After some gaming at Gencon some of my far flung friends and I decided we wanted to continue to play some D&D (in this case 4e) online. I, as the DM, have been looking for ways to play online. Here are some of the ways that I’ve found so far.
Maptools
Maptools is a great tool, with a pretty decent learning curve. I’ve watched a number of tutorials, and we tried to get it working. It worked for 4 of the 5 people we were trying to game with, but not every time. We really don’t want to deal with all the technical details, particularly because the game is going to be a “West Marches” style game, and won’t have the same group every week. We need something simple and easy to use.
Resources for Maptools
RPTools Tutorials: A site with some great video tutorials on MapTools. Really helped me start to get my feet wet with all these tools.
Maptool Education Central: OnlineDM has a number of posts on using Maptool. I found links to a lot of map resources through his website.
Rumble’s 4E Framework: Rumble, a user on rptools forums has created a framework for 4e and maptools. There is a lot of features available here, but I’ll admit, I’m a little overwhelmed with it all. I have a feeling my group will start using maptools more as a glorified map, and later on begin using some of the other capabilities of this framework.
Infrno
Infrno looks like what we are interested in to play, but it’s not going to be free forever. Instead we went with a slightly different setup.
Goggle + Hangouts
For our communication, we are going to use google + hangouts. We had no problems with the technical aspects of google+, and it seems like there are a number of people out there trying to figure out how to use google + effectively to play RPGs.
Twiddla
Twiddla is a free whiteboard website. The only problem with it is that I can’t prepare maps ahead of time, but I do really like the ease with which I can have players join the whiteboard. There’s no log in, no sign up necessary. All I need to do is share the link when I create a whiteboard. It works well with tokens created for maptools as well. It has a grid, that will be helpful since we play 4e.
Google Documents and Google Groups
We are going to keep all our campaign documents on a google documents and communicate through google groups.
Other Resources and Links
Reasons and Resources for Playing D&D Online: Amazing list by DM Samuel of online tools and links to programs that can be played online. Wow!
We’re going to try again next week after our failures with Maptools, we’ll see how it goes this week!
North of Nowhere 
I use Map Tools for my on-line gaming, and it works a treat, but it does require some work before hand to get the full use out of it. I keep thinking about trying out Google+ and the whiteboard, might give it a go.
I think we’re going to try again this weekend, I’ll make sure to post a detailed review of how it goes. I think the whiteboard might fit in better with my DM style, which is to DM a bit more off the cuff than have detailed plans, which I think maptools encourages (but does not require).
Yep, I’m definitely a big MapTool fan. My Friday night game has been going strong for over a year, and MapTool has worked like a charm. I even use it to run games in-person with a projector at the table. Good luck with your game, whatever tools you use!
Your website was really helpful for us getting maptools up and running, sadly though we could never get everyone able to connect at the same time. We followed some of the problem solving steps on the maptools forum, but couldn’t get everything to work.
It looks like a great program, though. Those who could connect were really enjoying it. One guy spent the two hours we were working on getting other people connected making macros for his character. We’ll probably try it again, but with the fact that we have over 12 people in our extended group, and the actual adventuring party is going to change every week, something that’s a lot simpler (like opening up a website) I think makes sense in the short term.