Savage Worlds Session report

I just ran a dungeon crawl using Savage Worlds Fantasy Companion 3 of the 5 players showed up and we played. The three players used the other two characters (the Halfling burglar and the Half-orc fighter who is also a pacifist and a potential berserker) collectively. The players managed to clear the sewers, beneath the town of Socanth, of the horrors and pests therein, and thereby brought relative peace and prosperity back to the town. I won't go into more details in case I want to run it again. All the players had at least read the quick start rules, so I didn't have to use a lot of time teaching everything. I think the highlight of the night was the wizard attacking with her staff and rolling 23 on an exploding d4. We played for almost 3 hours and had no problems aside from one player, who once, randomly got disconnected (it probably wasn't a roll20 problem though) but he was back in less than a minute. Now on to my thoughts on the VTT: Macros: Before the game started I had crafted many macros that did many things, but quickly stopped using all my complicated ones. For most of the session I was using macros that were variations on /roll 1dX! and was doing the math in head and calling the results, like I do in "Face To Face" gaming. IMHO Roll20 doesn't need an overly complicated macro system, what it has now I found sufficient, the one thing I do wish it had was a way to roll 2 or more Dice at one time and NOT add them together, and then have the result appear on the same line (unless it already has one, and I can't figure out how to it). I would like output to look like this: (3)=3 text, (5)=5 more text. I have now used roll20 from both sides, once as a player and tonight as a GM I find roll20 very useful. For over a year I haven't been able to find anyone in town to play savage worlds, using roll20 I have managed to get two games in less than a week.

Thanks for your insight. I just signed up for Roll20, and tried out a campaign so I could play with the dice roller, and found that to be an issue as well. Did you use the cards for managing initiative? It'd be nice if you could drag the card drawn over to the initiative table and have it handle card-based initiative. That said, I imagine it wouldn't be that hard to manage it by hand.

Doesn't it do that? I thought that that was the only card function that actually works.

I can draw cards, but if I try and drag and drop them on tokens or on items in the Turn Order window, nothing happens, and I even get the 'not' symbol when it hovers over it. I may be missing how to do it.

@Neal I did use the cards for initiative tracking. You drag the card over to the turn tracker and put it on the 0, not the token. You can not automatically sort, you have to do that manually, takes about 5 seconds.

Y'know, I had no idea I could drag onto the combat tracker. I suddenly feel much better about how Roll20 handles the card initiative. All I really want now is the ability to shuffle and re-deal to everyone currently already in the tracker and that will speed things up *tremendously*.

A button dealing for everyone should be enough. There are characters who receive more than one card (and then choose on which one to act), but it can be taken care of by listing them several times in the turn tracker. There are also groups acting together on the same card, but listing the group instead of the individuals should do the trick. So one button to deal for everybody should work I think. Maybe the possibility to sort the results by card value should be envisaged?