Hey, we should do some gaming some day,” and another to say, “Next time we’re back in Minnesota, we should really do some gaming.”
The odds are against it.
So I’ve been looking into “virtual tabletop” software. For those who are unfamiliar with the idea, it’s communication software that lets remote players share a “tabletop” (usually a map or whiteboard) for moving playing pieces on, and usually includes some sort of text-based chat so everyone can communicate. The fancier programs even have voice and/or webcam support, to really give you that feeling that you’re all sitting around the same table, rolling dice and munching Cheezy Poofs.
I tried out a handful of different programs (see the link above if you’d like to do so too). We ended up going with MapTool, which lets you import any image as a map (or a token) simply by dragging it onto the window. When you need a quick map or image or NPC, even while playing, you can hit Google Images and have what you need on your “tabletop” in seconds.
I strongly recommend MapTool for all your VT needs. I found only two small drawbacks with the program:
1) You can’t dynamically resize the tokens. If you need to make something bigger or smaller, you have to right click on it and select the size from a drop-down menu.
2) You can’t have multiple maps loaded at once. And when you change maps, there’s no easy way to bring all the player tokens to the new map. (Actually, I suspect there are tricks and workarounds for this issue, but haven’t had the time to dig through the forums and see what people are working on.)
For communication, we all used Skype. It’s great for voice communication (of course) but also has a chat feature that also lets you pass documents to everyone on the conference call. There’s no easier way to remotely hand out the handouts.
