I have a bunch of friends who want to play but most of them live in different places. Does anyone know of good sites/resources for remote gaming? I know a friend who skypes in a remote player and they set up a webcam to look at the minis but that's only one player. All of mine except one would be remote and we're looking at 6 players. From previous experience with podcasts it seems that Skype has issues with quality once you get beyond four people on a call and that's with an audio-only conference.
I've heard that there are more D&D specific type tools to use and I'd like to try and experiment with several of them to see what works. Any help on this topic would be greatly appreciated.
Pretty much all you need.
Maptools/rptools at http://rptools.net/ are free and you can do anything you want in them.
There's also RPGTable Online, a free and easy to use virtual table with built-in voicechat so you don't even need skype. http://www.rpgtableonline.com/welcome.php
I'll second roll20. I've been running the Lost Mines of Phandelver with 3 people in Dallas, one in Atlanta, and one in Nashville, and it's been very good so far. It's pretty quick to pick up as a DM. The jukebox has been the biggest hit so far with my players, and I'd consider using it at an actual table game to add atmosphere easily.
My biggest complaint is trying to get a map to work that already has a grid drawn on it. They have a tool to help you align it to the Roll20 grid, but it's not perfect, and if you have a large map (like Tresandar Manor), good luck to you.
The built-in (community-designed) 5E character sheets are also not quite there for supporting all your class features. For example, even the Basic champion fighter is hard to play using the character sheets attack rolls, since rolls are only highlited as critical hits if they are natural 20s, and there is no way I've found to change that threshold. If you hover over your roll, it is technically possible to see each individual contributing modifier, but it's an arcane text bomb at best, and often only displays the first few numbers since it is at the bottom of the screen (getting cropped at the screen borders).
But overall, we're overcoming these minor annoyances to play an RPG once a week with old friends. Which is a lot better than staring at minis on my table with no players around to move them...
I third for Roll20.
I have a Mentor level subscription and the Dynamic Lighting is AMAZING! It's a ton of prep-work for the DM to lay on your wall borders, but the effect is sooooooooo worth it! It's pretty neat to set up a 30' light radius on a player and let people actually SEE what that looks like in a dungeon as they move around.
Yeah the 5E sheets need some tweaking, but it's a fantastic tool for remote gaming.
@MightyTeuton: You can just ignore the imbedded character sheets they provide and instead set up macros with in-line rolls in the Attributes section which you assign to a token action. Then all you need do is click on the token and all your macro buttons will come up.
For the maps, you'll want to crop the outer edge of the image where they often have "half squares." Then count the squares for width and height. Multiply those numbers by 70 to get the number of pixels, then Set Dimension on the map accordingly. Don't forget you can hold down Alt when position it so that the image doesn't snap to grid.
Fantasy Grounds is the best around if you want to pay for a premium product ($150 for the preimum edition that let's you have unlimited free players), but Roll20 is easier to use, cheaper and far-and-away the most popular - and starting to pass Fantasy Grounds in some areas.
Does anyone have any experience modifying any of these environments on the fly? I watched some tutorials on roll20 and it looked like unless you want to use one of their pregenerated maps that it would take a long time to set up your encounter. When I play a game in person I draw the location on a mat that allows me to use dry erase markers. This means that if my players go somewhere that I hadn't intended or turn somewhere that was supposed to be safe into a battle zone I can ad hoc a new location with my imagination in a minute or so. Do any of these tools allow for quick changes of that sort?
Define one of their pregenerated maps.
Yes, it can take quite a bit of time to completely draw a digital high-detail map of an area from scratch.
You can scribble it out with ease in roughly the same amount of time it would take to scribble it out on a battlemat if you use their drawing tools, or you can use the internet to find a map of the kind of thing you're looking for (random field, crossroads, inn, whatever) that someone else has already created.
Dastari wrote:
Dastari wrote:
Having a 15+ year background in AutoCAD, Campaign Cartographer is out-friggin-standing! For me, learning curve was super-easy, and I created my own homebrew world in it. Plus used a ton of free downloadable maps for various cities that I plotted out here at work on huge 30x42 paper.
Here's my continent I created back in 2000 using Campaign Cartographer. Forgive the lack of originality back then on the name. Too much Starship Troopers at the time. 
The unfinished areas in the North and West are lands yet to be explored by any parties I've ran.
Also if you're wanting a random dungeon, MythWeavers has something I've been using forever.
http://www.myth-weavers.com/generate_dungeon.php
It's 3.5 based in it's encounters, but I usually use it just for dungeon creation, and populate it with my own monsters/traps/encounters.
You can take a screen shot copy, go into MS paint, paste it there and trim it up, then insert the dungeon .JPG into Roll20 and snap it to fit their grids. Turn on Fog of War and start revealing it to your players as they go!
http://rptools.net is another option.
There were several excellent frameworks built for 4e, 5e has a couple but I haven't tried any of them out so can't judge for quality.
Major pro is that it's free and can accomplish everything roll20.net offers except video chat and soundbox. Also you can go buck wild script the heck out of it.
Major con is that you basically have to learn an easyish programming language to use it. That and someone always has problems getting Java to work right.
I'm currently using roll20 for live play, and rpol.net for play by post games.
Http://donjon.bin.sh
That site has a lot of useful tools, including random world generator, random dungeons, an inn generator, random name stuff, etc.