No longer will we need play-by-posts!

[miz redavni]

roll20 (http://roll20.net/)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=DXXXFsjUDVI

My god this is cool. Me and a friend have been screwing around with it. It's simply amazing, full voice and video chat support, draw whatever you want, soundtrack customization, full internet image search built in, fog of war, HP bars, put sounds that will trigger off something, just wow...

If anyone wants to make a campaign with this let me know! I want to join! This is just..... Wow....

[Eldan]

Hm. Honestly, it doesn't look like it would offer much to me that Skype and an online dice roller wouldn't (that's what I use currently). That said, I can see the appeal to those who use battlemaps.

Also, I don't think PbPs will die out any time soon. For me, good PbPs are basically an entirely different genre of game. I haven't had any really good ones on these boards, I think, but with a good cast of players, a good DM and a fast pace, they are not only a lot of fun, they are also quite different from chat or RL games: people write long texts. There is more space to describe things, from the player and the DM side. In some PbPs, players spell out their thoughts, as in a novel, which I have never seen done in a table game. They are basically the shared novel to a table game's shared theatre.

[Psyren]

I like it - I wonder how it stacks up against Infrno?

[Tengu_temp]

What Eldan said. PbP games are a completely different creature from real time ones, with a different set of strengths and weaknesses.

[Prime32]

Yeah, stuff like this has been around a loooooong time.

I enjoy PbP. I suck at chat games. And I don't want to show off my face online. So this would be significantly worse for me.
Not to mention voice chat has problems when your players are from all over the world and each have thick accents.

[maglag]

Yeah, stuff like this has been around a loooooong time.

I enjoy PbP. I suck at chat games. And I don't want to show off my face online. So this would be significantly worse for me.
Not to mention voice chat has problems when your players are from all over the world and each have thick accents.

+1 to me on all accounts.

Not to mention the base problem of geting everybody in at the same time. Not fun at all to have to wait all night long until the guy in the other side of the world logs on.

[Maxios]

Yeah, stuff like this has been around a loooooong time.

I enjoy PbP. I suck at chat games. And I don't want to show off my face online. So this would be significantly worse for me.
Not to mention voice chat has problems when your players are from all over the world and each have thick accents.

I agree. Filly filly filly filler of +1 filling

[Flickerdart]

This is basically MapTool with the added disadvantage that you have to look at people and, by the looks of it, no tooltips.

[shadow_archmagi]

Personally, I prefer Gametable over Maptool (Because everyone can draw on the map, thus meaning that when out of combat the players inevitably create a tapestry detailing their heroic misadventures)

But yeah, people who sign up for play-by-posts aren't saying to themselves "Man, I really want to play D&D, but none of my friends live nearby so this is clearly the only way to play on the internet!"

They're signing up for the advantages of PbP (Both the DM and players can devote minutes or hours to what they're doing, or even wait a day to mull things over, rather than in a real-time game where you'd have about ten seconds before it's considered a long awkward silence) and also to escape the disadvantages of chat-based D&D (Dealing with timezones and work schedules to get everyone together, connectivity issues, etc)

[Rallicus]

Sick of hearing about this VTT honestly. It has yet to impress me.

The voice and video addition is alright, I guess, but can just as easily be accomplished by doing a "pop out" window in a Skype video conference. The only thing that really appealed to me was the addition of music and sounds, but when I found out you can only use soundcloud I lost interest immediately.

The supposed 100mb image limit is discouraging, given the fact that there's no limit in Maptool (as far as I know). However, this can be bypassed by a "premium service" in the near future, which I'm guessing is a donation or something. No thanks.

I'll stick with Maptool. It's treated me well thus far, mainly because I took the time and effort to learn it. I can see the appeal of Roll20 for people that don't have the time to learn Maptool, or for people who just want a simplified VTT.

But it's not for me. Not yet, anyway.

(Also I agree with everyones' opinion on PbPs. If you were doing PbP simply because you had no other medium, shame on you. There's plenty of VTTs out there that you could have put the time and effort to learn. Don't act like there wasn't.)

[Dr.Epic]

Looks interesting. I'm going to see if I can't get some people to join a game with me.

[TroubleBrewing]

But yeah, people who sign up for play-by-posts aren't saying to themselves "Man, I really want to play D&D, but none of my friends live nearby so this is clearly the only way to play on the internet!"

Actually, minus the bit about not having friends who live nearby, this was exactly what I thought. I'd heard about skype games, but I didn't think anyone actually did that.