You listed off the two good ones I'm aware of. Steam is getting more and more tabletop simulators and in all honesty it isn't hard to import in your own grids maps etc.

I used MapTool for awhile, it's a very robust system once you get the hang of it. But it was obnoxiously finicky to get to work for all players, despite all the things you could do with it.

Used to play it a long time ago but it was pretty fun

IRC can work pretty well! We used to do it on IRC with a dice roll bot.

i play on roll20 it has alot of tools that are useful i'm currently in a group that uses it.

I am up for it.

-screams-

roll20 I've heard lots about, but I mostly play in person. I'm actually playing in a 5e game tomorrow afternoon as a Blood Hunter who has been branded as an abomination and hits like a truck by hurting himself. -3-

I would suggest looking up Critical Role, as it's "a bunch of nerdy ass voice actors playing Dungeons and Dragons" and Matt Mercer is the DM.

As for funny stories, I have one from way back, in 3.5, my friend was running a campaign for a group of Barbarians, they were fighting a weather wizard of some kind on top of a volcano arena thing where there were ledges around that drop into the volcano. This was a big boss fight so there was some exposition and one of his players asks midway through the boss' rant to roll to bull rush him (aka, run straight at him, if connects: push back a couple squares). He does and gets a nat 20, so he pushes the boss in the middle of exposition into the volcano and killed him, end of big epic boss fight that probably took a couple days if not weeks to plan.

So yeah the best advice I could give is to roleplay your character and try everything and anything. As Matt Mercer says, "you may certainly try".

I like Critical Role! Its has some weird politics with people leaving and people not being around.

\o/ Nice story. Hopefully he didn't have the MacGuffin on him.

Yeahhhh

it's because they have work! x3;

Ashley is currently in something called Blindlight or something?

Liam is ALWAYS busy, but usually clears his schedule for critical role.

"Way back" and "3.5"....

*sad*

"way back" as in I heard this story about 3 years ago.

and it was 3.5e

I used to play in person but for some reason we've gravitated towards online more. Roll20 is pretty damn great for that and it has quite a few different systems built into it. other than it and the other one you mentioned, I don't know of any. x.x

roll20.net is kinda neat, if not annoying. I prefer to use the myth weavers site for character sheets. Though I muchly prefer Pathfinder to D&D, myself (not that I played beyond D&D 3.5e) though I've become rather frustrated with the game in general due to bad experiences.

I've been looking at Rifts lately. Totally crazy game. @.@

Some friends and I had accidentally commandeered the teacher's table at our high school. It was the perfect spot for lunchroom gaming, unconnected to the main tables, right near the front, and close to where food was served. Not only did we have the best seats, we got first dibs on left-over fries, pizzas, and dinner rolls. The teachers had apparently been scared off by what they thought was a gang of dice-rolling devil worshipers.

So, we're sitting on our plastic thrones (the only chairs in the entire place with backs,) at the king's table, which is covered in dice, gaming books, and excess french fries. I'm running an intro campaign to help work in a new member to our ever-so-exclusive, apparent cult. In front of the newbie is a forgotten math book, and in front of his book, somewhere between thirty and fifty pieces of polyhedral fate weavers. This included my favorite twenty-sider, an emerald green that would eventually be banned from play after the "Night of Excessive Saves!"

The players are in your typical ten by ten, surrounded by ancient stone walls which seem remarkably clean, even polished. Two of my players have long since figured it out, especially when they spot the floating skeletal remains and bits of adventurer debris. It was all coming toward them with a warbling sploosh, squoosh, squish. The neophyte had never seen or heard of a gelatinous cube before, and seems fascinated by my description. More-over, he's keen to try out his newly acquired magic item, as he's gotten himself an idear.

As it turns out, he has been reading up on his Robe of Useful Items and the bit that has caught his eye happens to be a 10 x 10 x 10 pit. Given the cube was a perfect 10 by 10, it seemed a perfect fit. There weren't any specific rules about tossing a magical pit under a creature, but I figured, given the pressure of impending, gelatinous doom, the player had to make a roll with a ridiculously low bar to clear. If he managed to miss it, I could always have the pit hit the wall, opening up a new area for the players to escape, still being hounded by glorping goop.

He rolled a one.

The pit falls at his feet, he falls into the pit, and, true to his plan (and because there is always room for jello,) the cube shlorps in perfectly. The ten-cubed pit is filled by a ten-cubed monster, and a thoroughly surprised, completely engulfed wizard.

Now, again, we're at the head of the lunchroom, there's no more food being served. Everyone is finishing up their meals and digging into the most recent gossip, starring at the boy they like, or dreading the next period. This all turns to dead silence when our new member howls out, "God DAMMIT!" before slamming his fist into his math book, which slammed into our mountain of dice, which immediately turned into an avalanche of scattering, multi-sided, faux jewels. Nobody says a thing, nobody laughs, or coughs. Every eye is on us, from the students, to the teachers, to the lunchroom ladies.

All of our eyes, however, are on our would-be member, who immediately shrinks under our gaze, quietly pulls back his chair, and begins gathering fallen dice.

***

No moral to this story, beyond keeping an eyes on your dice and your french fries off the gaming table.

Ehehe~ Excellent story, Bunny ^^

Roll20 is pretty much the best thing for tabletops online, there's a few things you need to figure out when you're setting things up but it's easy to use for players, it'll run in any browser that's not a phone or tablet which is far far handier than having to fuck around with installing things and setting up port forwarding and all that.
I had a particularly bad experience with maptool where the guy who was GMing didn't set it up beforehand, we spent about an hour trying to troubleshoot it with him until he gave up

That sounds awful :c

I really like Roll20 but Fantasy Grounds is SO appeal but looks a bit.. ridiculously expensive to get started.

Yeah, if you're just trying it out I'd say play Pathfinder or something you've already got the books for on roll20, so you don't have to spend money only to not get much use out of it :V

I'm a major D&D nut (ask CoffeeSHeizen). d20 systems tend to be a bit unwieldly to play over the internet if people aren't too familiar with the system already. I've done some games with Roll20 before, and while they went well I think that it was slightly clunky. I tend to opt for "mapless" combat in such situations, and do more "cinematic" scenes. Things are looser and rely more on the DM to keep things consistent, but I prefer less fiddling around with online tools for such things. In these cases, I've just used Skype to handle things.

There's not a best way to do things, but for all intents and purposes I would recommend the Roll20 site. I think I just haven't given it the time to fiddle around with it enough, but seeing people that were, well, familiar with it, things ran a good bit more smoothly.

Neat!

I was looking at Fantasy Grounds, which is expensive but it basically covers things much more explicitly than Roll20 (which is still great)

I also looked at Maptools. As well as some sites for making custom maps.

Also my friend and I (we both want to DM, eventually) have bought a few modules for 5e and then found the maps for them online. :D

What do you think of 5e? I feel like it removes some of the unweildy-ness (I am familiar with the mechanics of the earlier versions, but have only build characters in 5e and Pathfinder myself) It does seem pretty suited to "mapless" gameplay.

While I'm not old-hat, I have a love affair with D&D 3.5, which has extended well into Pathfinder. In terms of 5E, I enjoy the basic design. it's a bit of a half-measure in between older D&D, and takes some elements from 4E, but not exactly in a bad way. My own personal experience with playing it isn't fair, since there was a new DM who did things that the system wasn't quite made to handle balance-wise (attributing flat bonuses to assists for enemies instead of the Advantage/Disadvantage system). One of the things I found absolutely dumbfounding was an apparent elimination of size modifiers to AC. It's something i hadn't looked into greatly, but as a shapeshifting-focused Druid, I was surprised that a frog was easier to hit than a bear.

On the other hand, the system is designed to be less exploited, and attempts to put things in check later-game. I enjoy that a low-level party can take down a treant due to the aformentioned lower AC's than one would expect, but also due to cooperation and tactical thought (something that I've seen done, but unfortunately did not get to participate in). I also enjoy how spellcasters don't have a finite number of 0-level spells they can cast per day, how the 0-level offensive spells scale as the character gains in levels, and how instead of having five versions of a single spell, you can simply "buff" it by casting it at a higher level to deal more damage. Requiring minimum stats to do multiclassing is annoying, but also logical, and I do like how the classes have ways to separate your character from another character. Perhaps what I found most annoying was that you'd have to forgo attribute advancement in favor of feats, though the feats do a whole lot more, and I'd be willing to chalk that up to a mixture of personal annoyance as well as having much poorer roles in comparison to the rest of the party.

I played as a druid, and I think perhaps my biggest complain was that there wasn't a large sense of progression in terms of shapeshifting. I was limited to 2 uses, though only a short rest was needed, and that didn't increase to anything greater until 20th level. In addition, the choices for animals didn't have much of a difference either. A small buff to health, a little bit more strength, but when I was offered new animals I simply didn't feel as if I was being offered something that was more than marginally better than what I had previously.

TL;DR: It seemed promising, though I'm ultimately hesistant to give it a final verdict due to what may have simply been a bad campaign and party composition. (When the cleric is the AC tank and doesn't want to heal or do anything beyond use a crossbow, you know you're gonna have a bad time.) I'd give it another try, though.

I agree on all points. Although I think part of the reason they dropped the AC bonus to size was because it works on the assumption that the party, and all enemies, are Medium. It doesnt make sense for two Small or Tiny creatures to have more trouble hitting each other? And making the AC bonus dependent on size differences sounds overcomplex (to me, at least. Most of the math seems to have been reduced to easy-in-the-head levels.)

Druid shapeshifting does improve. I think there is a Class Archetype for it? Your CR for shifting goes up as you level. Its a bit.. Bursty. You can shift into stronger-than-party-member monsters at each CR increase, and then it becomes less useful as you level and get close to the next CR boost. Its very powerful at low levels, if played right, though. By the time the Burst becomes most noticeable you've had some levels to diversify the Druid, though.

I think the feat changes make sense. Since they also eliminated most of the Feat-dependent builds in the process (by expanding the Archetypes)

That said, Druid is one of my least favorite classes in 5e (also the ranger, sad since I usually like those two classes.)

Also Clerics are AC beasts DEPENDANT on Archetype. Which I think clerics get the most options for Archetype of any class, starting out. Also the balance for combat seems to be for off-encounter healing rather than in-encounter healing. Dependant on DM, of course. I never fault a Cleric for not healing, myself. No one likes being a pocket-healer for a group. Especially when Bards, Pally's, Druids, and even Rangers have access to decent healing as well. Its not fair to just say Cleric=Healbot.

Just my opinion, of course.

Also I said Also alot, also.

Also Pathfinder is pretty amazing but I came in too late to grow with it, and its a very large and terrifying system for a newbie.

How D&D 3/3.5 and Pathfinder handle is is that the bonus to AC is also a bonus to Attack. So, a Halfling got a +1 size bonus to Attach and AC. Therefore, assuming all other stats are equal, two halflings have an equal chance of hitting one another as two humans, but the halfling, being the smaller opponent, has an easier time hitting a larger opponent, and the larger opponent has a harder time hitting the smaller opponent. In practice, it makes sense, and if you're vaguely familiar with the size categories then knowing the bonuses is easy, as they simply double. (+16, +8, +4, +2, +1, 0, -1, -2, -4, -8, -16). A lot in D&D operated on simply equations or patterns. Though, I tended to make a lot of characters for others, so I had more exposure to these things to figure it out...

A Druid isn't a natural fit for me, I don't think. I tend to be the "Face" of the party, but someone was playing a Rogue and someone was a Bard, and yet another friend a sorcerer. Lacking a front-line fighter (since the cleric was the AC tank and a major pansy, AND forgot to use his spells), I has the HP tank, and that was the main use of shapeshifting: bonus XP. However, I could deal more damage as a spellcaster, which put me in an odd situation at times, as without another frontline fighter I was often the sole target of enemies. In retrospect I should have gone Barbarian, but I had made a conscious decision to be a druid.

Pathfinder and D&D 3.5 are, well, massive. There's a lot of material out there, a lot to get lost in... It's not the simplest of games to pick up by reading alone. It's not impossible, but it is certainly imposing. I'm usually happy to bring in new players, though, and a lot settles down once the "reach for the d20" instinct kicks in. The choices, the versatility, the flexibility of the system and skills and classes, all that fluidity... that's something that I love about something like Pathfinder. There's so many skills to choose from and there's interesting decisions you need to make, and the game lends itself naturally to the RPing portion. The lack of it was something that I absolutely despised in 4E, and while it improved in 5E. But, it's all a double-edged sword. Having so many options makes everything overwhelming, and adds to the learning curve.

I suppose I should say that I was interested enough in 5E to buy the core rule books, and it's something I'll at least check in on every now-and-then. I can see why people enjoy it, and I can certainly enjoy it myself, but when push comes to shove Pathfinder's where my heart is at.

Also (also, also, also) in regards to the cleric, I simply meant that he didn't really remember he had spells. At all. Didn't buff, didn't use is spirit sword, didn't call down lightning from the sky... just shot his crossbow. I know the role isn't a healbot, but he had a character capable of doing a lot, but simply decided to play it entirely martially, which added to some of the party's problems. (The rogue was a lone wolf and didn't assist other people or in ganging up on the big bad boss, the Sorcerer thought that 0-level spells consumed his spell slots,etc. It was a bit of a problem group. >.<)

Oooh ok, bad cleric. I getchu :c

not in 25 years

can i be a rage mage and punch everything with fire?

well then

ive been playing for 2 years

but what are rules because I make a lot of homebrew weapons and races

I made a couple monsters into characters like wererats and kua toas