Is Roll20 right for me?

Hey all! I'm a long-time GM seeking to use Roll20 to run my current and perhaps even my future campaigns. I've been looking at the program and fooling around with it for a few days now, but I'm curious to know about some features that will be important in determining whether or not I wish to purchase a mentor subscription and run my game. Firstly, I use a completely homemade rules system. Therefore, I am interested in knowing more about the custom character sheet feature. I see that it is possible to alter existing systems character sheets to suit your homebrew rules, but is it possible to use the application to make a character sheet more or less from scratch? Secondly, I am very interested in the line of sight feature and whether or not it's possible to implement elevation on a single map. Combat in my game tends towards tactical gunplay and I find elevation, cover, and multiple levels to be an essential feature of the game. From what I've seen so far the only way to make a multiple level map would be with multiple pages that could then not all be displayed at the same time. I would very much like to hear from anyone who has more experience with the program and can tell me about these features. Thank you.

You can definitely make a custom character sheet from scratch; all character sheets in the game were made by users. The character sheets are defined with html and css.

You can make your own sheet or if you don't know how to design one just use the Attributes tab on a blank character. You can then reference these attributes with very simple macros and the default roll template for very nice looking rolls. The lighting is great and works well, but isn't without its flaws. Things like corners are weird because the player's sight comes from the center of their token. It is good enough and so much simpler for a DM to use as long as he has prep time that it in itself is worth the 5 bucks per month for supporter subscription. Lastly, you're right in that the game doesn't handle multiple levels all that well, but it's hard to say if you could rig something that will work for you without knowing you and the game. If you do go with the mentor level sub, I'm sure that a script could be written that would allow you to stagger maps in such a way as to do the job the way you want to, but it is not a core feature and may or may not already exist. As with anything try it out a little and see. Test out a one shot with a bunch of players to help you fiddle around. I've learned much from other players in my game and from playing other games. Each experience helps me improve how I run my own game. Hope that helps.

There is a teleport script you could use to move characters between locations. I've used this to move them between floors before and it's not a bad solution.

While you can have multiple levels using multiple areas of a map, I think what stopit's talking about is having multiple tokens on one map on varying levels, such as a sniper on a rooftop shooting down onto ground level. That would be difficult to do using teleport, as it actually moves the token to a different area of the map. The way the tabletop is laid out, it's usually all top-down, which makes elevation difficult anyway. However, you could use the status marker on a token to show different elevations. If you mouse over the status marker and press a digit, you can enter a number (1-9) on the status marker, which could be used to show levels of elevation. It depends on how your system handles elevation. I'm also sure that there is a script out there which allows you to easily change those status markers. You also mentioned line of sight. If you use the dynamic lighting feature, it has LOS parameters which can be adjusted. In addition, you can use the measuring tool to draw a straight line from shooter to target, which gives you range and shows clearly if any obstructions block a straight line of sight. Hope this helps you make your decision. I will say, that I played on Roll 20 for almost a year before upgrading to Mentor, and once I did, a whole new world opened up! There is so much you can do with the API that you didn't even know I absolutely needed until I started messing around with it. Even though I am not a coder at all, there are so many friendly and helpful people on here who do that so well (yes, I'm looking at you, The Aaron), I've been able to make some dramatic improvements to my gaming experience for me and my group. Happy gaming!

There is a very popular YouTube/Twitch streamer who has created all of his character sheets from scratch and has put together a ton of YouTube videos showing exactly how he did them. The ones that he sets up are mainly specific to D&D (4e and 5e), but the information can easily be used in other campaigns. If you want a link to his YouTube page, send me a PM and I will send it your way. :)

Thanks all for the fantastic insights. Based on what I've been able to do so far Roll20 seems like a great fit for my game. Gozer the Gozerian said: I think what stopit's talking about is having multiple tokens on one map on varying levels, such as a sniper on a rooftop shooting down onto ground level. This is exactly right. While the game can do without that feature temporarily, it's an important component of tactical gunplay that I would like to bring in eventually.

Here's a link to a script on the wiki which could be modified to use for elevation levels. I've never used it myself, so I can't vouch for how well it works, but if you were to upgrade to Mentor, this could be an option for tracking elevation easily with status markers. <a href="https://wiki.roll20.net/Script:Flight" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.roll20.net/Script:Flight</a>

Gozer the Gozerian said: Here's a link to a script on the wiki which could be modified to use for elevation levels. I've never used it myself, so I can't vouch for how well it works, but if you were to upgrade to Mentor, this could be an option for tracking elevation easily with status markers. <a href="https://wiki.roll20.net/Script:Flight" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.roll20.net/Script:Flight</a> This will definitely do for now! But eventually I would love to see a multi-level mechanic for the background layer images. My ideal combat game table would end up resembling XCOM or Wasteland,

One thing that could be done (with quite a bit of upfront work) is to have different maps for each elevation level, synchronized by scripts. You'd set up several pages with copies of your map, drawing the dynamic lighting lines differently based on each page's elevation (e.g. you'd have one page for ground level with lots of LoS-blocking stuff, and another page for the top of the tower which has free LoS pretty much everywhere). Then you'd use a script to synchronize copies of all the tokens across all the relevant pages (so when someone moves their token on the ground-level map, the script moves the corresponding token on the tower-level map). This would let you send each player to a different page based on their character's elevation.

I have a script called Twins that does this for 2 pages.

that sounds perfect! the only thing that remains for me is wanting to also have accessible building interiors and rooftops

Easy! Put a roof graphic on top of an open floor plan map. The sniper on the rooftop is on the page with the roof graphic on top, the ground level folks are on another page (without the roof), and when they enter the building, just remove the roof graphic (send it to the GM layer). When they exit the building, put it back on again. If the sniper comes down from the roof, move him to the same page as the ground-level tokens.