The Gaming Den

I was looking at free, virtual, table-top gaming software and came across Open RPG. I remember using it a long time ago so I'm sure it's changed quite a bit. I was going to use it for some strategy gaming so naturally there will be lots of unit pieces on the board.

http://www.rpgobjects.com/index.php?c=orpg

Any opinions about Open RPG or other table-top freeware?

Piece of crap.

Some of the worst user interface design known to man. The map usage is completely obtuse. The character sheet and scripting features are completely obtuse. Incredible bloat. I don't have a single nice thing to say about that program.

Of course, I only used it a long time ago too but by that point it was a dead project.

I found this site (http://www.rpgvirtualtabletop.com/vts.html) which has links to a lot of other programs.

Some don't support more than five players, others don't support custom character sheets, many require an activation fee in order to let others join from the internet, and overall I'm not really finding a whole lot of anything interesting.

I should probably state what I'm looking for in case anyone is curious...

Allows at least eight users (including GM)
Allows creation of custom character sheets.
Customizable grid features.
Customizable "figurines" or "tokens".
Map Creation, or someway to import a picture to be a map.
Dice rolling.

I know OpenRPG has all the above, but I don't know if there's a better program out there.

PCGen is nice, but very cumbersome if you want to think outside the box of the stuff they are allowed to use. No mapping system I've tried. Load times can be pretty annoying.

EDIT: didn't read the post above when I wrote this.

@Surgo

Yea the UI is pretty annoying at times. In the last version I used, the "grid" and "snap to grid" features kept falling out of sync if you zoomed in and out of the map.

I don't think I hated it as much as you, but it did have it's issues and who knows, maybe they have gotten fixed.

@Avoraciopoctules

No worries, I'll probably check it out anyway.

I haven't checked on them in years but the last time I checked they were a completely dead project. No development whatsoever. Somebody would have had to pick up the reins again for that.

My DM uses PCGen. It takes him forever to add stuff.

We tried using Open RPG, but it had some serious problems like 'you can only check if something is visible at the /end/ of movement.' or 'you have to write blind code for the characters, because there's no documentation of what scripting actually is.'

It's terrible.

I'd rather use Second Life. And it doesn't have any of these tools (mostly because good randomizers just got banned by the US government).

I don't get why this is so hard. All you need is a bitmap viewer that you can layer sprites on and let players move theirs around or point or draw. There's dozens of flash apps or java that do that. And then a chat window that you can 'spoof' text into with hideable layers - one again, many java or flash or whatnot have done that for decades. And a dice roller. There's hundreds of those in various html accessible versions.

Why are all the gaming ones such crap?

-Crissa

I use Openrpg for a few of the games and it works fine. There sometimes are issues when you get kicked out for no apparent reason, but that usually can be solved. It's a convenient interface by which players can have digital character sheets and auto roll some of their attacks, damage, skills, and whatnot.

Usually, we supplement it with a voicechat program.

Googlewave might be worth a try as soon as RPG-specific apps are written.

Maptools is the one I prefer to use.

Surgo wrote:Piece of crap.

Some of the worst user interface design known to man. The map usage is completely obtuse. The character sheet and scripting features are completely obtuse. Incredible bloat. I don't have a single nice thing to say about that program.

Of course, I only used it a long time ago too but by that point it was a dead project.

Well, the program *has* improved since a long time ago. New people *did* pick it up after it died, making OpenRPG+. For example, you can now drag-and-drop miniatures, unlike with the program the old people left to die.

Also, OpenRPG hides some features that most other similar programs just plain don't have. For example, you can stream music files in real time to everyone in the room (or set it to loop, or whatever) with a simple command. Thus, you could, for example, give your game a soundtrack.

I checked out Open RPG, It's easier to install than I remember and pretty familiar to me despite the changes. Pretty customizable for what I'm looking for and making new sheets should be simple. It doesn't come with much after installation so I would need to get/make everything.

Looked at kLoOge which has a particularly pretty demo. Unfortunately you need to pay to make new campaigns or make any other worthwhile adjustments to campaigns.

Looked at map tools, which looks particularly interesting in it's ability to add properties to tokens (miniatures/icons). Didn't fool around with it too much though. I'll look more at it later.

hogarth wrote:Maptools is the one I prefer to use.

Yeah, maptool is crazy good. If you want to take full advantage of it, you've got to learn the macro language, but the automation it's capable of is really amazing.

RandomCasualty2 wrote:

hogarth wrote:Maptools is the one I prefer to use.

Yeah, maptool is crazy good. If you want to take full advantage of it, you've got to learn the macro language, but the automation it's capable of is really amazing.

Thirded. The initial time investment in learning how it works can be a bit of a pain. However, the customization it offers is quite satisfactory and it's possible to pull off a lot of nifty automated stuff.

When I tried Maptool it was arguably as bad as OpenRPG. Who the fuck designs the user interface for these things? Is it the same guy who designed the Honda Element and the new Subaru Impreza?

Hey, the Honda Element is an awesome vehicle!

Surgo wrote:When I tried Maptool it was arguably as bad as OpenRPG. Who the fuck designs the user interface for these things? Is it the same guy who designed the Honda Element and the new Subaru Impreza?

If you can do better, then go make one. They're free, and I'm not seeing particularly better options out there. I for one am not expecting perfection out of freeware, and the programs work just fine once you learn how to use them.

Seriously. ORPG is an open project. So...

I can't program such a thing, but if I were designing the interface that someone else was going to program it would not be a shitty one.

I personally cannot throw a touchdown in the NFL, but that doesn't mean that my plan for throwing the touchdown is to run into the back of the endzone and take a knee.

That interface literally has no comprehensive system, and requires six plus steps to do even the simplest things.

Caedrus wrote:

Surgo wrote:When I tried Maptool it was arguably as bad as OpenRPG. Who the fuck designs the user interface for these things? Is it the same guy who designed the Honda Element and the new Subaru Impreza?

If you can do better, then go make one. They're free, and I'm not seeing particularly better options out there. I for one am not expecting perfection out of freeware, and the programs work just fine once you learn how to use them.

Seriously. ORPG is an open project. So...

What is this, bizarro-land where you're not allowed to be a critic anymore?

As a program, it's designed poorly, in that it has too many interface items which makes programming it horrible.

So I'm not sure how much of a branch you'd have to take...

-Crissa

I'll look more into maptools and see where that takes me.

Oh, on a side note... can you put math into character sheets for Maptools? Simple expression type stuff. Nothing too complex.

Dakira wrote:I'll look more into maptools and see where that takes me.

Oh, on a side note... can you put math into character sheets for Maptools? Simple expression type stuff. Nothing too complex.

I have no idea. I don't use it for character sheets, just for the map software.

Dakira wrote:I'll look more into maptools and see where that takes me.

Oh, on a side note... can you put math into character sheets for Maptools? Simple expression type stuff. Nothing too complex.

Well, Maptools doesn't exactly have Character sheets per se. What you have is tokens (miniatures) capable of storing data, which, if you're using the right macros, can store a character sheet.

And the amount of information they're capable of storing is rather amazing. It's pretty much possible to automate almost everything. You can have a macro that lets you select another token, make an attack roll, compare it to the AC, check concealment, roll damage and then apply that damage automatically.

The macro language is pretty much a mini programming language complete with branching statements, loops and methods to get and store input from the user.