Roll20 - it's rather good

[Rob Lang]

My group is having trouble. I have 2 players who commute from London (only 45 miles but in Southern England that can be 90 minutes or more each way). I recently lost a local player and so the locals goes down to 2. Bit of a bummer.

I'd like to increase the size of my group and to do that means either going locally or bringing in other players who have moved away but would like to play. I think I'd like to try both!

I do a lot of Skype-chatting at work, so the idea of having in-depth conversations over video chat is not a problem.


So I signed up over on , which is a "virtual tabletop". I really wanted it for sharing my scruffy hand-drawn maps, die rolls and face-to-face chat and it certainly has that in spades!

The banter was still there. It's difficult to have little side conversations like you can in person. One of my players is blind and she said the interface is rubbish for her but she's used to using it for another game so worked around it.

The players found that they did much more during the session and I found it much easier to use the rules. In a sense, the game felt slowed down; but they achieved more. I also used the private-messaging stuff too, which was a little easier than passing notes.

On the second session we had some loss of sound, partly due to my router/ISP being pants and needing a reset. That didn't stop the game, though, it just meant they talked without me.

I quite liked being able to upload the maps straight from my disk rather than entering into length negotiations with my printer.

I'd much rather be face to face but if that's just not going to happen then I'd rather have a game rather than none. We're polishing up the current campaign and then I'll start a new one, which will have a trawl for players!

[kylesgames]

My experiences with Roll20 have been good. My local group doesn't like the whole online thing, but I've run a couple games with them that turned out decent/okay (some of my players have atrocious etiquette with regards to online play, so there was background noise, unannounced absences, and so forth through the whole thing).

I do have a group that I've run with exclusively through Roll20, and that's turned out pretty good. We usually use Skype outside of Roll20 for audio, but the rolls and PM's work well through it, and it's a good base for mapping things out.

[Rob Lang]

Great! Do you use the grid stuff?

We're more of a talky-and-scribble sort of group so don't need it. I also have a pen-and-tablet, which makes scribbling very familiar.

[kylesgames]

[Anastylos]

I use roll20 as well. What my players like most is the possibility to play music. We are using Team Speak for talking, because its not that resource greedy as roll20 or skype.