Except I'd really want to play with them, and I'm always the DM for our group. And I know the most about the setting out of everyone. And no one else wants to DM.
So we're stuck. We need outside help. So I'm hoping someone in the forum community would like the run for us.
We're looking to run once every two weeks, just to keep the schedule nice and open. Since we're going to play online, we're planning on using mIRC. If we end up using a gametable it needs to be cross-platform since the group is mixed among pcs and macs.
We're all in our mid-twenties, so we're not shy about mature themes. If you want a rundown of our characters:
Daren M. Contheil: Half-elf Fighter multiclass Warlock. He's a 4e conversion of a Hexblade character I used to play. He can curse an opponent once/encounter, and is a great weapon fighter using a maul. He has a cat familiar named Cassy. He has a tragic past that he's actually accepted and dealt with, and is currently a rather well-adjusted individual. However, he adventures to find a way to gain control over Fate, considering it too capricious for his tastes. He's also a ladies man, or a womanizer, depending on how well he rolls his Bluff check to seduce said ladies.
Lexiss "Windstriker": Human. She's going to be a conversion of a Duskblade/Swashbuckler. Right now my friend is leaning toward Assault Swordmage. She's actually a scion of House Cannith, but never developed a dragonmark. Growing up, she became increasingly bored with the foppish life of her upper-crust parents. They gave her fencing and magic lessons with expensive tutors to try and satisfy her need for excitement, but she grew bored of rigid studies and sparing matches. So she adopted the name of "Windstriker" and became and adventurer to have some real excitment. She's also engaged in some questionable activities, like cat burglary, just for fun and to see if she could get away with it.
(My friend plans on her developing the Siberys Mark of Making, whenever that becomes available.)
As for my second friend, he's made two Eberron characters and I'm not sure which one he'll want to play. He's already played one and never got to play the other. The one he did play, Fritz, was a longstrider shifter spellthief in 3e. We'd thought it'd be fun to update him as a razorclaw shifter warlock in 4e, and flavor him as being a "pact thief". That is, whichever pact he ends up choosing, he's actually stealing the power from the patron, instead of making a deal with it. This could lead to interesting hooks. Like if he picks Infernal pact, there could be some angry devil on his tail wanting the power back.
His other character is the one he never played, Gabriel. He was going to be a Daelkyr Half-Blood. I'm not sure what class he was going to pick with him, but he liked the idea of being kinda crazy. If you're okay with it, I've actually written a conversion of the Half-Blood for 4e, called the Foul One.
You can find it here.
Well, I guess that's all the pertinent information. I hope to hear from someone!
Good luck, though. Online D&D play is the primary method by which I've stayed in contact with my old gaming group for almost a year now
. I recommend using MapTool for your game - http://rptools.net/ - it's Java-based, so it'll run on Windows, Macs, and Linux. You might also spring for some sort of voice chat, like a Ventrilo server or something. Ventrilo+MapTool is the setup we use, and it works great.I've heard a lot about maptools and I was thinking of getting into it. Is it easy for players? I don't think I'd want to bog my friends down in learning the ins and outs of a program for a biweekly game. We'd be more inclined to just "wing it" in a chatroom.
It's not hard to get into as a player, and I believe there are a number of tutorials teaching DMs how to start using the program.
There's a lot of depth to the program, and it's likely that you'll just use it in a very simple fashion at first - set up a map, place tokens on it to represent monsters, drag them around, and type things like "/roll 1d20+14" or "/roll 3d6+4" into the chat room to handle die rolls. At that point, it's already pulling its weight, in my opinion - it's duplicating all of the functionality you'd get with a regular kitchen table and some minis.
Over time, you can pick up on more of the deeper features like programming macros (my paragon tier character has a dozen or so buttons I can click on to automatically roll attacks and damage for his various powers), placing conditions on tokens (we have a set of icons set up for our tokens so we can right-click on them and tag them as Bloodied, Dazed, taking Ongoing Psychic, etc.) and even lighting and fog of war.
I posted in gamer classifieds too, but that post only got a third of the views this one did and no one responded.