OpenRPG?

PolletteIrieska

PolletteIrieska

I'm about to be moving five hours drive from my gaming group, which is a real pain, especially since it was short notice and I've been working up a Shadowrun campaign for them to go through.
I've been looking for methods to run the game online, and I ran across OpenRPG. Has anyone else used this program? What were your experiences with it? What game did you run and do you have any tips?

If you know of another way to do it (except IRC, I've already explored that possibility and it's still on my list) I'd love to hear some suggestions.

Micah

Speaking only secondhand here...

I've heard that if you have to game remotely (PbEM, PbP, IRC, whatever), the fewer rules, the better. It's a decent forum for collaborative storytelling and roleplay, but not so great for dice-rolling.

Anyways, good luck. My heart goes out to everyone without a good group nearby.

MythicParty

Pollettelrieska, another option is looking for a new group. Nothing really can compare to the social interaction of face-to-face gaming. Micah's blog has a nice list of sites to help you find fellow gamers:
http://blog.aisleten.com/category/lonely-gamer-protocol/#references

I myself am fond of one of the oldest online player registries: Access Denied. With 13,000 profiles, they’re worth including. http://accessdenied.net/ which had 12 players in the Fort Worth area:
http://www.accessdenied.net/cgi-bin/query.cgi?City=FORT+WORTH

Good luck.

Steve G.

FemmeLegion

I've been in three instances of "online gaming". One was an actual "online campaign" held over IRC. The other two times, most of us were in the same room and a few of us were remote. (It was PARTICULARLY interesting when the DM was remote, but I digress.)

One of those sessions we handled with an online client (I forget if it was OpenRPG or something else). The other session was handled via telephone (I was hosting most of the group, I had a speaker phone, and the remote DM had conference-calling capability to reach the other remote person.)

Both of the latter two were a pain in the butt to set up, but holy cow the telephone session went much more quickly and smoothly than either one I did on the computer. If you have a hands-free phone and a person in your group with a speaker phone, seriously look into it. No matter how fast a typist you are, you will never type faster than someone's urge to cut up or "multitask" while playing.

Joshuha

I use "Fantasy Grounds":http://www.fantasygrounds.com as a virtual tabletop software to DM my games. I have been using the product since 2005 and it really emulates the tabletop experience well when combined with a voice app like Ventrilo. I recently migrated my campaign information over to Obisidian Portal as well.

It is a pay once application but you do get heavy discounts for purchasing in bundles. As far as ease of use, graphics, and making the gameplay feel like a tabletop I think it far exceeds what openRGP can do. They have a demo on their site you can play around with (although its for the older version, the new FG2 version has a lot more features).