Forums of the Megaverse®

Who is gaming remotely with their group? What tools and services are you using? What has worked and not worked for you?

I've never used onlne gaming before COVID-19.

Into 5th session GMing a D&D 5E game. Two players, going well. We use Roll20.net, which runs in web-browser; you can:
- chatroom style text communication
- There is a die-roller; players option to use real dice on honor-system
- put a map or battlegrid up for more technical combat encounters/exploration. Also good for showing visual aids (NPC portraits, clues, runes, etc)
- video and audio chat, we do audio only
I am doing an original campaign, so finding appropriate monsters/maps usually involves me porting pics of my painted minis in. I don't plan on running online after this is over.

Also I am participating in a Pathfinder group of 5 players + GM.
- Discord is audio chat run off your web-browser.
- The GM has a Discord group for chat/messageboards
- GM added a die-roller app to the chatroom
Since the group is larger, combats take longer than they should because players drift off while waiting for their turn.

We've been exploring options, I think we're going to try discord. Honor system since we normally are so spread out no one can see each others rolls anyway and we're old enough to enjoy the bad luck rolls along with the good. Sometimes the best stories come when someone critically fails a roll.

I use Roll20, which is great for my games that use/need a virtual tabletop. We use Discord or Zoom for video and audio. For games where it's just theater of the mind, Discord with the Avrae bot has worked fine.

What is the Avrae bot?

Avrae is a bot you can add to a Discord server to do dice rolling in the Discord server. More information can be found here.

Thanks for the replies everyone. We tried discord and it was mostly fine. One player got disconnected about hourly and another kept cutting out (I believe he was on wifi with a slower type like B, I suggested if he could to try a wired connection next time). But it was doable. And free is good. We just used traditional dice and didn't bother with a bot. We weren't using the chat window at all and as the GM I keep my notes on the PC and combat tracking on the PC so flipping back and forth would be annoying.

I've been running a campaign with everyone on Hangouts (but Skype or Meet or whatever would work too). The one thing that's been awesome is Google Sheets, and to a lesser extent Google Docs. All of the character sheets are in Google Sheets, as is any combat management. If I want to share it with the players it's just a click. I wrote a little dice add-on for Sheets which we used for awhile, but at this point it's just honor system. We don't use a grid system for location or anything, but I have been playing around with Roll20 and might use it in an upcoming session.

Seriously though, Google Sheets saves a ton of time and effort. Definitely worth looking into - either for shared data like a character sheet, or just to help with managing GM stuff.

I'm actually not loving google sheets, but I'm also not using it the way Google would prefer. I'm making an excel sheet on my PC and opening that in google sheets (android app) on my chromebook. That version of sheets is not as stable and when it crashes it tends to corrupt the sheet. But I'm only using it for combat tracking and it's only crashed once during a combat very early on, the rest of the times it's been after combat was done and I just hadn't closed it yet. Problem is most of the time I'm on an old windows machine and keep all my gaming files in windows/microsoft formats. But on gaming nights my travel machine is the chromebook. I may have to try building the combat sheet natively in google sheets and use the webpage and see how it goes. I just far prefer Excel for initial setup.

roll20 what I use maining to game hard to find rifts games around here.

Google Meetings and roll20. Works fine for us. Little more prep work involved.

(OP here) We've settled on Discord for us. Audio only. We're all 38+ years old, no one is interested in cheating and I trust them. They roll badly enough they aren't fudging even if I felt inclined to question it.

We play on discord too. Audio only and works like a charm for posting maps and images.
For rolling we use the sidekick bot which mostly does whatever we need it to do.