Virtual Gurps assistance.

[Boge]

Just thinking that having a program set up for me on a laptop, tablet, or smartphone would be a cool thing to use. It would be nice to have a visual presentation for all the players to show where they are during combat, show maps, keep track of inventory and character sheet changes, and especially to import combat modifiers and whatnot so you know exactly what you're rolling against instead of having to look up rules for 10 minutes at a time.

Is there anything there that does this fairly easlier? Roll20, Fantasy Grounds? If so, which is the best to use?

[Emerald Cat]

I ran a Pathfinder campaign on Roll20 a year ago. I used Inkscape (a free drawing tool) to draw my maps and then uploaded them to Roll20 for my players to use. Early on I had problems with my maps not displaying if they weren't in a format everyone could read. But Roll20 works well for map display once you resolve the technical issues.

Roll20 is set up to handle inventory tracking and character sheets. The GURPS version of the character sheet would require some editing to match your genre, but that shouldn't be too difficult.

I've found that using the in app ruler is great for handling tactical combat. It works even better for GURPS, since it outright recommends measuring distances between combatants with a ruler. Unlike with a real ruler, there is no risk of knocking over minis!

Unfortunately, importing GURPS's modifiers is simply beyond Roll20's capabilities. And I doubt that you'd find an app that gets that complicated. There is a table in GURPS Basic: Campaigns that gives qualitative descriptors of different difficulty modifiers. I'd recommend using this table for non-combat skill rolls whenever you forget the canonical modifiers for the skill, and then look that up after the game.

Ask your players if combat is taking too long. If the frequent look ups don't bother them, then you don't need to do anything. To speed up combat, there are two options. One is to remove a lot of the optional rules like hit locations and opportunistically striking body parts, because they involve a lot of looking up tables. A second option is to compile a GM cheat sheet with all of these tables and rules so that you don't have to flip through the book.

[mlangsdorf]

You can use Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, MapTools, Battlegrounds, or probably something else that I'm forgetting to display maps. I personally like MapTools (rptools.net) since it has a good chat interface, measurement tools, drawing tools, and it autocalculate sight lines for you. It also has a sophisticated macro language for rolling dice and you can automate some aspects of the game that way - including inventory management.

However, you have to be careful, because SJ Games frowns on full automation. You have to look up some stuff, no matter how sophisticated the tool, or you risk getting cease and desist letters if you distribute your tool.

[Anaraxes]

Our group has used MapTool and Fantasy Grounds. They both work reasonably well.

Cons: We never got the automatic lighting to work right in MapTool (as of a few years ago). MapTool also had an intolerance for even slightly mismatched versions, so you need to make it a habit for everyone to update the program immediately before you play.

Fantasy Grounds seems to have a somewhat flaky connection, with characters getting the "sleep" icon or sometimes disconnecting and having to reload, even over a local network. It also has (to me) a curiously unintuitive interface. The way you do things seems ok once you figure it out, but it's not always obvious what you were expected to do, and the interface doesn't particularly lend itself to suggesting the proper experiments.

[seycyrus]

I use CC3+ for maps, and FG for the roleplay. As mentioned previously, the restriction against any sort of automation prevents the computer from doing what computers do best, compute things.

As it is, I have a table of modifiers that I have manually added (poor lighting, all-out attack, range modifiers etc), and then click on all the ones that apply. It's not automatic, but it does speed things up quite a bit.

Oh, I've never run into any problems with FG losing connections or anything. As long as I stay reasonably close to some guidelines on the sizes of the maps that I share.

[DouglasCole]

I've seen some ridiculously sophisticated (but private-use-only) skins and mods for Fantasy Grounds with GURPS. Professional quality, stuff that would be a credit to SJG if it were available through W23.

Mark's point about MapTool is 100% true - the macro language is quite powerful if you can use it.

[mook]

Originally Posted by DouglasCole

I've seen some ridiculously sophisticated (but private-use-only) skins and mods for Fantasy Grounds with GURPS. Professional quality, stuff that would be a credit to SJG if it were available through W23.

Reading things like that is really depressing (especially since the VTT I backed on KS ultimately transformed to a Fantasy Grounds license).

I've used Roll20 for a few poke-abouts here and there, but having a fully official toolset that I know correctly interprets RAW right out of the box really would be the dream.

[starslayer]

1. Generally we use IRC and some virtual presentation software for quick drawings (for things like positions in combat and the like); so we don't use anything advanced and have successfully run multiple years of online games. The scriping capabilities of say hexchat are just stellar and allow for things like '/rpm 200 30 L' to just go head and roll to make you 200 energy spell, with skill 30, and using luck if you encounter a critical failure, in one command, instantly. We have recently moved to using google docs for character sheets (shout out to Armin for making the GCA->CSV converter for me)

2. With that said there are great free tools out there, like openrpg, and I surprised it does not get mentioned more often, to my knowledge its been around longer then fantasy grounds, provides a robust scripting capability, has GURPS sheets available (or you could just put some extra functionality on the CSV created by GCA->CSV export and be able to build your sheets in GCA).

[mlangsdorf]

openRPG doesn't get mentioned more often because it is really, really buggy, or at least it was in 2008. My group used openRPG as a map client for a while but it would crash 3 times an hour. MapTools had more features and was much more stable.

I think openRPG may have gotten new developers since then, but it really burnt bridges with me.

[Boge]

Mostly what I'd be interested in were modifier calculations, which it sounds like I won't get, and inventory/character management.

I'm just a player, by the way, and we get together to play, so connection stuff and all wouldn't be the breaker. I'm not sure if our GM would even care to use it, but I'd love to manage my character on a tablet or smartphone and then quicker calculations for combat modifiers would be nice to have.