Hi All;

A little background:

My regular gaming group does not like to play Shadowrun as they don't like the fact that there are no levels and you "don't get stronger". I live in a rural area and it's an hour drive, minimum, to get to a larger city. I have some friends (no, really I do!) who are willing to play, but are hours of driving away.

My question:
Has anyone played Shadowrun (or any tabletop RPG) by Skype or an online gaming table (I've heard that Google has one, but I haven't checked it out)? How did it work? Was it very awkward? If I were to set something like this up, what are some things I would need to do and/or know? Tell all! Tell all!

Thanks in advance for your help.

<edit to correct grammar>

I've remote gamed with several groups, using Skpe, and a few "virtual tabletops". It's different.

First the biggest pro is the ability to come together when you are apart. That's the difference b/w gaming and not gaming for me. I don't have a local gaming group. So that's a huge, huge plus.

The biggest con is the remaining separation. It's easier to get drawn out of the group dynamic than if you are in the same room.

In my opinion, those are the defining factors for remote gaming. If you can keep everyone involved, interested, and excited during the game session, you've overcome the obstacles. working out a detail like what dice-rolling mechanism to use is secondary.

None of my Shadowrun games lasted more than 4 sessions, but we had a DnD game go over a year.

Are you looking for players?

Thorguild

I have been running games for over 2 years now...almost weekly using this method. Things take a little longer, and it can be harder to explain things since you can't just draw a picture. However, it makes it far easier to have private discussions mid sessions, ideal for paranoid type settings.

I use vent for communication and an old version of AIM(yeah) for its die-roller feature. To share pictures we have started using a private facebook group.

I might be interested in playing in a Skype game if people are looking to put one together. Also, there are several people/groups that are discussing Skype games over on the other Shadowrun forums, forums.shadowrun4.com

I've had some success with Roll20. Handy combination of image sharing (in a "collaborating on a document" sense, not a shared Dropbox folder sense), built-in voice chat and a die roller feature. Signup is required, but it's free to use. The only downside/wish-I-had feature for me personally is that it doesn't have a persistent file sharing area, but a Google or Dropbox share is easy enough to set up.

I've run games on Infrno with great success. There's a virtual tabletop, text chatting (group and private), and webcam feeds for video and voice. It takes a small amount of work to upload pictures and maps before the game gets started, or you can do it in progress.

We have been playing with remote players for nearly 5 years now. Typically we have 3 or 4 players that come to my house and 1 or 2 players that dial-in via Skype. I have a paid Skype account so that we can have multiple video chat going at one time (you could also try oovoo which is free and supports multi-video for free). This set up has worked well for us.

The remote player(s) do sometimes feel a little out-of-the-loop, but that is usually easy to work around.

Because the minority of our players are remote, in my house we use a central workstation connected to a large TV so the remote players see the whole living room, and we see a nearly life-sized head on the screen. When the GM draws something for us all to see one of us carries it over to the central camera and holds it so that the remote player(s) can see it and explains what’s going on. This does slow things a little sometimes, but for us the game is as much about friends getting together as it is about playing a game so the slow-down isn’t a big deal.

We use the honor system for dice rolling, our remote player(s) use dice and report the results, I use a dice program on my tablet, the GM uses software as well for dice, and my Wife uses dice. We all use Skype text messaging for “passing notes”. It has worked quite well for us.

Has anybody tried using Google Hangout for a game?

I haven't, unfortunately. Roll20 has some kind of integration with it, though, so hopefully that's a good sign.

Thanks, All! Great stuff! Keep the good ideas coming.

I've played with both Fantasy Grounds and d20Pro, while the games them selves were sucessful the groups broke up due to RL.

I've been in on one game. It worked well for some people and less well for others. I think the main problems were ad-blockers, script blockers, flash blockers, and anti-tracking programs. I don't think we found a way to run the game if anything like that was even partially running.

An advertising company wanting all of our information isn't really a surprise, though.