Ok, just finished a five-player playtest of a scenario using the Serenity RPG Cortex system. Our heroes were attacked by Space Pirate Goblins! After a battle on board a lifeboat, we sat down and went over what we thought about Roll20. Here's the list we got. I know some of these are already addressed and some are more minor. For completion's sake, I am listing all of the things that came up. Overall impressions was that my players were blown away by the program. My real-life tabletop group even wants to use it in our face-to-face games. Very well done!
- First and foremost, we need a way to tell who was in the room and who isn't. I sent the link to several old groups I played with as well as others and we had people drop in and out throughout the game. Problem was, we couldn't tell who was currently in.
- Secondly, with every person adding to the room we have additional names get added to drop-boxes, character journals, etc. Eventually I had a selection of a good dozen people to speak as, even though only five were current players. That's not including characters! A way to delete names from the room is needed. Even now, when I fire up my campaign we tested it with I still have a list of names. It seems to add the players persistently. When we start up our second series of playtests, it's going to be tough to wade through the list.
- In addition, the ability to name tokens would help sort through a multitude of tokens as well identical minion tokens.
- The ability to remove individuals from the initiative order. As they killed Space Goblins the turn order stayed the same. I either had to recreate the turn order or just play past the dead.
- The Players Tab was deleted off of an old map page and I lost the functionality to move players from page to page. It still isn't there and I will have to start a new campaign to gain it back, it looks like.
- The characters page was a little awkward. I wanted the ability to talk, as a GM, as a group of NPCs. For example, I wanted to address the group as "Space Goblin Pirate Ship". I had to create a character page as "Space Goblins" so I could talk as "Space Goblins". In addition, after creating pages in this fashion to talk as those characters I had to go into edit mode to delete them. A way to quickly delete character pages would be nice. As an aside, the ability for every player logging on to be tied to a certain character page, token, etc would be awesome.
- The chat box needs to be bigger. THe ability to have multiple e chat boxes would be nice. We had both In-Character chatting and Out-of-Character chatting. The ability to separate the two would be nice. That way the logs wold show only IC, if we wanted.
Anyways, that is just stuff we were thinking of as we went along. I will update more as we continue our playtest scenarios over the next couple of days. I am about to launch an actual campaign using the platform and will continue to update as we play through with a real campaign.
