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Page 2 of 2 In the end I modified Vassal Engine 's Playing Cards module to enable multiple players and the poker chips (they are copper coins for the ferryman of river Styx in this hack). For those of you who haven't had time to get acquinted with Vassal Engine, it is a Java-based board & card game playing environment complete with an editor. You can play on-line or with one machine, synchronously or asynchronously (play by (e-)mail). The interface is pretty ragged as is the editor but both deliver if you know what to do.
The Vassal module hack has been working quite well, despite some UI usability issues. The biggest hiccup is that sometimes we go a bit low on the cards in conflicts involving multiple parties. I really need to add another 52 cards to the module when I have time. Also the Vassal metaserver is sometimes down for no apparent reason.
What We Could Do Without
As I list these applications I now wonder what we use OpenRpg for except as a heavy version of a chat in addition to the speech communication in Skype. We have shifted towards editing the character sheets straight in our Gaming Wiki, so the nodes have gone unused as well. Maybe we could try using Skype chat instead for the next session and see if we miss any features of OpenRpg.
What We Use When Not There
We have set up a Wiki to serve as an information bank for our games. We use PmWiki , basically because it is light-weight and works with text files instead of a database (we originally did not have access to a database). We store general information, announcements and character descriptions of our games in the Wiki.
We also have a bulletin board for our gaming needs. Mostly it is for scheduling sessions, but also other types of general discussion occur. And as the board has generally been easier to follow (like when new stuff appear etc.) than the Wiki, we've been using it more and more to provide information about the games, such as session reports etc. The board software we use is SMF .
The board has also served well for metagaming purposes. One thing about on-line role-playing is that you seem to have less time per session than in regular face-to-face games (result of both different scheduling and the on-line communication taking up more time than in real life) so metagaming conversations seem to be more sparse than in face-to-face gaming. To compensate that we've been discussing our gaming experiences in the board.
One app or rather a web service we use is Doodle . a Web poll creation service. We use Doodle to decide on our game night scheduling. Using Doodle is very simple: Make the poll by selecting the dates, send the poll url to participants and then everyone fills the in the poll which of the dates are suitable for them. This reduces the traditional unwieldy conversation of when to play by a lot. I'm really impressed by Doodle, it is so simple to use. You don't need a registration etc, you just start making or filling the poll.
So that was it, the apps and services we use to play Dust Devils online. I'll report on experiences of playing without OpenRpg if I can get my group convinced we could do without it, too.
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