Good day to you all! I have a special situation and I was wondering if anyone may have some ideas for solutions. My friends and I (all in our 30-40s) are spread out over the country and, due to the demands of life (which I'm sure you all know how disruptive regular life can be) we aren't able to play synchronous D&D. We all had a desire to play together however, so we found a way. We all created Google accounts (because Google works great on desktop or mobile) and a shared folder. I am the dungeon master of our little group of adventurers and we use Google Docs to host all of the dialogue (for those interested, we each picked a font and color for our characters and made some text rules, such as spoken text is all in bold, action text is in italics, and such things like that) and Google Hangouts for chatting and doing individual character to dm type stuff. This is working fantastically for the narrative portion of D&D. For the maps, we used Google Draw but this is a very limited tool (the map size cannot be too big and, if on mobile, you cannot edit the drawing and move your character around and do things like that). We have also tried Google Sheets and this has worked better for desktop but, like Draw, mobile users are not able to manipulate their tokens and such. And so here is the problem that I'm looking for help with. Does anyone know of a map tool that would be able to be used asynchronously (meaning it wouldn't have to be constantly hosted - like a Google Doc, anyone can log on at any time and make changes), work on both mobile and desktop, and allow for large map sizes. If it had features like fog-of-war and things like that, it would be great but certainly not a requirement.
Perhaps there is nothing like this that exists, but if you know of a tool that would be similar and have an idea of how we could work it, I would certainly be open to suggestions. I thank you for your time! Have a lovely day!
Have you tried Roll20.net? I think players can join games without the GM present. I'm not sure what they can or cannot do while the GM is not present. Roll20 has fog of war and other cool features. I've never used the mobile app and it's ratings aren't good, but the desktop version is terrific.
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"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." – William Gibson, Neuromancer
A couple of my party members looked into Roll20 but they said it didn't function well on mobile and that the adventure needed to be open (or hosted) on someones computer for it to stay active. I didn't personally try.
Yeah, the DM need not be present for anything at all in Roll20, and the content and state persists (hosted by them). It is a little iffy on mobile, although it works, but you need to pay a subscription to access it on mobile. (Ignore their app, completely. It's useless.)
I'm currently playing a game in a very similar situation (except it's not just across the country, but across the world, including friends who've moved to Mexico and England), and it works great. Obviously slower than "live", but every once in a while we can all jump in at the same time and do a live session, which is great for those "important" encounters. :D
Although I'm afraid I don't have a solution for you, if you're okay with being limited to grid then you might want to give my web app Mipui a try. It doesn't match all your requirements, but it might work better for you than Google Sheets and Google Draw.
Specifically:
Maps are persistent. You don't even have to log in - just share the URL with your friends.
It supports mobile... But it's flaky. In particular it's hard to drag tokens around in mobile.
It allows for arbitrarily large maps, but in practice things start to get slow when your map starts getting over ~40x40. My next version will be able to handle much larger maps, but it's not ready yet.
It has fog-of-war (and a line-of-sight tool to reveal it) BUT it considers anyone with editing permission as a DM, so if you need your players to edit the map as well, you can't really use it.
Attached an animation demonstrating how it looks and how the fog of war behaves. Keep in mind there are a few other themes but they are all symbolic.
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Good day to you all! I have a special situation and I was wondering if anyone may have some ideas for solutions. My friends and I (all in our 30-40s) are spread out over the country and, due to the demands of life (which I'm sure you all know how disruptive regular life can be) we aren't able to play synchronous D&D. We all had a desire to play together however, so we found a way. We all created Google accounts (because Google works great on desktop or mobile) and a shared folder. I am the dungeon master of our little group of adventurers and we use Google Docs to host all of the dialogue (for those interested, we each picked a font and color for our characters and made some text rules, such as spoken text is all in bold, action text is in italics, and such things like that) and Google Hangouts for chatting and doing individual character to dm type stuff. This is working fantastically for the narrative portion of D&D. For the maps, we used Google Draw but this is a very limited tool (the map size cannot be too big and, if on mobile, you cannot edit the drawing and move your character around and do things like that). We have also tried Google Sheets and this has worked better for desktop but, like Draw, mobile users are not able to manipulate their tokens and such. And so here is the problem that I'm looking for help with. Does anyone know of a map tool that would be able to be used asynchronously (meaning it wouldn't have to be constantly hosted - like a Google Doc, anyone can log on at any time and make changes), work on both mobile and desktop, and allow for large map sizes. If it had features like fog-of-war and things like that, it would be great but certainly not a requirement.
Perhaps there is nothing like this that exists, but if you know of a tool that would be similar and have an idea of how we could work it, I would certainly be open to suggestions. I thank you for your time! Have a lovely day!
Have you tried Roll20.net? I think players can join games without the GM present. I'm not sure what they can or cannot do while the GM is not present. Roll20 has fog of war and other cool features. I've never used the mobile app and it's ratings aren't good, but the desktop version is terrific.
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." – William Gibson, Neuromancer
A couple of my party members looked into Roll20 but they said it didn't function well on mobile and that the adventure needed to be open (or hosted) on someones computer for it to stay active. I didn't personally try.
Yeah, the DM need not be present for anything at all in Roll20, and the content and state persists (hosted by them). It is a little iffy on mobile, although it works, but you need to pay a subscription to access it on mobile. (Ignore their app, completely. It's useless.)
I'm currently playing a game in a very similar situation (except it's not just across the country, but across the world, including friends who've moved to Mexico and England), and it works great. Obviously slower than "live", but every once in a while we can all jump in at the same time and do a live session, which is great for those "important" encounters. :D
Although I'm afraid I don't have a solution for you, if you're okay with being limited to grid then you might want to give my web app Mipui a try. It doesn't match all your requirements, but it might work better for you than Google Sheets and Google Draw.
Specifically:
Attached an animation demonstrating how it looks and how the fog of war behaves. Keep in mind there are a few other themes but they are all symbolic.