Always on game?

[myscribe]

Is there a way to off-site host FGII on godaddy or hostgator?
I would like to use FGII to run a game where the players can react throughout the day (ie. one or two rounds per day) over a 3-4 month period. We would rotate the DM between the 5 of us every 3-4 months.

I don't have an extra computer to act as my own server and not sure how to allow a rotating DM to access to the box.

Thanks,
Steve

[jthm0138]

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[Ghoti]

This is a wonderfully awesome question. I was wondering the same thing awhile back, but couldn't find a way to do it.

I would imagine that if you have a windows-based host running Terminal Services (serverese for Remote Desktop), that might work, but it would be somewhat clunky, but would at least allow for someone to connect as GM.

If you didn't have anyone there as GM, that would also work once it was launched as long as you didn't need to use the mapping/masking, or the combat tracker, etc.

Again, this all depends on whether FG will play nice with Terminal Services/Remote Desktop.

[jthm0138]

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[Ghoti]

Perhaps VNC might work then? I don't know whether it has the same limitation.

[Master]

I am not sure that FGII would work good for a persistant game. The whole conceptual idea behind the two are completely different. In my opinion your best bet would be to use a php web forum that is modified. I ran a mechwarrior 3rd edition game that way (which was a complete failure). I modified the software so that you typed out your turn and how many dice needed to be rolled and when you submitted the post it rolled the dice and locked the post. I then wrote a web based chessboard to track player movement in combat. It worked well but lost some of the magic which is why it failed. A VTT is a lot better in that respect because you are not cutting out the actual human interaction aspect. Although you have to schedule times.

[jthm0138]

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[Griogre]

A VPN is a good way around port forwarding. I know there have been several FG games run using Hamachi a free VPN. Here's a link to the site: https://secure.logmein.com/products/hamachi/vpn.asp?lang=en

[Dwelian]

My group is running a game right now using OpenVPN (https://www.openvpn.net). It's free and relatively easy to set up (once you poke the appropriate hole in the firewall :). I set up individual keys for every player and set up the server to always give out the same IP addresses to the same players, so once everyone has connected to the GM they can just use the session history entry from then on.

[Jolan]

Hamachi is a great option. I use it to connect to my folks' PCs with VNC to show them how to do stuff. Since it is a VPN and I now have a direct IP for each of their systems they don't have to mess with virtual host settings in the router.