Great White Games/Pinnacle Entertainment Group

[sirkerry]

Anyone know of a good comparison of all of various virtual tabletops out there that can be used to play Savage Worlds with?
_________________
-Kerry Harrison
Organizer, Space City Savages
Running: 50 Fathoms
Prepping: several different scenarios
Playing: New Year's War Playtest

[booga]

You can take a lok here: http://rpgvirtualtabletop.wikidot.com/vt-comparison-chart

In my experience teh two best ones to play SW with are Fantasy Ground II and Maptool. Maptool is free but has a higher learning curve, and FGII is prettier but is not free (every player has to pay for a license, or the GM has to shell for an ultimate license and all his players then play for tree). A SW ruleset exists for each VTT (same thing, FGII's not free), and they both work great in my experience.[/url]

[semifamous]

I'm a big fan of Tabletop Forge, the G+ Hangout plugin/extension.

[booga]

My experience wasn't great with Forge, but that was a few months ago and I'm sure they kept improving it.

Another good one I forgot to mention was roll20. It's still fairly new, but is very very promising (very stable in my experience, and it's got card decks). For Forge and Roll20 are system-agnostic, so there won't be a SW ruleset to automate things like in FGII or Maptool, but they are valid options nevertheless.

[dstuffle]

Fantasy Grounds 2 has great support for Savage Worlds and their settings.

Downside is the start up cost is significant. You ether need an Ultimate License (for the GM, players can then play with the trial version) or the GM needs a Full License and all the players need a Lite License to play.

The upside is that it doesn't take you months of XML coding to enter the Savage world's core information / setting info (for the ones availible) yourself.

[GamerDude]

[jcayer]

I think a lot is based on what you want. I use Maptools, but strictly for maps. A lot of the time, we don't even use the grid. Just a basic map to give everyone a starting point. There is a SW framework for Maptools that will handle just about all the mechanics: http://rptroll.blogspot.be/p/savage-worlds-framework-for-maptool.html

I've tried TableTop Forge through Google hangouts, as that is how our remote guys connect, and found it lacking. That was a few months ago. It does have a lot of promise.

[kronovan]

I haven't ever used Fantasy Grounds, but from what I've been able to discern from the website there isn't a map editor/creation tools, which would be a killer for me. The cost would also be a deterrent for me as well, as I don't run games online nearly enough to justify spending $150 on any VTT and then extra $ for the specific SW setting templates.

I use MapTool and I'm quite happy with it. I'll echo that there's a learning curve to overcome with it and it has a few kludges/rough edges. Actually, I'm not so sure if it's the tool itself or the Savage Worlds framework that are are the source of those rough spots. All can be worked around with some perseverance, just expect to have an hour or 2 of frustration when you're new to it.

The best thing about MapTool is that it has some nice map creation tools and I've actually used its screenshot saving feature to make maps for printing and tabletop play. Unfortunately it only outputs in 72 dpi, but it works well enough for a quick map. There's also a heap of tiles, objects and textures available for it that you can find links to in the the rptools.net forums.

[Bhoritz]

[Krimson]

I'd be more inclined to pay for Roll20 if they had a one time licence fee instead of yearly. Still, it is an excellent platform and not even bad for Play by Post if you're like me and work an irregular schedule which hinders regular games.

I do have a GM licence for d20Pro and the Lifetime Master of the Universe licence for iTabletop. Though I really need to learn to use them better. Apparently someone made a tool to integrate Google Maps into d20Pro so I need to check that out, and I'm not overly impressed with iTabletop at the moment, but invested in a recent Indigogo (where I got my licence for much less than the regular cost) and have hopes the platform will improve. In both cases, I would love to see Google+ Hangouts integration like Roll20 is using.

[jcayer]

Roll20 looks impressive. Thanks for pointing it out. I'm going to have to give it a serious look as a replacement for our Google Hangouts solution.

I haven't delved in yet, but it looks like it combines a slightly simplified maptools with video chat.

[Krimson]

[dstuffle]