Friday, March 15, 2013

Roll20.net--Scored a Crit!

Last night, John W. ran myself and another player through a workout of the roll20.net virtual tabletop RPG system.

I worked well.  There was a bit of a learning curve, but I have that may have been my own shortcomings, instead of a weakness of the interface.

Roll20 easily utilized my webcam and mic, I unfortunately, didn't have my headphones or speaker with me.  I was having trouble seeing the map as a player, but when I logged out and logged back in as a GM, everything went fine.

Assembling an encounter or importing maps from the web is a snap.  And I was very impressed with it's easy to understand interface and self-explanatory toolset.

There seems to be a wide assortment of tokens to use for the player and GM and I see it being a major toolset in my future.

The die roller is great and it keeps track of your last 10 rolls, which was a huge help last night.

I used my MacBook Pro and had no trouble getting everything working.

I really can't praise it enough.  I haven't used other Virtual Table Tops, but at this point, I see no reason to seek any more out.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks again for testing it Mark. I agree with everything you've said. Most of the problems from the Player Point of view I 'think' are resolved via giving proper permissions for tokens/characters. I had simply not put the Player Characters into the system. But, for an attempt where no one had run the program before, I think it went great.

The Big boon for me was how smoothly everything worked. Minimal lag, smooth transitions between pages, and only a short wait to 'log' in because of my 'free user status'. When you compare it to the ten bucks a month that you would pay for D&D insider, the Five dollar 'upgrade' and free PCGen seem to be the way to go.

I hope we're both able to use this in the future!

OkieWriter said...

Roll20 also works perfectly on Linux, and doesn't require a download so it is perfect where some of your players are on public computers.

With the $5 upgrade you get Dynamic Lighting. It is usable by everyone, once the GM has it. This feature lets you simulate torches, or more easily expose just the parts of the maps your PCs can see.

To speed things up, try not to upload large maps. Make smaller maps, and upload the pieces you need for the session and when possible, remove the old stuff. And remember to group select PCs and other icons when moving them between pages. And copy and paste PCs between pages so the information doesn't have to be updated on each page.

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