Roll20 uses cookies to improve your experience on our site. Cookies enable you to enjoy certain features, social sharing functionality, and tailor message and display ads to your interests on our site and others. They also help us understand how our site is being used. By continuing to use our site, you consent to our use of cookies. Update your cookie preferences .
×
Create a free account

The Ultimate Game Table?

Hey friends, I've been a Roll20 user for a long time. Pro for most of that time because I believe the platform's improvement is a boon to gaming as a whole. I use a bunch of API scripts, and have run a mix of homebrew and published adventures in various systems. What I want to see/know are some examples of games/tables that had unabashedly phenomenal  setups. Cool functionality that is beyond what Roll20 natively supports. Best practices of resources, what APIs play well together and add to the game in a constructive and not distractive way, that sort of thing. What, with a bit of time and effort, is this platform truly capable of when unleashed? It does not matter what game system is involved, I just wanna see the systems used in a cool and polished way.
What really helped me go to a new level of improv and reactive DM'ing for when the players choices trully go off book was setting up my live session with pristine cool scripts and api functions that improve our actions in game without distracting from the fun of RP and Improv or taking player agency away.  Also the most important thing I did that expanded my improv and response time was learning how to best use the transmogrifier.  Setup a session that has every single battlemap you have ever drawn up/Dynamic lightinged up and store it in a session called "Battlemaps" or store battlemaps by biomes, I just name my maps with a scheme and keep them all in one battlemap session, then transmog alphabetizes the maps and I scroll down to "forestspecialbridge" or "forestspecialcabin" or "Forest1", or "ForestCampsite".  Also I do not use the default Monster manual, I spent 2 weeks making every creature have 7-15 tokenside default tokens and then store every single one of those creatures in a session I call my own bestiary and yoink creatures over whenever I need them during session.  I also have a cool system in the game where if the players have a small chance of encountering a monster that is "unique" so I just flip the token and run a script that adjusts their attacks/saves/hitpoints on the fly.  This really adds to the players experience as they don't trully see the guardrail when they drive off book with their choices. I have a massive set of tables and decks setup in my session.  I have a table system that rolls biome based encounters for the 4 tiers of dnd similar to xanathars encounter tables, but expanded and tweaked a ton adding in monsters from many sources and fixing encounters I felt were dumb for their tiers.  For the Magic Item tables, I started with the default tables then as I ran each adventure module and purchased the newer books, I sat down and systematically added them where I felt they belonged.   For tables, you absolutely need the table export/import api.  Sadly nobody can really share their own tables with this api as it is too close to breaking copyright rules.  Same with encounter tables, but what I like about my encounter tables is:  
Keep the live session as narrow in assets as possible so that you don't lag out your players with tons of stuff or lag out yourself.  Have a session setup as a storage session so when you finish with an asset, instead of straight up deleting it, just move it to the storage session and then delete it from the live session.  Try to think of common things you will use often in a session, like for instance, don't burn every map, use a marching order page where the players stare at a generic map forming up a formation and then only move to a map if player decisions lead to some kind of combat, otherwise just describe areas to the players even if you have a map in mind. Honestly feel like plus/free users don't trully experience the value of roll20 without the transmogrifier, I could never run an entire module in one session, that'd be so awful,  and laggy.  
Honestly feel like plus/free users don't trully experience the value of roll20 without the transmogrifier, I could never run an entire module in one session, that'd be so awful,  and laggy.  Yes, agree the proverbial 110%. Wish I had known this before I got 1000 hours in.
Paul said: Honestly feel like plus/free users don't trully experience the value of roll20 without the transmogrifier, I could never run an entire module in one session, that'd be so awful,  and laggy.  Yes, agree the proverbial 110%. Wish I had known this before I got 1000 hours in. FWIW its literally the greatest feature they have going for them and guess where it is?  Buried at the bottom of a tab requiring a scroll down constantly to use it and no way of making a button/macro for it.  These guys clearly do not use their own product.  There are multiple glaring issues with the UI that they just completely ignore like we all know without a doubt that there are tons of UI annoyances and they never fix them lol.  Usually having to do with scrolling down.  How many people have endured the double scrolldown that we have to do when setting permissions for macros?  how long has that been there and not a single dev has ever been a DM in a game and thought to himself after seeing that that maybe they should change the default size of the edit macro window lol.