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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.

LostOne wrote:(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.

Who is gaming remotely with their group? I am.

What tools and services are you using? Foundry VTT + Discord. I would strongly recommend foundry over the cheap freebie stuff. It won't have Palladium specific mods for it but it will have lots of other great features out of the box as well as tons of great mods.

What has worked and not worked for you? I've tried some other software that isn't Foundry, didn't like it as much. Found it lacking. Also Foundry isn't perfect either, the best thing in the world would be Foundry but with a better interface and less difficulty to set up, but other VTTs tend to not be as robust imho.

I use Roll20 and Discord. At this point, I am unlikely to change due to a specific feature that Roll20 has (probably due to age of that platform and progression of development from that point).

Originally, Roll20 didn't have the character sheet tab (where you find the fancier UI now), but had just the Bio & Info tab (to store avatar, backstory, etc.) and the Attributes & Abilities tab (where you create attributes and the abilities/macros that can reference the attributes). So, if I make a "character" named Wizard Spell Macros, I can use the Attributes & Abilities tab to create a macro for each wizard spell. These macros can be written to not use the attributes of this particular sheet, but to use the attributes of the sheet associated with a selected token. You can also write a macro that will spit out a list of the spells with each of the spell titles being a clickable link that will trigger the macro associated with that spell. The very first macro on my Wizard Macros "character" is the menu, with all the individual spell ability macros following after.

This means that when I create an npc (or someone creates a PC) that is a wizard, I can just copy that menu, edit it down to the spells they know, and they can now cast their spells by selecting their token and clicking a couple buttons. The advantage to this is that it is not in a compendium. I don't need to drag and drop a bunch of individual spells to a sheet. If I decide something about a spell is problematic, I can edit the macro in on the Wizard Macros "character", and that will immediately change how it is cast by every pc or npc in the game.

I have sheets for each variety of magic, poisons, and faerie foods. The one for poisons gets a bit of use any time there is a character that uses poisons on their weaponry, since I can put clickable buttons in their attack description to roll if they succeed on a strike roll and the poison gets applied.

I think Foundry has potential, but I have to admit to having a bit of a sour taste in my mouth about the platform. At the very beginning, there was no refund policy because "you will just like it". Also, there is a Pathfinder 1E game that I play in that migrated from Roll20 to Foundry. So far, we have spent 2 out of 5 sessions troubleshooting problems instead of playing. While this isn't directly the fault of Foundry, Foundry is sort of like cell phones and the old joke: "there is an app for that". A lot of things that GM wants to do aren't available in Foundry core, so he gets adding modules. And then modules start conflicting, or they simply don't get updated with Foundry, or they aren't stable for whatever reason. At this point, I am quite sure I won't be spending $50 on something that doesn't have the features I might want, and I can't rely on any modules that might provide them, because they may not keep up with Foundry's development.

From the sounds of it, it can be pretty good for some systems that are built for it (assuming the GM doesn't want too many modules).

I've been playing on the roll20 site for Silvermoon's Robotech games for at least five years. before that the PB chat rooms were the place to chat and play games.