Tips for Getting your Game Online

Written by Tyson J. Hayes on 2010/02/09 – 00:00 -

Last Sunday was my first attempt into trying to bring my Savage Worlds game into the 21st Century by moving it online.  Some of my players will be moving out of the state (and one the country) so we were looking to change our play to adapt to the new distance.  While I am big fan of internet technology and generally try to live more and more in the cloud I found the experience frustrating and bit off putting.

Set it all up your stuff a week in advance

It may seem like a bit of a duh but get all of the programs you’ll need to run your game setup well before you play.  I chose to use MapTools for our game as it was free, open source, and generally didn’t annoy me.  That being said it does have some quirks that are not apparently at first, unfortunately, these “quirks “held up the game for an hour while we tried to work them out.

1) Everyone needs to use the same version. Which was something I wasn’t aware of at first; fortunately some of my players also play in another online game and quickly pointed this out to me.  So save some time and use the same version.

2) Just because the program says it can be accessed from the internet doesn’t mean it’s not lying to you. I was never able to host the game.  While the internal tools told me I should be able to host the game no one was ever able to connect.  In the end I had another one of my player’s host the game.  I never figured out why it didn’t work, but I discovered some great port forwarding tutorials at PortForward.com.

3) Careful with maps done in Photoshop. While a minor quibble at this point it was frustrating to put in a map that had been lovingly crafted only to have it not fit the internal grid.  After getting everything is setup, make sure your maps work properly; it’ll really dampen your mood if it doesn’t.

Register all the accounts before hand

Most of my players either didn’t have Skype.  So we spent a good while getting everyone registered, futzing with mics, and generally getting us all on at the same time.  Save yourself some pain and assign some homework to everyone to get the accounts setup and registered well in advance.  Skype has a great built in tool to make sure the mic is on and that you can hear everything.  Use it.  It’ll save you time pretending to be the Verizon wireless guy.  “Can you hear me now?!”

Have you tried to make the transition to online play? What successes or failures have you had?


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Categories: Roleplaying Tools, Session Management |
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  • guilhermemoraes
    Well, theres the Fantasy grounds II options for paly savage worlds, since it has the corebook and a few others source rules to use, but, of course, its not free.

    Its a good software, you'll need some time to learn how to use it, but you'll survive it. :)
  • My experince with Fantasy Grounds II has been pretty brief so I can't speak to how good of a program it is. That being said I'm a bit turned off at the cost of liscencing all all the seats needed plus the rules systems to play. Though a built in card program to handle initiative would be nice.
  • The Dice of Life has a few articles on the use of MapTool for RPGs, including for face-to-face games.
    http://www.thediceoflife.com/search/label/MapTool

    Regarding importing images as maps, it's pretty easy to adjust them within MapTool.

    1. Pull in the image into the background layer.
    2. Disable snap to grid on the image.
    3. Scale the image to resize it; this gives you finer control of the size of the image than what is available from adjusting the grid size.

    For VoIP, I also recommend Ventrilo. I pay $3 a month for a dedicated host to offset the bandwidth and minimize troubleshooting. Note that Ventrilo is not available for Linux.
  • Thanks Kristian for the info, I'll give that a try when I get a minute. I partocularly liked RPTroll's article. Quick and dirty review of MapTools and why it's awesome.

    As for Ventrilo if I were having bandwith issues or needed to offload some of it from me I'll definately consider it. Thanks!
  • Mindshadow2k
    Also I forgot to mention for those using Maptool there are some great frameworks out there to use with it albeit sometimes complicated to get the incorporated into your own campaign file.

    http://forums.rptools.net/viewforum.php?f=33&si...
  • Mindshadow2k
    First off great article and something that I think most people transitioning to playing online don't think about these things. I have been playing online for about a year now running a bi-weekly Saturday game and have learned a lot!

    1. Make sure you get one on one time with each player prior to your game day to get them to connect to you and ensure versions are the same. Every now and then I go and I upgrade my version of maptool that I use and so I post on our forums giving the direct download link to the version I will be using and schedule an off day for about an hour to go over connecting and ensuring the player token is what it should be.

    2. In today's computing world with routers and home networks with gaming people should get familiar with checking their local IP address (essentially your address on your local network) and how to setup the ports accessed through connecting to your router with your internet browser. The day of my game I usually open up a command prompt (in windows typically start >> run>> type in cmd hit enter and when the dos window comes up you type ipconfig and under Local Area Connection it should list your computers IP. Then of course you have to go into your router and ensure that the port your using with maptool is directed to that port for both tcp and udp.

    3. Maps sometimes your maps can be larger then you would like and if your internet provider doesn't provide you with a good upload speed then it can take a while for you to transition from one map to another. Maptool has the ability to zip your campaign (File >> Export >> Campaign Repository File) and with this file you can upload it to a server online then add the url to access your campaign repository file to Maptool (Edit >> Campaign Properties >> Repository tab) and this takes out the variable of your upload speed and they will just download it from that file server.

    I can't think of any other tips that I would add but this is good stuff because I remember when I first started I had to go through hell trying to make sure everything was good and we didn't spend an hour every time just getting things setup :).
  • Thanks for the comments on what was working for you, I'll take your advice when I will need to upgrade MapTools, and I was unaware of the ability to zip the campaign thanks for pointing that out!

    As for figuring out your IP that does work well if you don't have a router, if you do going to something like network-tools.com will tell you your IP quicker then it would take to login to your router and navigate to find the information.
  • Mindshadow2k
    I believe that site will only tell you your external (WAN) IP of course I could be loopy and there could be some link on it that I didn't see (happens all the time) :).
  • Correct network-tools.com only tells you your external IP which is whats needed for connecting to a map tools server. Your comment is a bit confusing butI knew what you were talking about. :)
  • Mindshadow2k
    Well the issue most people have in getting things connected is if you have a router you essentially have 2 ip adresses one internal (LAN) and one external (WAN) and so to configure the port that maptool is using to direct it to the proper machine running as the server the port has to be configured on the router to point to the internal IP because traffic hits the router on the external IP and the router needs to know which internal IP to send it to.

    Wow I hope that as confusing as it sounds heheh.
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