Tabletop Roleplaying Online

Of all my hobbies, tabletop roleplaying has to be my favorite. I know it immediately labels me as a hardcore geek or nerd or whatever you want to call it, but there it is. I’m not afraid to admit what I love.

Over the last 4 months, I’ve been running a D&D 3.5 edition game based on Monte Cook’s Ptolus setting. As I mentioned before, the game has been running online using 37 Signal’s Campfire and Basecamp apps. We’ve had 6 regular players who get together for around 4 evenings every other Saturday evening (early Sunday morning for me). It’s been a lot of fun.

This is the first game I’ve run online like this. So far, I think it’s gone very well. We use two chatrooms—one in character, one out of character. The pace can be slow sometimes as typing takes time and we sometimes have to wait for people to respond. We’re getting a little faster now, so if we’re in the midst of a dungeon crawl we can get threw 3 encounters in an session. The format and speed has forced me to make some changes to my game style. I do more preparation ahead of time (typing up descriptions I can just paste into the chatroom) and lowering the number of encounters, making sure each encounter is more important to the story, more dramatic.

Despite using a website and chatroom for running the game, I still haven’t been using any other software for the campaign. I’d love to find a decent cross-platform character generator that doesn’t have a horrible user interface (I’m looking at you PCGen ). I’ve been tempted more than once to write my own tools, probably based on Eclipse or Adobe AIR. If you are looking for software, there are some good lists online.

I think Wizard’s decision to provide tools for online tabletop gaming for 4th edition next year is one of the few Good Things to come out of the announcement. However, the quality of their current website has me a bit worried about any online tools WoTC plans on providing (the search on their forums has been turned off for over a year because they don’t know how to scale it for the size of their archives).

I’ll be taking a wait and see approach to 4th edition. I’m not particularly interested in re-purchasing many supplements, but if 4th edition turns out to be a good game on its own, then I’ll probably try it out. Though I’m just as likely to pick up a World of Darkness game or Shadowrun.