Play Dungeons & Dragons Online with Gametable
posted Wednesday, October 22nd 2008 by Jonathan Drain
Even in this age of massively multiplayer videogame RPGs, I have a lot of friends who enjoy traditional roleplaying games online in some form. I’ve seen play-by-email, message board games and real-time games on internet chat - in fact I’ve written a free dice handler to aid real-time text-based Dungeons & Dragons games.
As the game further develops the use of miniatures, however, you’re going to increasingly benefit from an online miniatures simulator, and WotC’s official table software isn’t here yet. That’s where Gametable comes in.
Gametable is a free application you can use to simulate a tabletop grid online. It supports square grids, hex grids, and grid-free. You can draw on the ‘board’ like a dry-erase whiteboard, and place round graphic miniatures (called ‘pogs’) which players can move around the map.
The program has some features which impress me over other software of its kind. Gametable allows you to do a “colour erase”, rubbing out one colour of drawing without damaging the others. This is useful for drawing annotations such as spell areas, then erasing these quickly without rubbing out part of the map. You can also annotate pogs with names and attributes, signifying status effects or hit points.
Gametable also handles dice and text-based chat, although you’ll need to install a third-party program like Ventrilo for voice chat. The program doesn’t try to do everything, and won’t adjudicate game rules, which task is left to the DM as usual. You’ll also need a separate character sheet, which is something you can handle on paper as usual or a digital character sheet like my text-based character sheet, Yeoz’s text-based character sheet or Yeoz’s Excel character sheet.
Gametable’s not the only virtual tabletop software, but it’s certainly a good start. Other readers have recommended OpenRPG, MapTools, GlitterComm and Fantasy Grounds.
You can download Gametable here.
Comments
Mike Brady
October 22nd, 2008
Thanks Jonathan! I always enjoy your blog posts. I think I’ll stick to MapTool though; it’s truly a fantastic piece of software and I have a tough time believing Gametable will beat its features. For one, Maptool handles light and vision - two things that I can never remember to think about as a DM.
For a fantastic character sheet, can I recommend these excellent sheets at dnd4.com? I find myself using them all the time to double-check my players’ work (usually to their benefit). The only caveat (based on feedback from my players) is that you seem to need Microsoft Excel - not OpenOffice or any other clone - to get the full benefit.
Wil K.
October 22nd, 2008
That’s a pretty nice mapper! Good UI design.
Bhoritz
October 22nd, 2008
Gametable can do much more than that:
http://www.gwindel.eu/GT.html
Bhoritz
October 22nd, 2008
Oh! And you can have nice character sheets in Gametable:
http://gametable.wikia.com/wiki/Tutorial:_Character_sheets
Micah
October 23rd, 2008
Meh, I’ll stick to the analog paper and pencil. I can see the allure of digital gaming for people who don’t have a regular group, but for me, nothing beats friends around a table.
Eric Maziade
October 23rd, 2008
Yeah, GameTable is pretty nice. Looks like it has a lot of potential, though I never ended up trying it in a real situation…
The community was rather active as well… but their forums died a few months ago and never came back. I was trying to lend a hand to the developers (I submitted a code modification that allows to save the map to jpg).
Hopefully it’ll keep on progressing - it has lots of potential and its a somewhat well structured project (which seems like a rarity in the case of small, free open-source projects…)
James
October 28th, 2008
RPGLife.com is now offering a free copy of Screen Monkey table top as well as a schedular and player finder as well as 3000 maps and 1500 miniatures to use.
http://www.rpglife.com/screenmonkey
James
pubertfaggons
November 5th, 2008
Hi, I am absolutely new to DnD but want desperately to learn. But I have no one around even remotely interested, so to my digital friends I turn!
How do I start playing online? What communities/sites are there for me to visit?
Thanks.
Clyde
December 10th, 2008
Hey, I actually play in RL, afew friends and I ae a clan called, Silent Rush. Were quite new to ths game, but our main DM is teaching us. I’d like to know if anyone out there wants to play with me because we can rarley get togethe.