Help Campaing via Skype

[Mentol]

Hi,

I am thinking about starting a campaing with some friends, and since I am living in a different city, we would try to do it via skype, all of them together in one place and me in another.

It is the first time that we try that, and I will be the Dungeon Master (furthermore, a complete newbie Dungeon Master :smalleek:). I am somehow concerned about the combat, since I am not sure how could we organize that so it is not a complete chaos. I thought about some kind of program that would allow me to create some maps in advance and then update them during the combat with the position of the characters and share it "live" with my friends.

Is there something like that? (or any other kind of solution you may think about)

Thanks!

[Telonius]

I've DM'd a remote campaign before. (We used oovoo instead of Skype, but it's a similar setup). Fortunately the player that was in my city had an external webcam. Everybody else had their webcams on them. My webcam was pointed towards me, until the party got into combat. Then, I just pointed it down at the big battlemat. We did have minis. I used one of those big pads of one-inch graph paper, and used markers instead of pencils. (Black marker was visible over the webcam, but pencil wasn't). The players would direct me where to move their minis.

It worked out really well. Wasn't quite the same as actually being there in person, but it wasn't much more chaotic than a normal session would have been.

[Hunter Noventa]

We do exactly this with our campaigns, and we use GameTable (http://gametableproj.sourceforge.net/) to take care of map issues. it allows you to create maps, save them, load them, etc. Everyone just connects to the map and can move their characters (not to mention create their own counters), measure distances, put down spell effects, etc. it requires java, but it works fairly well for the most part.

[Larkas]

I've read some positive reviews on Fantasy Grounds (http://www.rpgnow.com/product/2633/Fantasy-Grounds-II---Full-License?it=1&filters=0_0_2300_0), you might want to check that out.

[Mentol]

Thank you, guys!

That is the kind of things I was thinking about. :smallbiggrin: