Best Online Place to Play, Where should I set up? Options

[Khairn]

SR is a great game that gives the GM and players everything to play with including the kitchen sink When I've run games at my place its been "relatively easy to keep track of things. But now that I'm planning on running an online game I'm a bit lost as to which program or site to use.

PBP, IIRC, Skype, Wave, Obsidian Portal, VTT's and virtually every combination between them have all seen their fair share of SR games. So for those of you who have played SR online, which program offered you the best bang for your buck and why? Is there a steep learning curve to master, or is the challenge more in organizing the game than in running.

I'm not a noob when it comes to some of these methods of gaming, but I did want to know which you thought was best and why.

[Fatum]

I play in IRC, and so far it's been a blast.
There's a number of bots for dicerolling, including my own (which includes a function for quick stat lines generation), so everything's going pretty fluidly.

[Aku]

My vote, as far as a means of playing is going to be Maptools, found @ Rptools.net. It's free, open source, and really is a complete package at this point. IMO, version 1.3 development is wrapping out and is mostly bug free, and they're going to be starting on the next generation version (1.4) "Real Soon Now" which is going to basivcally be a complete re-write from the ground up.

[Squiddy Attack]

I play in Skype (via text, not voice chat). We've used a couple different sites for dicerolling (this one prevents cheating, and this one is made for Shadowrun). Skype's file-sharing is also nice.

[BishopMcQ]

For dice rolling with trackability (PbP etc) I recommend Invisible Castle. It allows you to roll dice, set TN for measuring Hits, etc, and give GMs the ability to search the rolling history to make sure that players aren't re-rolling until they get the numbers they wanted.

Virtual tabletops, I really like Infrno.net. It has VOIP, Video, shared tabletop, along with a Facebook style interface for character tracking, messaging, etc. It is one of the newer sites in the world and is going through their open beta right now.

[Hamsnibit]

my pals and i play via ts³ and use this tool for rolling. its made for shadowrun too and lists your rolls. personally i use it for extended tests only the good old platic D6 still do their job greatly and make this nice sound on my table too (IMG:style_emoticons/default/grinbig.gif)

[sunnyside]

I notice you had PbP in there first.

Now to be clear if you and your group have the time to regularly sit down for a few hours, than one of the realtime methods may be your best bet.

However if you cannot pull that off reliably, PbP can keep your game live and rolling.

It also has some advantages of its own, particularily for the GM.

-You get some time to think. In a realtime game your often thinking on the spot, that means you have to have worked out the details ahead of time, or you wind up ad libbing, which usually doesn't have as good an outcome as if you could take a minute.

-All the details are recorded right there, and are probably searchable. I have found this quite useful. It can be useful for players as well, allowing them to refresh their memory on plot stuff.

[Khairn]

Thanks for everyone's reply. Its interesting that despite the games technological and obvious "online" themes, that the there isn't a site more focused on providing an online gaming experience. I know SR is still a table-top RPG, and that's still my preferred way to play. But if any game should have an online way to play ... wouldn't you think it would be SR? Just wondering. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)