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I have been playing tabletop roleplaying games since a fateful day when I was 13. I had gone with a friend to play Magic: the Gathering at a local video game shop that also happened to sell Magic cards. One of the players mentioned a gaming group starting up at the local Media Play.<br/><br/>Curious, my friend and I got a ride over to Media Play. There, I found a pretty large group of people playing Magic. I also saw an interesting sight: some people with books, funny shaped dice, and little painted figures arranged on a square grid. I watched for a few minutes, and quickly got the gist of what they were doing. I asked if I could join. The response? "Sure, we need a cleric."<br/><br/>Thus began a hobby that has spanned half my life and cost a great deal of money. I have played a number of systems: World of Darkness, Cyberpunk 2020, Shadowrun, Rifts, Call of Cthulhu, Star Wars (the older edition that used d6s), homebrew systems created by various friends. But I always come back to D&D. It was my first system, and it remains my favorite through three editions of the game. In a lot of ways, it has grown with me.<br/><br/>In the last few years, though, I haven't had many chances to play D&D. I was skeptical of 4e at first, and then spent a lot of money buying 4e books after Alexandra Erin convinced me of its merits in her <a href="http://alexandraerin.livejournal.com/43316.html">repeated</a>, <a href="http://alexandraerin.livejournal.com/44950.html">impassioned</a> <a href="http://alexandraerin.livejournal.com/67583.html">blog</a> <a href="http://alexandraerin.livejournal.com/69027.html">posts</a> <a href="http://alexandraerin.livejournal.com/110210.html">about</a> <a href="http://community.wizards.com/alexandraerin/blog/2010/07/21/hors_de_combat_-_what_does_0_hp_mean">it</a> (all of those links are excellent reading, even if you already know you like 4e). I sat on these purchases for months, planning games, even getting some people to make characters. But no game formed; the other players either didn't have free time, or I didn't have free time, or we were too far away.<br/><h3>The Search for a Gaming Table</h3><br/>Eventually I found a little free time to bring a game together, and since I couldn't solve the problem of my friends' lack of free time, I started looking to solve the problem of people who had free time, but were too far away. So I started looking for a solution to playing D&D over the Internet. Namely, what I needed was something known as a virtual tabletop. I started out with simple requirements: free is good, open source is even better. Since there was no good overview or comparison of the existing virtual tabletop options, I decided to make one. I'll describe, briefly, why I didn't pick each one (until I get to the one I *did* pick, of course).<br/><h4>OpenRPG - frustratingly deprecated</h4><br/>Years ago (about 10 of them), I tried using WebRPG as a virtual tabletop. I remember it having a somewhat cumbersome and over-engineered interface, and being frustrated with it on many levels. Still, it was the first thing in my memory, so it's the first thing I looked up. Turns out it went open source a while back, and is now called <a href="http://www.rpgobjects.com/index.php?c=orpg">OpenRPG</a>.<br/><br/>Unfortunately, this was a non-starter. OpenRPG is written in Python (yay!), but doesn't work with Python 2.7, which is the <em>de facto </em>standard in Fedora. I didn't want to maintain a separate Python install for just one program (this is possible, but would be a pretty big hassle to set up), so OpenRPG was a bust.<br/><h4>Screen Monkey - expensive and cumbersome</h4><br/>The next program I discovered was Screen Monkey. Once again, Alexandra Erin was instrumental in this - she mentioned using it for her online games. Screen Monkey has one big advantage - for the players, it is browser based, so only the DM needs to install any client software. Unfortunately, that software only runs in Windows. So, I found an old install disk for Windows XP, and installed it as a virtual machine using <a href="htt
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