Reply To: Curious about setting up online tabletop RP group – help wanted

[balginstondraegParticipant 1151xp 2]

I’d say it all depends on what kind of game you want to run. If you just want a virtual tabletop space where you can “push some toys around for a bit” and do all the rules checking and dice rolling and calculations yourselves then something like roll20 would suit you quite well. If you want something that automates mechanics and dice rolls then I’d say something like Map Tool (not Map Tools with an s which is a software program for  surveyors) or Fantasy Grounds would be more up your alley. You basically need to decide how much you want the program/software to support and automate things and how much you want it to just be more like a space to display relative distances between things “oh yeah, he’s over there and this thing’s over here”. When I’m playing Pathfinder with Map Tool (And a suitable Pathfinder framework for Map Tool) I can just click a button to attack and a menu pops up where I can select a target, set attack & damage modifiers and then one more click to roll the whole thing with all appropriate rules taken into consideration. If I was doing this with Roll20 then I’d have to go through every step manually. The strength of roll20, on the other hand, is that it’s a website that’s easy for people to connect to instead of needing to get into ip addresses and port forwarding with some other virtual tabletop softwares. It might help to know where you sit on a scale of convenience to wanting to get dug down in deep and really get to grips with the thing yourself.

Given your stated preference for rules playing over roleplaying I’d suggest Pathfinder 1st edition. However Pathfinder’s got a lot of rules (it’s basically 3rd edition with house rules that fix some of the issues 3rd ed had) but you don’t want to go throwing people in at the deep end. By this point Pathfinder has lots of source books with extra rules in. Don’t go giving people a wiki link and telling them to do whatever they want or they’ll either get lost or come up with some broken combination of things they’ve taken out of context. When a feat says it can only be taken if you’re a worshipper of a particular deity or a member of a certain culture new players can often overlook things like that (and some of the wikis don’t mention the gods for copywrite reasons).

 

The Mage brings up a lot of good points. Essentially if you can give us a better idea of what you’d like to achieve we can give you better/more helpful recommendations.