Alternative to PbM Games
 

I'd think a good alternative to PbM games is with video-chat software and webcams - there are many decent solutions out there.

www.skype.com
www.oovoo.com

personally I use oovoo - and u can have a conference call of up till 6 participants

This will offcourse not be like a FtF-game but sometimes people just can participate in a FtF-game.

We will try to set up a conference call via oovoo tomorrow since Rupert 'Willis sadly couldn't join us in Oslo.

I will keep you posted after the fight (Sanchez are entering a pit of death-style UFC championship to the death.)

I've played various D&D, Savage Worlds, some Zombie RPGs, WoD, Fate, Risus, and Paranoia. Paranoia was the most fun. They all work. D&D combat is at a glacial speed in PbP as you can imagine. I would like to try Apocalypse World games at some put.

I use three systems at the same time:
- Roll20 for the Diceroller and interactive character sheets.
- Discord for the voice channel as Roll20 gets very laggy with sound
- Facebook for files storage and threads I can follow and curate.

I prefer text chat. I don't have to worry about how I dress, I can listen to loud music and, perhaps most importantly, it is trivially easy to search a prior session's log for specific info.

I'm now 4 sessions into playing a v2.2 game on Discord + Roll20. The main snag appears to be that I (alone) cannot see the GM's shared screen on Discord, so he has to use the Roll20 map more often.

Also, Roll20's initiative counter seems wonky.

Roll20 seems to have recently broken something with the initiative tracker. It used to be a lot more robust.

I, too, am in the Roll20 + Discord camp (though not in the good admiral's campaign). My usual groups have worked out the general protocol of using Discord's voice channel for the actual game and text chat for side chatter. This helps keep the chatter from derailing play. No video chat - bandwidth is a precious natural resource and I find video distracts from the virtual tabletop.

- C.

I find the tracker takes up too much time, I just use a notepad and keep track that way.

in fact I've pared back a lot of my map use there. It slows the game down and turns it into a boardgame

Hmm... this "might" be of interest to some people in regards to the specific topic of this thread, but it seems an awful lot like spam

Doing it full on Discord is working fairly good for us, I'd say =)