I have created a campaign where my US based friend is GMing for us a campaign (the red hand) with out level 9 atm party in DND 5.5. He is somewhat near to the Lake whose name I wont mention , I am in the UK. My wife sits in the same room as me on a 2nd ethernet cabled PC. The third and fourth players in our party are in Sussex and Manchester. So , we are all over the UK and playing with a DM in the US. When I play the game, I find lag for me on my gaming rig to be a minor issue, not annoying level - present , but not too bad. (Sorc/Bard) not 3d dice, Chrome. When my friend in East Sussex plays, (Wifi at home, by the router, Chrome browser, 3 yo laptop) he gets lag and sometimes up to a minute before a roll on a charsheet appears in the chat log. He uses 3d dice with his barbarian. Bestie in the US seems to have fewer problems, his connection seems stable (gaming rig, Chrome, 3 monitors I think, multiple tabs, discord, Brave free-meeting). When my wife, in the same room as me , but on an old laptop i5 8gb ram , ethernet , chrome - rolls spells / dice etc we can see delays of up to 2 MINUTES. And player 4 is on a 2 yo laptop in Stevenage, with Chrome and doesnt often mention issues with lag but hes a quiet one by default We play on Sunday nights at 8pm UK until 11pm UK This is super immersion destroying and frustrating for my party, and for me as resident IT support. All party members are becoming familiar with spamming F5 in the browser and closing Chrome, but this isnt working really , just increasing the party-pissed-off-level. (yes I know the laptop(s) could be changed as it seems to be worse than the gaming rigs in use, but - bear with me) My question , technically - am I right that my account, created in the UK, game created by me, then shared to a GM in the US is hosted in the US? When I DM , is it also hosted in the US? Should I consider latency as 200+ (I havent checked, but am guessing at this point) because as a UK subscriber to roll20, I am always connecting to a host server in the US? Can I understand please the tech "skeleton" that my use case likely has? What steps if any , can I investigate , so as to reduce the lag and issues being felt by my wife and friends (and a bit by me) as this is going to end the campaign if I dont get it sorted? Has this been found to be a "suck it up" response in the past ? Can I make it right as resident group IT nerd? (time to write a player guide on clearing browser cache half an hour before Roll20, and to complete windows update, and reset the router?)
