Fria Ligans forum

Has anyone tried playing via VTT yet? If so, what would you recommend and any hints or tips to share? 

I have, and it works great. The only issue I had was with map scaling, because one might be larger than another one when imported into Roll20.

Awesome. I'll give it a crack, then. Thanks for the tip about the scaling—I'll watch out for that. 

One thing I found cumbersome was rotating the initiative cards to indicate what actions had been spent.  I had some custom poker chips made for tracking that when playing face to face, so I used the graphics from those to make cards in roll20.  On the front of the card I put the "available" side and on the back I put the "spent" side.  I set the cards to play face down so a player can pull them out of their hand and it will switch from available to spent.  I'd include the graphics here, but I can't get the image insertion to cooperate.

I haven't but plan on running in Fantasy Grounds in the new year. One of the community members created a really great rule set for Alien.

https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/s ... PG-ruleset

hey,

There is a pretty good mod for tabletop simulator, if you are into that particular type of software.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ ... 1753799650

Regards
Jolly

I haven't run or played this game yet, let alone via VTT, but when I do I will use MapTool via rptools.net (I just mentioned this program in the maps thread). It is a combination mapping tool and VTT. It is free. My gaming group uses it to play D&D. We started with Roll20 but after the data breach (https://blog.roll20.net/post/1869631243 ... estigation) and the general limitations of Roll 20 including paid features, issues with voice chat, saving maps, and map size, I switched to running with MapTool and haven't looked back.

I would not say MapTool is a solution that doesn't require some learning. However there are good videos explaining features, a wiki, and an active user community. I was skeptical at first but after spending time with the program I am amazed at all the things it can do. The developers are working on many improvements of late and have just added the ability to play sounds for the players via the program, which would be a nice thing for an ALIEN game. Such features require a small bit of coding (3 lines or so) but once you have it written once you can use it as boilerplate. I grabbed code someone had posted online to use for sound in my games.

You can also create rule sets (they call them 'frameworks') for games. I haven't seen one for ALIEN but I would feel comfortable adding most of what I would want myself. I can think of many ways in which MapTool would be an excellent way to run ALIEN. For example the ability to add a map to the program from an image or PDF (such as from a cinematic adventure) and to reveal it or conceal it zone by zone with vision blocking as the player characters progressed through it.

It's not the prettiest user interface or mapping tool. For the price (free) and the feature set, it more than gets the job done. You also don't need an account or to provide personal information to use it. Every player just needs to have the program installed and you can run the game using your PC as the server.