Greetings! While the forums are down, Peter was kind enough to allow the blog to serve as a place to offer insights into ERA.
It would be interesting to know, from those who are continuing their gaming sessions remotely, how are you doing it?
For those who use are wondering, ERA can be used for remote sessions, even though it’s not specifically designed for it. Managing this is not trivial, but unless your Internet provider blocks certain applications, it can be done.
The only thing you must do is allow ERA to be seen from outside your local network. When you use the Adventuring module and your players use the Character status module, all are accessing the same port in the local network, normally provided by a router or the Internet provider modem. What you need to do is “open” that port to the outside world, by telling your router or modem to do a “port forwarding”.
There is a comprehensive guide for a large number of devices at https://portforward.com/router.htm .
In case your Internet provider requires you to forward only ports in a specific range (ERA uses 7777 by default), you can configure that by adding the line ServerPort = NUMBER in your ERA/RMC/ERA-RMC-Settings.conf or ERA/RMFRP/ERA-RMFRP-Settings.conf.
Let us know in the comments if you tried this or other approaches to remote play and how did it go.
You can also use the comments section to suggest content on ERA you would like to see published here.
For specific troubleshooting you can always write to the support account: era–support.voriigkye@recursor.net .
Stay safe!
Thanks for the help Voriig!
I had not played remotely at all until the pandemic, but now I have two groups going on Roll20. I am currently playing D&D on them, just because it is easy (since the modules with maps and tokens are sold by Wizards of the Coast). But eventually I plan to move one group to Rolemaster and play remotely.
I was not sure whether to try Roll20 or Fantasy Grounds, but we went with Roll20 in the end. What I would really like to see is more support for Rolemaster (especially RMU) in Roll20. Above all, a Character Sheet.
I haven’t tried Fantasy Grounds yet, but I understand there is more Rolemaster support for it?
I’m not sure a Character Sheet for RMU can legally be added to Roll20 until the games is officially released. The same is preventing me from offering ERA for RMU.
With regards to Fantasy Grounds, I have never tried it, but from what I remember reading in the forums there was a user who was the one developing the Rolemaster addons.
I just checked and it seems to be Dadakin. Also I did a quick search and these seem to be the available packages in Fantasy Grounds for Rolemaster: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/store/?search=rolemaster
Wow, the Fantasy Grounds stuff looks really good! The interface is pretty old-school, but I actually kind of like it. Being able to resolve attacks and spells and even stat gains would be far more than anything you can do on Roll20 currently, so that is encouraging.
I very much look forward to the day RMU is released, because I think the tools you are making would be really amazing for it.
My group has gone to using Zoom for our sessions – one of the players was given a Pro account for work. I have an almost 80-year-old player who is not super technical, so this is as far as I wanted to push people. We’re really playing primarily for social contact, and I’m not worrying about progress much. I bought a good external webcam on a flexible base right at the start of our stay-at-home, and I use that as 2nd cam on Zoom, showing the tabletop. That has worked really well – so far the biggest problem we’ve had was the elderly player’s hearing aids were chirping and all of our microphones were picking it up, but she couldn’t hear it at all.