GURPs Online

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by shawnhcorey

Just curious: has anyone tried Google+ Hangouts for gaming?

Brett gave it a good review a couple of weeks ago.

[Kuroshima]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

Brett gave it a good review a couple of weeks ago.

Can you provide a link? I'm curious on the whole hangout thing (and I have a g+ account, I just never used hangouts)

[Graham]

MapTool, Fantasy Grounds and Battlegrounds all give good environments for playing GURPS with varying degrees of automation built in and varying amounts of control over the map and tokens. Each has its strong points and each suits different types of gaming groups.

You can couple any of them with something like Skype or Ventrilo to add voice.

For me, currently, the application that comes closest to actually playing GURPS face-to-face is iTabletop.

The free version lets you set up two campaign worlds and link to up to four (free) players. You can pay to get more storage space and more floating licences.

iTabletop doesn't have the automation options, but adds video. Coupled with reasonable control of images, pdfs, sounds, the map and tokens, this makes for a pretty immersive experience.

The main thing missing from iTabletop is a shared whiteboard for drawings on the fly, but there have been encouraging comments recently that this is about to go into beta testing.

Graham

[shawnhcorey]

Originally Posted by Kuroshima

Can you provide a link? I'm curious on the whole hangout thing (and I have a g+ account, I just never used hangouts)

Here it is.

[gmjasongurps]

i have also had good luck with using Map Tools for my weekly GURPS game. It has been going on for over 3 years. We just use Map Tools for the game, and done use anything like Skype or TS or Vent at all, and it works fine!

[BaHalus]

Well, Gurps using orkut is cool. Maybe using Google+ can be even better.

[Higgipedia]

Originally Posted by shawnhcorey

Just curious: has anyone tried Google+ Hangouts for gaming?

I have and I liked it. It's still a work in progress, though. They claim you can have 10 people in it, but non-scientific experiments have determined that the number is currently five, so you get a referee and four players. I don't know if it's a hardware or a software issue.

Zak S. over at Playing D&D With Porn Stars has been an early and vigorous advocate of G+ gaming. I played in a Empire of the Petal Throne game with him and some other people from the D&D blog universe and it was fun. The battle map side of GURPS might be a little difficult at this juncture and there isn't an internal dice roller. That said, it's still nice to be able to see and hear the people you are playing with.

I can only imagine that it will get more robust as people figure out how to do cool stuff with it.

[The Wrathchild]

Google+ Hangouts indeed seem to show some promise. I saw a report from S. John Ross the other day, and he was enthusiastic about the experience :-).

Check it here.

[Graham]

Originally Posted by Higgipedia

The battle map side of GURPS might be a little difficult at this juncture and there isn't an internal dice roller. That said, it's still nice to be able to see and hear the people you are playing with.

The advantage of something like iTabletop over Google Hangouts currently is that the video and voice is integrated with the map screen and dice roller windows, rather than being separate applications.

However, I can see that if Google+ takes off (and I hope it will, as I'm impressed with it so far) we may well get gaming features added - all that's really needed to enjoy GURPS online with the basic combat system is a way to share images easily and a dice roller (and with friends you trust you can live without the dice roller).

I'll add that Google Documents looks to be a pretty good way to share and edit character sheets too.

Graham

[Kuroshima]

Originally Posted by Graham

The advantage of something like iTabletop over Google Hangouts currently is that the video and voice is integrated with the map screen and dice roller windows, rather than being separate applications.

However, I can see that if Google+ takes off (and I hope it will, as I'm impressed with it so far) we may well get gaming features added - all that's really needed to enjoy GURPS online with the basic combat system is a way to share images easily and a dice roller (and with friends you trust you can live without the dice roller).

I'll add that Google Documents looks to be a pretty good way to share and edit character sheets too.

Graham

They just need to allow 3rd party plugins and webapps to integrate with Google+. Once they have that, it should be possible to have a set of roleplaying aids. The maps part will probably end up using google maps infrastructure, the character sheets will go through google docs, and 3rd parties will have to provide the randomizers...