Software for role playing online?

April 23, 2007 3:18 PM

software for (pen and paper) role playing online?

I'm looking for software for playing pen-and-paper role playing games online for a group of geographically distributed gamers. It will have to work on both Macs and PCS; Gametable so far looks like the best bet; OpenRPG sounded promising but I've found the Mac version to be rather buggy. Are there any other alternatives? Open source would be great, but I'm also willing to purchase something. Any help would be appreciated!

posted by tperrigo to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (4 answers total)

i've heard good things about gametable. never used it myself though.

I think a great place to get advice on it would be to post on the wizards board directly. I recall having seen a thread on there a while back that compiled and discussed such programs, but i didn't bookmark it and can't seem to find it now.
posted by teishu at 7:31 PM on April 23, 2007

This one fails your 'must work on mac' and 'prefer free' criteria, but in case others come looking for good pay-for PC solutions, I've found Fantasy Grounds to be nothing short of amazing. Apologies that I have nothing more useful to offer.
posted by toomuchpete at 8:00 PM on April 23, 2007

Best answer: I've liked RPTools' MapTool rather better than OpenRPG, although like the name suggests it only does the map and token movement (but RPTools has some other things as well). I don't know how well it works on the mac, but it's Java 1.5 and WebStart, so hopefully it's portable.
posted by inkyz at 8:27 PM on April 23, 2007

Response by poster: MapTool looks really promising; I will definitely give that a try. Thanks, everyone, for the suggestions!
posted by tperrigo at 8:00 AM on April 24, 2007