A group of friends and I used to play SR back in the SR2 days. We were all in high school and would get together at my place.

Fast forward to today. Most, if not all of my SR buds have moved out of the city or out of state. While the advent of text messages, email and IM make communicating with them easy, it makes SR near impossible.

I'd love to start GMing again, and budget a few hours a week that everyone can get on their computer and play SR.

My question: Does anyone know of any good web-based collaboration software that would allow us to come together virtually and play SR?

Ideally, I'd like a chat screen, some sort of workspace where I could display schematics/pictures/documents and maybe even a whiteboard so players could scrawl over floorplans, etc.

I'm welcome to any ideas.

Open Rpg is quite good, what I use mostly for when I run online. Has a nice chat bit with dice rolling function and a whiteboard where you can upload maps/minis/etc..
www.openrpg.com

EDIT: MUHAHAHAHA Don't have much problems with the chat interface myself but then again each to their own.

OpenRPG is perfect for that. The chat interface wasn't topnotch, but what my WoD group was use OpenRPG for the mechanical stuff, and aimchat (or whatever IM client you use) for the RP.

EDIT: Beat me to it, Tobias.

In a pinch, and chat program works if it has a dice roller script (such as IRC), and you can use any picture hosting site for maps and such, and simply paste the link into chat.

Thanks guys. Any idea if it'll work with Vista?

I think it just runs through Python so if you can get the latest python which works with vista it should work however I'm on an XP Set up atm.

I loaded up OpenRPG. This program looks pretty sweet. Are there any SR modules for it?

No modules per-say. However I know at least on the mayhem gaming server you can use /dieroller sr4 and then it sets all dice into a nice format when you roll them and show how many hits.

Don't forget utilizing a voip chat program makes things go alot faster because there is no chat-type to read.
I prefer Ventrillo, but there is teamspeak as well.

Skype is what we use for Backgammons game.

There's a lot of free stuff that will get the job done. The best stuff has been mentioned already in this thread. But if your friends are willing to throw up 15-20 bucks each, yall can get a real good program for online Shadowrun with Fantasy Grounds II. It is designed for d20, but don't let that fool you. It can support any game that uses words and dice.

It meets all of your requirements and then some: built in chat/3d tossable dice, display of images/maps including tokens you (or your players) can create and import and a snap-to grid, Draw function to take a free-hand to any of your displayed images/maps, an initiative tracker to remember who goes after who and to announce who's currently up, quickdice macros to store frequently rolled dice at the bottom, cone/AOE shading for cone-based weapons or grenades, and it works fine with Vista (tested as Vista client and/or host).

It is a great program if you're willing to spend some cash. You can reskin it's fantasy atmosphere into something a bit more modern also. With a map-making program like Dunjinni you can really pump out some professional-lookin online jobs (though I find I don't often have time to regularly do the nice maps). My players and I are enjoying it a lot.

Here is a demo screen just to show ya, no one is connected and no game is in progress:

http://usera.imagecave.com/Raij/FGshadowrun.JPG

edit: It looks sorta cluttered because it's on my work laptop with low resolution, normal monitors have more than enough room

Wow.. that rocks..

Add in another vote for OpenRPG. Ive been using it for 3 or 4 years now I think, best thing evar if you cant get a live group.


/dieroller sr4 works no matter what server youre connected to.

I use IRC chat. Friends and I tend to hang out in an IRC channel, when we game we join an IC channel and use the hangout as an OOC channel. I used pircbot as a base to craft a dice bot. The bot handles a variety of game dice ranging from standard dice rolls, to savage worlds dice and cards to more importantly, shadowrun. For my irc client I use mirc.

If you happen to want a copy of my bot, the Funkagroovitalizer, message me. It's a bit of a work in progress for a few things. I haven't really added an init sorter for shadowrun, however, for the games it works nice.

Dashifen is working on a web-based chat platform designed specifically for Shadowrun.

Details HERE.