Router issue

[Doc_Sparks]

So, I considered starting an online game with some friends and my quest for a tool to help me create a world brought me to this wonderful program. My problem is sadly one that the group will probably tell me cannot be easily fixed. I can't personally afford the internet on a monthly basis. As such I tend to use free wifi from a local McDonald's restaurant. This of course means that I have zero control of the router and no ability to adjust any of its settings. I tried setting maptools to UPnP but was given an error message that said mapping wouldn't be possible before setting up a server. The server didn't show up on the list because, of course, the router is blocking it. I doubt there is anything that can be done other than asking the restaurant to help me out but it's worth asking about with my rather inept ability with this program I recently discovered.

[jckrbbt]

Chances are they will have ports 80 and 443 open. You can try to run your server on one of these two standard ports. The other thing you could do is save your campaign file to a shared or public folder in DropBox or similar, and have a friend run the server. MapTools has pretty low overhead, and you can run multiple instances concurrently. I've run two instances at a time, one as a GM, and one as a client. Hope that helps.

[Doc_Sparks]

This actually helps out greatly. I'll test these out and see if it works. Thank you.

[aliasmask]

You may also want to look at Hamachi for you and your players. It uses port 80 and will translate for other services from your computer as well.

As for the overhead, if you're on ADSL and are the server, you will see some lag at 4 players and at 5 players or more, depending on the maps and tokens could possibly be too much and cause some lag related weirdness with tokens. But I'm sure McDonalds has something better than ADSL, but may choke individual connections to ADSL speeds.

Another option is using a phone with 3G and have it be a hot spot. The up and download speed is about 4-6 mbs which is really good for hosting and there won't be a firewall to worry about.