I've just (finally!) started up a new Ars Magica campaign in my local gaming group, but some of my members have transportation problems and one will be moving out of the area in a few months. So we're looking to take the game online, leaving me to wonder:
[size=150]What platform or software is currently best suited for playing ArM5 across the internet, especially with a group mostly comprised of Ars newbies?[/size]
I'll most likely handle voice chat via Discord, and the game world history and notes using World Anvil, but I have no idea what the most Ars friendly option is when it comes to shared character management and playing through encounters that require live dice rolling. I've played a little bit with Roll 20, own a copy of Fantasy Grounds, and have even looked into the session capability of MetaCreator, but none of them seem ready to just work right out of the box without a lot of tweaking or an ugly learning curve. For the folks who have done some of that tweaking, what has given you the best results?
(If there are any paid upgrades needed, I'll foot the cost of any "ultimate" or "game master" packages so that my players can participate free.)
I've seen a lot of games get success posting up all the shared information on a wiki; You can update characters and share grogs and covenfolk easily that way. If you're doing voice chat in discord, there are bots you can install into your discord group for dice rolling as well.
I really don't think that's going to be engaging enough to keep the player's attention, especially when the character they are currently playing isn't doing much. From my experience with a previous online campaign, if they have nothing but Discord in front of them and most of the conversation being done via voice, they're going to start surfing in a different window if only to have something to look at, and eventually be gone. It doesn't need all action all the time, but the group needs some specific interface that says "we're playing Ars Magica now, please pay attention" or we'll never get anything done. At the very least I want to display a graphic for the location - not necessarily a map, maybe a drawing of the area or important landmark - and possibly portraits for important NPCs currently present.
Plus, as newbies, automating their rolls as much as possible while showing how the totals were built will be a huge help, something a simple dice rolling bot can't manage. The problem isn't trusting their rolls, it's following their math, walking them through spontaneous spellcasting is hard enough currently with a physical character sheet and a table full of books. I can calculate it quickly enough for them, but then they'll never learn to do it themselves. Something that can build their total using the names for the variables rather than just adding the current value would be great. Ex: (Sta + Cr + Ig + Aura + Stress Die)/2 If I was building a wish list, they'd be able to invoke a spontaneous casting interface that walked them through the process, but while my professional skills extend to writing a detailed spec for the workflow and interface, I'm not actually that good a coder.
The problem may be that I'm not engaging enough for that solution to work, but I'm who they got.
We use RingCentral for our board meetings with members spread throughout New England. It puts the faces in little windows around the edge while being able to share a computer screen for the main part. It works pretty well. I'm not sure if it has a cost to it, but at least seeing faces would help keep the group together.
If you're sharing a screen, you could use MS Excel or a Google Sheet or similar. Choose the Arts and the character and have it show the formula and the values.
Both of my two current sagas run as follows:
Each saga has it's own wiki, mostly to deal with notes about what has happened, people we've met and places we've seen.
Characters (and the covenant) are created and kept updated in Metacreator, with the files kept in Dropbox, available to everyone in the troupe.
As for actually playing, we feet face to face and play, though we have experimented with both mail and googledocs for stories or even just conversations that only involved a single character.
We don't meet often enough, so we try to avoid spending more than a few minutes on scenes that only involve a single player.
Christian: Is that more or less how you'd describe how we run things?
The best option for playing online, specially for novice players is Roll20. The character sheet does a lot to keep the calculations simple and make things easier. I post sample pictures of one of the character sheets if you want to take a look.
If what you're asking about is getting the dice-rolling done easily, I'd also recommend Roll20. The macros are very useful once all the data is entered.
That said, making an attractive player experience in Roll20 is a gigantic pain in the rear. So much uploading and graphics tweaking and other things I hate doing.