Virtual Tabletop

As some of you may know, I'm an avid tabletop RPG gamer and GM most of all. For most of my life, since my late teens, I have been playing RPG:s at least once a month with an average of perhaps 2,5 times a month.

Lately however our main group have gotten a lot of scheduling conflicts, and we haven't really had a good place to play for almost 2 years. The only place we had was at the home of the guy with the least time to play. All these things and more have conspired, and so far we have played 3 or 4 games this year. I have been playing with another group as well, but we have had the difficulty of great distance between all the players, and the guy in the most remote location not owning a car or license to drive.

All this let us to try our hands at virtual tabletop gaming. We chose roll20.net as the platform because it's totally cross platform, and requires no installation. We decided to use our mumble server for voice, as the roll20 video chat is pretty spotty at times. We still use it for video however. At first the whole thing was kind of awkward, but it worked well enough. But as we got more used to it, GM:ing games on roll20 is almost easier than the old-fashioned way.

Of course the whole thing loses a lot compared to everyone sitting at a table together, in the same way as playing computer games over the internet is different from doing it at a LAN. But my reasoning is that if it allows you to play when you otherwise wouldn't be able to, I'm all for it.

There are still a few kinks with the whole experience that I have yet to figure out. One is character sheets, at the moment I have all the sheets and make all the changes and then I scan it in and share it on BitTorrent Sync (used to do it on Dropbox, which works fine, but has space limitations). roll20.net have character sheet support, but it's quite basic and difficult to manage. I figured I might do one of my own that would work both as an online system, and to design paper sheets.

Another one is the music. This is a quite small thing, but it would be nice if everyone could hear the same music. I suppose you could do a really nasty hack in mumble, but speex isn't the codec you want to transmit music over. I have been thinking about some sort of icecast server that I could manage somehow. I have to look into it more at some point.

Anyway, if someone is thinking of starting to play virtual tabletop games, definitely look into roll20.net. And if you like it, donate some money to them. It's a great project. And feel free to comment on this post if you have any ideas or questions.