While this could have been forced into Indie Publishing or RPG development, I think it fits best in the "Actual Play" area... especially as this board seems to enjoy discussing personal history.

I didn't start playing D&D until 4E.  I'd played a lot of World of WarCraft, and to suddenly be in a world where there were similar mechanics and stats for fighting couple with an amazing amount of leeway to do whatever the heck my friends and I wanted was intoxicating.  Played for a couple years with friends until we scattered across the U.S. for employment reasons.  After a few months we all started to crave a way to play together again, so we tried MapTools (with Ventrillo for voice chat).  At this point I was the DM and the system created a lot of barriers for us.  While there are things I enjoy about the program, the firewall/port situation is atrocious and we never seemed to be able to get things how we wanted.  So the game fizzled out.

Fast forward a couple years, and I wound up making some new friends and playing 4E (and Gamma World... oh Gamma World) locally.  It has been excellent.  I began bragging to my old party about the good times I was having and everyone began to get the itch again.  So we looked at the options currently available and none felt right.  Then one of group's members realized a program he'd been building for simple image sharing and organization actually had everything we needed to play together.  And what was better... it had none of the crap we DIDN'T need.  It was a space where people could gather and move around tokens.  It was a long-distance TABLE.

And so here we are: http://roll20.net/  The system will launch wide for free this summer after we've done some beta testing with other players who will help us make sure that we're ready for roleplaying outside what we've been playing, but I can say with confidence that Roll20 works, because I'm regularly using it to play with friends.  Throughout tweaking it, it's been fun to see how focusing on simplicity has kept our group happy because it feels the most like actually getting together to hang out. 

I'd love to answer any questions folks have about how the system works or entertain any ideas you've got about things we might not realize yet would be helpful to the sorts of games you're playing and/or building. 

Hi and welcome,

I'd really like to learn more about your specific experiences with Gamma World. Your post implies that you really found what you wanted in role-playing at that point, and perhaps that you applied whatever principles were involved to your own designs. Tell me more about what playing Gamma World was like for you.

Best, Ron

Ron wrote:
Hi and welcome,

I'd really like to learn more about your specific experiences with Gamma World. Your post implies that you really found what you wanted in role-playing at that point, and perhaps that you applied whatever principles were involved to your own designs. Tell me more about what playing Gamma World was like for you.

Best, Ron

Hi Nolan,

Here's the thing: if you can't anchor the discussion in this thread with some specific discussion of a real play-experience, then I will close the thread. You can read about the rules for that in the sticky post at the top of this forum (Actual Play). I'd like to see the discussion continue, so I'm offering you a way to do that. Posts like your reply are a signal that you either aren't understanding the requirement, so I'm clarifying it here, or that you don't want to.

Best, Ron